Most hands played on BBO

[inquiry]

In another thread, one of our posters made the following statement...

 

I have played on BBO almost from its inception. I quite possibly have played more hands here than anyone. If not I am certainly in the top three.

 

The first part of the quote is true. The second part, no doubt, the poster thought was true--and i thought might be true. But the statement got me to look to see who might have the most played hand. The fact is, the he was not even in the top 100,nor 200, nor 300. One BBO member has almost 35 thousands hand played in the main room alone (six times the number of hands the poster quoted above has).

[kenrexford]

I think I might have guessed the location of the queen wrong more often than anyone else on BBO...

[kgr]

Can we see how many hands we played ourselve? (I hope my wife is not able to see it!)

Can you tell me how many I played...just curious.

[hotShot]

35000 wow

 

Could you add how much time it took to reach that?

[inquiry]

35000 wow

 

Could you add how much time it took to reach that?

Well, that was 35,000 hands logged into bridgebrowser (yes I can look at all 35,000 hands, bidding, auction and play). All it takes is to run one of the reports. I didn't finish the report, I simply searched the first 200,000 BBO players in the database (there are a lot more) who had played 2000 hands or more. For that investigation I looked only at main room hands. This ran in background, and I stopped it after 200,000 to see if the original poster was found (he was), then sorted the list by hands played. You can sort by total hands, imp hands, mp hands (not many in main room), average imps, average MP, and a few other fields simply by clicking on the header.

 

There are soooo many bbo players that to do the entire list, looking for all the players would take quite a while (online). It would be much quicker it you had all the data local. There is a minor flaw in my analysis here, however. Those were only main room hands, no team and no tournaments. I will need to run a seperate search for those. Also there is some missing data from early 2006 that has recently (I think) been obtained but not unloaded (I will have to check on that).

[pigpenz]

looks like someone should get a life, almost as bad as 10,000 forum posts :(

 

ever wondered what someone like that looks like?

 

Did anyone see the Southpark Episode where the kids kept getting killed off in warcraft by some online cumputer geek....that is what i would expect of this person :P

[barmar]

Some of these are probably professional bridge players, so this is their life.

 

Consider the Cayne team, which every day plays one or two "Cayne vs whoever" team matches. Assuming they do one 28-board match a day, 5 days a week, 40 weeks out of the year (the other weeks I expect they're playing in f2f tournaments) that, that's more than 5,000 boards/year. Before and after these team matches they're often playing in the MBC, so they probably have a similar number of main room hands.

 

I know a number of amateur bridge players who play at least one f2f club game every day, so it's not that hard to imagine similar amounts of online play. I expect that when I retire, I'll probably play lots of bridge (I'd also like to get into directing more).

[bid_em_up]

I didn't finish the report, I simply searched the first 200,000 BBO players in the database (there are a lot more) who had played 2000 hands or more.

Was 2000 hands a typo? If it was wasn't, I think that if you raise the limit on the number of hands played, it would probably run faster. 2000 hands isnt that many (that would be about 55 hands a month over the last 36 months on average). So you will get a LOT of players that meet this criteria (which is why you had to quit at 200,000 players).

 

Try running it for players with more than 25,000 hands played, and lets see how many you get. :-)

[hotShot]

Let us assume that player started to play 1-1-2003 up to know, that is about 4 years. To reach 35000 he/she must have played 24 boards every single day since that date. It takes about 2.5 hours to do that.

[inquiry]

I didn't finish the report, I simply searched the first 200,000 BBO players in the database (there are a lot more) who had played 2000 hands or more.

Was 2000 hands a typo? If it was wasn't, I think that if you raise the limit on the number of hands played, it would probably run faster. 2000 hands isnt that many (that would be about 55 hands a month over the last 36 months on average). So you will get a LOT of players that meet this criteria (which is why you had to quit at 200,000 players).

 

Try running it for players with more than 25,000 hands played, and lets see how many you get. :-)

Sadly, it looks at each player no matter what number I use. The only advantage to using 2000 is that the ones it downloads the infomation for have to have played 2000 hands. This means less names to manipulate...

[matmat]

follow up questions:

how many boards have been played in the MBC?

 

is it possible to just run through those and "tally" the players in each hand? (presumably this could be done with some hash table or something.

 

m

[Guest Jlall]

he/she must have played 24 boards every single day since that date. It takes about 2.5 hours to do that.

Oo. Play against faster opps ;)

[inquiry]

Can we see how many hands we played ourselve? (I hope my wife is not able to see it!)

Can you tell me how many I played...just curious.

You have 3769 main room imp hands, and 19 main room matchpoint hands (there is a six or seven month gap where data is missing, hopefully that data will someday show up). In addition you have played another 554 hands in team games/tournaments. Again with the seven month gap....

 

That comes to 4323 hands.

