FM75

Would partner make a negative free 3 ♦ bid with something like: ♠ AT ♥ xx ♦ KQJ976 ♣ xxx or ♠ QT ♥ xx ♦ KJT987 ♣ Axx? Partner can pass and wait for a 2 ♠ rebid, but chose not to. He could use negative X to show a minor at the top end of the range. I would expect really good diamonds and a side ace or king based on your holding. With hearts over opponents, partner is likely to have diamonds over opponents. The hand looks like it may very will be double/double eight card fit - so an 18-19 total trick hand. Try 4♦. If partner rebids 4♠, you are probably in good shape. With your support and a trick in a black suit, he might take a push to an easy diamond game and by not delaying diamond support you may head off trump lead. A heart lead is likely and does not hurt. A diamond lead is probably worst but unlikely unless you delay support. Perhaps I am painting partner too optimistically based on selection of this hand for posting :)

I suspect you are questioning this specific inference. It is ok, if during the play declarer first verifies his assumption that the spade Q is offside. Without that, the conclusion as to the conditional probability of the heart Q location is an error.

"Common sense" is so often wrong, that equating it to irrational seems natural. No chuckle, except maybe in pointing this out.

Opponents have at least a 9 card fit in spades, but they do not know that yet. The deal is a 19 or more trick hand. Letting them try to figure it out below 4 spades seems counterproductive to me. A 3 spade splinter suggests 4+ trump, where a direct bid suggests 5+. I think partner will be in a better position to judge whether to compete above 4S, if you make the direct and more limiting 4H bid, plus it gets you to a game contract and sends the message to opponents that you are playing in a 10+ card fit. If you splinter, then your LHO absolutely knows that they have minimum 8 card fit, and that you have a 9+ card fit, even if he has only 3 spades. If he just bids 4S directly based upon that info, you do not have any chance of making 4H game. Further, splintering alerts them to the bad split should they compete. Let them figure it out after their first spade trick or after the dummy comes down. my $0.02

Water "conservation" is a pretty funny concept. Water is probably the most "renewable" chemical on the planet. No matter what you do with water, it is very hard to prevent it from returning to the ocean or the atmosphere! Perhaps the term "water consumption" is really a horrible misnomer. Water is much more like beer. It is rented, not consumed. However, it is certainly true that many people have tried to live in areas where it is not naturally plentiful or local. Even the Romans were able to move water fairly significant distances.

Using browser at a teaching table it is easy to save a link that the hand viewer can play - while you are still at the table. Is it possible to retrieve the hand after the table has been closed? A windows client user, I think, can find the .lin file. I have not been able to retrieve one even though it is within the last 100 hands played.

To record chat on Mac is just as simple as on any other platform if you are using the browser. You can click in the chat window, then right click (unless you are using old style Mac mouse - then I think it is command click), select all, right click again and select copy. Now the entire chat is in your "clipboard". Paste it into email, your favorite word processor, Google Docs, Evernote, or any cloud-based application. With the right client, you can take a picture of the hand and store that as well, but you probably already know that. (There is no reason to "login to chat" since the chat is occurring in the chat window, which does not even exist if you have not logged into BBO and joined a table.

There is a tacit assumption being made here that there is a constant (measurable) or zero delay between an action of one player and the visibility of the action to the next to play. The assumption is false. It doesn't work that way regardless of whether the players are using windows client or the browser/flash implementation.

You might try a different browser. Connecting with BBO requires a Flash plug-in. Different browsers may use different versions. I use Google Chrome on 2 Mac's with no problem (Snow Leopard on laptop, Lion on iMac). My friend uses it on Windows 7 which works fine EXCEPT for BBO starting in November. Since then she has had to use IE or Firefox.

Based on bidding, I think most likely distribution is something like: N 2=5=2=4 S 3=2=3=5. North probably has a stopper in each pointed suit, but diamonds offer the prospect of our being 5-3 and spades are likely 4-4. I would hope to set up diamonds and be able to continue them when getting in with hearts. I am leaning toward the Q!D, even though that seems open to criticism. I want them to go up on first trick, or let me run another one.

Browser Google Chrome for Windows 7 - 64 bit. Chrome claims that Flash is up-to-date. Trying to connect fails 100% of the time. From same PC, can connect using IE. Does anybody know why? Fix, other than using a different browser? Chrome works fine from Mac. I believe Chrome Canary (pre-beta) has been working as well. It also seems prone to losing connection while playing, even though it does not lose skype connection. So I do not feel that it is a wireless issue. Feet away I never lose connection from Mac.

