Not allowing dummy to see opponents hands.

[bid_em_up]

Fred,

 

I read your response in another thread stating:

 

As for suggestions as to how we might reduce cheating (by allowing the dummy to see only his partner’s hand for example), it is hard to disagree that these measures could only make incidents of cheating fewer and further between.

 

However, I do not think that this implies that we should implement these suggestions. As I have said before, our general policy is to not remove functionality in an (ultimately futile) attempt to reduce cheating if we believe that such functionality will significantly and adversely impact that BBO experience for people who do not cheat.

 

My opinion is that allowing dummy to see only declarer’s hand will do just that. It will make being dummy a lot less enjoyable for a lot of our members. Allowing kibitzers to see only one hand will have the same effect.

 

Personally, I agree that making this option mandantory would take away from many players enjoyment of the game to not be able to view the others players cards when dummy and understand why you would not wish to do this. We also both agree that some measures of this sort could only make incidents of cheating fewer and further between.

 

I also understand the other user's expressed frustrations. He would like to have results that are as fair as they can possibly be made via the software. I, myself, get annoyed when a dummy starts hollering "CLLLAAAAIIIMMM" or "????" because he can see that a finesse is working, when declarer doesnt know it yet. Not to mention other unethical situations that occur.

 

I do not wish for this thread to deginerate into another one on the same subject. One is enough. This is just a suggestion that might make everyone happy (except the programmers, of course). :lol:

 

Consider allowing the table host have the option of setting his table for "view opponents hands when dummy" or not. His table could have some notation or coloring regarding the fact that the table has been created in this manner so others would know prior to joining that this is the case when they view the table in the lobby. If the table host selects this option, then dummy will not see opponents hands, regardless of what option they have selected in their own personal profile.

 

Have that table play only boards with the "no-view" option selected. In other words, when a new table is created with this option turned on, it will generate a new board that has a "no-view" option as part of a routine that isolates this board for what table type it is allowed to be played at or it will select a board from the "pool" of boards available for "no-view" tables. Boards from this table would be scored vs. 15 other tables where dummy was not allowed to see the opponents cards, so that the final result should be "normalized" across the field. It wouldnt do much good to have 1 table with the no-view option selected and 15 tables where dummy could see opponents cards, since, as the other user says, if there is monkey business going on at one of the other tables, it affects everyones scores across the board.

 

Yes, it may take a while for these boards to play themselves out. Thats part of the trade-off of having this function available.

 

Maybe this functionality is only available in the Masters Bridge Club so that users who are really bothered by this sort of thing can play in there and leave those who either arent bothered by the possibility or dont care about it to play in Social or Relaxed rooms. Possibly its the default option for play in the Masters Club.

 

I also understand that anything of this sort would not be real high on the "to do" list but thought I would toss it out there for you to consider anyway. ;)

 

Thanks.

[keylime]

Chuck,

 

I second your suggestion in full.

[sceptic]

I doubt it is that easy to do, I think it has been suggested before

[inquiry]

I doubt it is that easy to do, I think it has been suggested before

It might be easy enough. This already exist in tournaments (so code base is there)... maybe something as simple as make one of the three play rooms where you can not see opponents cards (just like in tourneys) (the master room, perhaps). Those wanting to play under those conditions could go to that room...

 

The one tricky part might be to find the matching hands. Since hands are compared without reference to which room. So that would be the hard part.

[bid_em_up]

I doubt it is that easy to do, I think it has been suggested before

While it may not be totally easy (I kind of implied this, when I said it would make everyone happy except for the programmers), I certainly dont think it is a difficult task either.

 

As a programmer myself, I would expect that a flag could be generated when the hand is created that would identify what table type that hand is being used for play. This may or may not require two seperate hand type databases or hand generation routines, I dont know. But I am reasonably certain that programmers such as Fred/Uday who have managed to write this software with all of its other intricacies can come up with a method of doing this.

 

Giving the table host the option of allowing dummy to see all four hands or not should be relatively easy to accomplish.

 

I think something like this really just becomes a function of whether they feel it is worth their time/effort to do so, and I will respect their decision either way.

[fred]

My guess is that implementing and testing this suggestion would take several hours of work for both me and Uday. It is not as easy as it sounds because the current option that handles this exists at the tournament level, not the table level. Furthermore, it is hard for me to say exactly what would be involved in creating a separate pool of hands and whether or not doing so would have any impact on the performance of our servers or database machines (Uday would know better since he is responsible for this part of BBO development).

 

Also, most likely there would be issues of backwards compatibility with old versions of the BBO client. We have learned the hard way that such issues can sometimes turn a relatively simple task into a nightmare.

 

I will discuss this with Uday but I very much doubt that we are going to get involved in this in the near future. As most of you probably know, we have recently finished a major overhaul of the BBO client program and I expect that the client will remain more or less as it is now for the next few months (except perhaps for bug fixes) while we work on some other projects.

 

I am not going to go into detail about these other projects now, but I can tell you that our plans have the potential to positively impact online bridge for just about all current and future BBO members - in other words possibly millions of bridge players. While I think that the suggestion in this thread is a reasonable idea, so far there only seem to be handful of people who really care about this. No doubt there are others out there who would like to see this option and have not spoken up, but my sense is that such a option would not be very popular. It certainly won't be anywhere near as popular as some of the other things we are planning.

 

As Mr. Spock said, "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" and we try to keep this in mind when we make decisions as to how we spend whatever time we have for new development work.

 

Fred Gitelman

Bridge Base Inc.

www.bridgebase.com