[sceptic]

Ben anychance of knowing how many I have played and if my imps average is +1 average over the last 3 years :)

[Free]

Ben anychance of knowing how many I have played and if my imps average is +1 average over the last 3 years :)

+1.1 imp average, you're a cheater!!! :P :)

[sceptic]

moi? :)

[Mr. Dodgy]

I have played at least 8,269 hands on BBO in the last 2 years (11/day-ish), mostly in tournaments. I wouldn't consider myself to be a VERY heavy user. 35,000 is a lot but I'd probably have twice as many played if I were free to play as much as I might please.

 

I've also directed over 4,000 boards. And awarded more than 14,000 DodgyPoints hehe, blacklisting 2,809 IDs.

 

I average -0.18 and 48.05%. I suck.

[jikl]

Heh, I would hate to think what my average might be.

 

Sean

[pigpenz]

i remember when i fist started playing and went and saw I think Liby's hands on myhands and was suprised to see that it was around 3000 month that was almost 2 yrs ago. So I can believe it. My only experiences are in the MBC and ACBL games but alot of the folks on ACBL games are retired and play almost all the games everyday. Thats the possiblility of 108hands per day. So its easy to see how some achieve such high numbers.

[Wayne_LV]

    

[inquiry]

I looked at the website for BridgeBrowser and am confused as how it works.

 

Do you buy BridgeBrowser as a program?  If so what is the price? 

 

All I saw listed were CD's of hands from OKBridge and BBO.

 

Do you have to buy the CD's or can you access their database online?  If so what is the cost of doing this?

 

All of my analysis of my own hands have been done by cutting and pasting records from MyHands to an Exel database.  This got to be so much work I finally stopped doing that and now just review the worst boards directly from MyHands.

 

I would guess I have played between 15-20K hands on BBO, mostly in the Main Bridge Club and my averages stink too.

BridgeBrowser comes in two flavors...

 

Flavor one is you buy the program and then order disk of data (CD's) or buy a huge chunck of data (DVD). I have that version of Bridgebrowser with just one small hunk of data. It is very fast to search..but the data is old (you have to buy newer data to keep up).

 

The second flavor is an online subscription. Search on line is slower (there are tricks to speed it up). But the online data is always current (and you have access to all the old data as well).

 

The homebase club offers a totally Free version of BridgeBrowser online. The only catch is you are limited to hands played in homebase tourmaments (and a few special events. like saturdays BBF individual). It is a good place to learn how to use BridgeBrowser to see if you want to purchase access. To find out more about bridgebrowser, visit either the BridgeBrowser university at homebase forum or read about it in the various homebase newsletters, which have step=by=step instructions on using the program... see Issue two for how to get started with bridgebrowser (loading it and getting it to run), Issue 3 for getting starting searching using Bridgebrowser. These supplement and extend some of the material in the BridgeBrowser university thread.

 

Also Issue 1 talks about bridgebrowser in more general terms...

[bid_em_up]

Ben,

 

I must be blind. When I looked at the BrBr website and order form, I do not see where newer hands are available for purchase on CD/DVD. All the CD/DVD data appears to be from 2004 or before.

 

Is the more recent data available via the CD/DVD option? Or is it only available with the online subscription?

[Rain]

I think there's a further need to distinguish between those who play mostly against GIB with no humans vs those who play against real people.

 

Its like post count in a way. Does relative substance matter?

 

Last year I tracked down a few to interview for a short lived newsletter. One of the players playing the most boards plays against bots at an incredible speed.

 

One shares username with his wife/son.

 

One plays a lot just for fun =D

[inquiry]

Ben,

 

I must be blind. When I looked at the BrBr website and order form, I do not see where newer hands are available for purchase on CD/DVD. All the CD/DVD data appears to be from 2004 or before.

 

Is the more recent data available via the CD/DVD option? Or is it only available with the online subscription?

I think he just isn't updating the order form. Despite many good reviews of BridgeBrowser, it has not been very sucessful. I am not sure why, I agree with the bridgeguys who said...

 

BRIDGEBROWSER:

"Offered by Mr. Stephen Pickett of REC Software Inc. of Vancouver, Canada. This software offers a learning tool that no bridge player can afford to be without such as access to every bid made and every card played in a 50-100 table field. Not just your hands, but those of 50,000 others, including most of the world's experts. Here in an easily-to-access database is information that was in the past only available to expert players after a lifetime of competition: what works, what doesn't work, and who does it. BRidgeBRowser has hands sorted by player, rating, date, hand shape, and of course results . With this information you can literally become an expert." source http://homepage.mac.com/bridgeguys/CGlossa...uterBridge.html

 

And as a long time user of bridgebrowser, i can tell you that it has been tremendously improved.

 

But he will sell you whatever combination of old data on disk or access to full data online. I only use online data myself now.

[inquiry]

I think there's a further need to distinguish between those who play mostly against GIB with no humans vs those who play against real people.

 

Its like post count in a way. Does relative substance matter?

 

Last year I tracked down a few to interview for a short lived newsletter. One of the players playing the most boards plays against bots at an incredible speed.

 

One shares username with his wife/son.

 

One plays a lot just for fun =D

well, the bridgebrowser database does not store any hands on which GIB plays.... at leasst that is my understanding. So i am not sure how to figure out who has played how much with GIB...