FM75

That the "???" seat was not paying attention to the bidding.

If you use GMail, you can configure it to work with the mailto: link that Barry mentions, as well as with mailto links occasionally found on other web-sites. See instructions here. http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=10966 If you are using some other type of web mail, try Googling "configuring X for mailto" substituting your email service for the X. Maybe others will work also.

As long as partner is on the right page, he should be able to figure it out. He will have seen two hands by that time. His thinking should be along the lines: Declarer and dummy are expected to have X points based on the auction.I have Y, so parter has roughly 40 - X - Y.How many cards does declarer have in the majors?Dummy and I have combined m,n,o, p in the 4 suits. - most NT leads will be in a major.From the auction and what I see what are the most likely types of leads?If partner's lead is a minor, why? (Usually it will be from a solid sequence and should be obvious - but rare)If partner leads a major, why that suit, card?If partner has all the points, defender does not have to do too much, other than possibly unblocking. That said, it is a good question. Most of the time, you won't be using the rule of 11! Have you decide to double all passed out 2NT openings in the balancing seat? :)

Your agreement here... Well, what exactly is your agreement or strategy on doubles? Maybe P expected to hear something from you and double here is for takeout, using the least space - the 3 ♠ rebid was pretty inconvenient. 0=4=5=4 and on the bidding just wants to hit your long suit? - AKxx T9876 AKxx - decent ODR hand, but inconvenient for a 2 level overcall? Then again, maybe partner has something like Kxx xx AKQ Kxx? Envisions declarer unable to reach dummy, and is hoping for a half trick or so from you? (I know, it adds up to 15...) Does partner have an agreement with someone else that 1N overcall in balancing seat is 15-18, and uses 11-14 to open with that partner? What did you do? I am expecting a dummy with max maybe 2(3)Qs and a spade void.

Web version - and the issue appears looking at dummy as a defender as well. Option set to view cards. Now the shortest suit appears at the top, longest at the bottom. The orientiation of the cards is vertical instead of the normal horizontal that one would ordinarily see at the table. It would be nice to give the user options on the appearance of dummy (or EW, when kibbing all hands).

It seems that the order and orientation of the "defender" cards and suits has changed, when kibitzing and viewing all hands. I would prefer that all hands be shown in the same suit order. As a kib, SHDC is fine. In the latest version the cards are now displayed in shortest suit to longest suit order - for each defender! I think the card images have reoriented by 90 degrees as well. To me, this is just weird. That said, If some like the new, I don't object to their being able to continue to view it that way. So to Options (somewhere): 1) Add a suit order option. (4 characters - letting user pick shdc or shcd, etc.), or longest to shortest, or shortest to longest. 2) Same order or not for both defenders. (If same order then total length maybe the way to go). 3) Card orientation - vertical, horizontal (when card images are displayed)

Sloppy generation of a JPG file. Maybe the publication has bad automation, or just bad editing.

A teacher I know wanted her students to play in the "main" club so that they could see how their play compared with "the world". This came up before she knew about it. 1) Does +slow+ permanently disable the interruptions (perhaps leading to an eventual zombie table)? 2) Can players simply click BRB and play that way the whole game without the interruption?

In my experience, most people have a hard time solving problems when they fail to carefully define the problem. This looks like a good example. What is the problem that autobooting is trying to solve? Slow play? Dead tables? Two similar problems in one respect. Slow play. There has been a good suggestion on another thread. BBO creates a "speedball club" for players that want to play fast - regardless of skill :). Dead table. A "dead table" is one where the HOST is AWOL - gone - and there is an empty seat. Note the definition! When the host is there and 3 other players are playing, the table is not dead. They are all aware. (Maybe all four are nailed to their perches - but that does not matter!) A dead table is a problem. It has at least one empty seat! A prospective player selecting "take me to the first available seat" ends up at a dead table. After waiting for some period of time, and maybe a few "chats" the prospective player starts whistling in the graveyard and leaves the table. After waiting for 15 seconds, that player click the button - yes - that button. BAM - BBO seats the poor schmuck at the recently vacated (unexcavated) table. Hopefully with this description of the problem, it will be clear that removing the table owner is the solution. Booting one of the other 3 players can be done by the table owner - if he is awake. If he is not, there will soon be an empty seat - a necessary condition for a dead table.

I agree. Speedball Bridge Club is a good suggestion. I do not think it needs to be enforced by automation. Just set a suggested pace. Or the suggested pace could be set by the table owner in the table description.

:) If you are really anal, it is "Daylight Saving Time". As in saving time, not as in savings banks.

You might try joining the Beginner Intermediate Lounge (BIL). That behavior is not tolerated there. It has lots of friendly tolerant players ranging from novices right up to darn good intermediates. It also has some advanced to expert players who sometimes offer free classes. FWIW - You might expect "relaxed" people to be polite and patient. In my experience, they seem just as likely to chat "faster, please" as players in the main club. Perhaps some people find it relaxing to just play cards - without the stress of trying to play as well as possible. http://www.bridgebase.com/forums/public/style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif

A few months after I posted the comments above, I downloaded the source for the dealer program and added an option to construct a BBO style .lin file. Using that program I can construct any number of deals that have both dealer and vulnerability set. That set of deals can be uploaded (at least up to 50 anyway) using the standard BBO upload and i could get deals that are properly set up w.r.t. dealer and vulnerability. The board number is merely sequential (unless there is some way to set them that I could not figure out). Some day I might doff my hacker hat again and set up the script to upload the deals for me automatically. But for now, I have other projects keeping me busy enough. Also, busy enough not to describe the changes much further. Building the program (on a Mac) was not too difficult, but it uses C and yacc, so describing the alterations is not something I have time for. Building the program on linux should be no harder, if you are a programmer. I offered to provide Fred with the relatively minimal changes, but he did not have much interest at the time. That said, I believe that you can set the dealer and vulnerability on each hand that you generate, after you have stored them on BBO. Sure it is an extra step, but you are only creating deals one at a time on BBO anyway and you can name or number them as you like as well.