Guys, the new tournament display is a big improvement. Adding entry count and not having to refresh are great ideas. Also you did not mention it, but not having to "PIN" a window is very smart. You might want to take that concept to things like the user pop-up. Pin is an irritation. I have some additional suggestions for the tournament page, while it is fresh on developers' minds. 1) Add a tournament number column (perhaps left of Title column) and take the tournament number out of the title. Often directors send out an announcement to ask for subs by tournament number. Now they appear raggedly at right end of description, Giving it, its own column makes it easy to find (especially if one realizes that most of the columns are sortable). 2) Add Entry limit column - Automated express often is "closed" before it starts. Might as well see that before clicking "More" or "Register" 3) If a member clicks on Type, to sort by Indy vs Pairs, retain a "subsort" by "Status" A suitable alternative would be to have "radio buttons" at the bottom "Individual", "Pairs", "Both" 4) A visual "cue" that sorting appears IFF you have clicked on a column title. Maybe it would be nice to "cue" that somehow so people even know that it is there. For example, an up/down/unsorted icon? 5) If Refreshing is unnecessary - take away the Refresh button :) Anyway, the new screen is a big improvement. Congratulations.

Please, in the next version, fix the Flash text input areas to work in the standard Windows/Mac way with respect to clipboard operations. I am pretty sure they worked this way in some previous versions. Now you have to select, right click, choose copy to copy text. Then click in new text input, right click and choose paste. It even seems to use a "different clipboard". Much better would be Ctrl-C (Command C), to copy, and Ctrl-V, (Command V) to paste, and Ctrl-X (Command X) to delete. Where Command is the "Apple" key.

Minor rant warning... There are two things in particular that most bridge authors and publishers have done very poorly with: 1) These are non-fiction. If they are to be taken seriously, they should have an index, as mentioned earlier. 2) Even worse, many (Bird's in particular come to mind) fail to have the hands and the text :unsure: on the same or facing pages. That is truly inconsiderate to the reader. I think fewer fail this, but still far too many do. Why after all these years of publication, has evolution failed? (One book mentioned several times in this discussion has a hand with 14 cards in it. Never really did figure out how it related to the discussion in the text.)

Somewhere recently the behavior of the web client changed with respect to cutting and pasting in the chat window. It used to be that Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-X (or the Mac equivalents Apple CVX) did what was expected. Now you need to right click the mouse and select copy, paste, etc. from the popup menu. Worse, than that!!! You can end up pasting from the clipboard from what ever your last successful copy or cut was, which was NOT what you thought you had just done! Noticed this at least a month ago. Sorry it took so long to get around to reporting it.

You really have to try hard to find it by clicking "more about BBO", then finding discussion boards as a link in some text! In addition to that, put a link to the Forum on the Flash menu somewhere. If I were to make odds, I would bet less than 5% of all BBO users know this even exists. Less except for the recent enhancement notice.

Dave, I like the idea. Regrouping sounds good. 9 point scale might be a little "broad". See previous answers. I don't think anybody used 1,2 maybe even 3 yet. On your scale, 576567 (beg-intermediate) :) Now, the next thing is to figure out the metric. Is it a Euclidean 6 space? Or in some dimensions, should opposite be a good fit? Then you could add - How many books have you read? Was your improvement proportional to your effort? :)

I have noticed that when playing some opponents in the BBO ACBL tournaments that explanations of conventional bids seem to appear automatically - too fast to believe that they are manually alerting each time. Very much like playing against the robots. 1) Can I set up convention card to behave like this for my opponents? 2) If it can be done, -- a) How do I do it? -- b) Is it only used during tournament play? If there is a link to an explanation somewhere that would be helpful. I have only found the help for setting up cards for specific partners.

I have not tried using the categories yet. Seems useful. Recently, I think before this release, the card selection seems to have gotten "jittery" in the sense that cards seem to move around when mouse is moving over them. In addition, it seems like less of the card is clickable during play. I have had mis-clicks recently, for the first time since you changed it in the spring when hands were "resizing" after a trick and a quick click would often end up on a card different from the one it was over before the preceding trick was cleaned up. I had not experienced this issue since the change this spring until very recently. Occurs on both Mac and Windows. **************************************************** Just saw this: http://forums.bridgebase.com/index.php?sho...=0entry477415 Seems to explain what I saw. Thanks.

LHO opens 1♣ holding: ♠ A1053 ♥ QJ2 ♦ AKJ63 ♣ A All that is in his convention card is: 5 Major, NT 15-17, Transfer, Stayman, 2SA 2heard 2spade = 20-21 2Club =23 His partner had: sayc = 1nt 15-17, 2C demand bid, stayman, transfers to major suits, neg X RHO did not alert at any point. LHO ended up dummy, and I objected after my initial lead of club 10. RHO simply said it was the first time they had played together. If it matters, I held 6 clubs to Q and partner had KJ97. 1) Is the bid legal? 2) If not, what is proper recourse and expected result.