Screens analogue

[ochinko]

Would it be a good idea to delay seeing of the last bid made for the two players that don't have to bid next?

 

Here is an example:

 

Step 1: Partner deals, and opens 1H. The bid is visible only to my RHO, and I don't know which one of them is thinking.

 

Step 2: Let's say LHO passes. Now I see both bids at once, but I don't know who thought for how long. At this point LHO sees only partner's opening, and doesn't know who thought at the opening, and who thinks now, I or RHO.

 

Step 3: As soon as I make my bid LHO sees simultaniously the last two bids, but partner sees only my RHO's pass. And so on.

 

The drawbacks:

1. The interface should behave differently for the players and the TD(kibitzers). I can only guess how much hassle it would be to implement it.

2. You don't know who slows the bidding, and can't complain from a particular player, only can call the TD. Because of this a playing TD would be unable to replace a player, since he wouldn't know who to replace. But then again, a playing TD isn't able to properly view these situations anyway. He can only trust to what is shouted in the tournament's chat.

[barmar]

I like this idea, but why should LHO see partner's bid when it's your turn? Why not have it wait until it's his turn before he sees anything?

[hrothgar]

I've seen this same suggestion raised several times.

I never liked it very much...

 

From my perspective, the major problem is that most players make use of "dead" time during an auction. Hiding all of the different calls may help disguise UI, however it also ensures that plaers need to spend much more time thinking about their next bid/play. In short: the feature that you hope to use to eliminate UI is exacerbating the very problem...

 

Equally significant, its unclear whether these changes will actually be of much use. To use an extreme example, consider the case of an uncontested auction. Sure, RHO MIGHT have gone into a long tank considering whether to make a lead directing double of some clever overcall. In reality, you can be pretty damn sure that it was partner... I'd argue that established partnerships will be able to figure out who introduced delays during contested auctions as well.

 

Finally, if you want to go down this path I can suggest better implementations... Personally, I think that the best way to proceed would be to treat this as cryptography problem. Back in the weird old days, a great deal of cryptography focused on using frequency analysis to crack ciphers. In turn, the folks who designed ciphers spent lots of time trying to defeat frequency analysis: For example, some ciphers were designed such that the number of symbols used to encode a given letter was a function of the frequency...

 

It might be interesting to create a probability density function mapping the frequency of delays in an auction. (Check whether the system was uniform or Poisson or whatever). In turn, you could then introduce noise into the system in such a way that the shape of the curve was preserved while shifting the mean and masking most of the "signal"...