That effectively rotates it, but only with respect to who is opener, and as you mention, you need to alter vulnerability, if it was only one way before. But the hand that is South in the original remains South after the "rotation". In answer to the original question, you could write a little "program", e.g. in python, but the format of the .lin file will force you to fill in the missing hand! The BBO lin file always starts with South (or West), the opposite of pbn, and leaves the fourth hand unspecified after the last comma in that section. So your rotation program needs to "fill in the 4th hand", then rotate. I am not sure whether you then need to blank the new 4th hand. I suspect you can specify all 4, but I have not tried it. I noticed this two weekends ago, when writing a converter from .lin to pbn for a DD program that I had.

Searching for 0.25 or $0.5, just plain eliminated some of the things I was looking for. There are only 5 prices, to the best of my knowledge. Text search is a weak method, especially since it is not limited to the price column. When you test, you must try to make things fail. If you don't test that way, you will end up fighting embarrassing fires, because you only tried the things that obviously would work. Anyway, I don't want to harp on it. I sent Fred screen shots of some of the search problems. The domain being searched here is very limited. Using text search can sometimes work well and sometimes just badly. The idea is to figure out, in this limited domain, what the natural and likely questions will be. Those should be answered via carefully constructed, purposeful queries. One of the problems with getting people to click on the top of the column headings, is that it is totally unintuitive. There is nothing about the column head that suggests clicking on it. So unless you have used it in windows/mac directory listings, or excel or have seen it before, nothing is likely to get you to click on it. (Of course, you could write "click column headings to sort" somewhere on the screen :). The people that already guessed it would laugh. But the ones who didn't. It might kind of knock their socks off. Does the "Help" mention that you can do it. Not that most people feel the need to look at help. If you ever escape from Flash, maybe it gets easier.

The page just starts scrolling when it loads if it has hand diagram. Ok in Safari but fails in Chrome browser.

http://www.bridgebase.com/forums/topic/50686-full-disclosure-using-browser/page__p__605803__hl__fdcc__fromsearch__1?do=findComment&comment=605803

If South had AQ, would you have seen the X card?

LOL :) I guess you did not try the Search box for that item. It fails rather badly. In the current version (I just tried the new improved beta) the register and price are serving double duty in one place. That is probably just a bad idea. <br class="Apple-interchange-newline">Sent screen shots to Fred. BTW. Searching text does work pretty nicely for some things - such as find a tournament #. Going back to the grid was also right (IMO). Reducing its width also worked well. Suggested the idea of filters a'la Data, Filter in Excel. That way the selection is specific to the data type (column) that you care about. Example - Individual/Pair. Tourney price (only about 5 values) you might pick only one, or maybe 2 or 3. Expand/Collapse Hosts (that column and at least one other does not sort properly now) Some times it is best to take a well known and widely used user interface and adapt it rather than try something that is just surprising.

Sorting the column will put the cheapest tournaments at the top. Sorting again will put the most expensive at the top. So if you want to find a 0.25 or 5.0 tourney it is easy. All will be grouped together. For the same reason, take the tournament number out of the name and make it a column of its own. So when a TD is looking for subs for tourney nnnn or tourney nnnn is starting soon, you can find it quickly if you are interested. Today, sometimes you can't even see the tournament number or maybe only a digit or two of it.

You have finally found a partner who is willing to work as hard as you are to improve. You are readng the same books. Debating ideas. You have committed 5+ hours per week just working on nailing down your bidding system for about a year. You are competing successfully online against your peers and slightly better players on BBO. You even met and competed for a couple of days at a nearby national event. So what is the next step? You have some weaknesses, of course. You have some strengths. Time to come up with a strategic plan. The idea is to focus on the areas that provide the highest marginal improvement. Both of you still work full-time. Your local clubs are for retired folks. Since your partner is over 100 miles away, even if the club had evening comps, it would not help. At this point, most of the hands you are playing are not learning tools. Identifying the areas for improvement with the highest reward is not so simple. What is next on your "bridge improvement plan"? Is self-assessment enough? You and your partner have thick skins and open minds. So criticizing each other privately is not a partnership problem.

1) Splinter in hearts - very weak. ♠xx ♥xxxxxx (you only promised 4, so he better have a fistful) ♦xxxx ♣x 2) 4♥ down 1 - Optimistically. Pessimistically, a void in clubs, and an extra spade or diamond, most likely an extra spade or even two. Otherwise opponents would have been in 4 spades instead of redouble to partner.

If you swapped the black suits, I would at least think about it.

RHO opened. You have 21 hcp. LHO made a free bid, call it 8. If RHO opened some rule of 20 ten count, (1♣) and rebid 1NT, you can count up 39 points. So which Jack do you want to know about? Bid 2♦ after original X, showing the BIG double, and diamonds. If p has a long major, he can chime in. Where does it convert to penalty double? For sure at 7N. You can walk your way down from there. But eventually you reach partnership agreement land.

In the strong club system that I am using, 1NT = 10-12 NV, 13-15 vul. (If dealer, you open just over 50% of hands NV, just under V) The 1 club bid is 16+, So there is no overlap. 1M = 11-15. That said, we could bid 1N on xxxxx (maybe even Txxxx?) in a major. I have not seen that happen yet though (about 1 year of play), sometimes because someone has already opened.