Archiving of teams match LINs

[mrdct]

It would be useful if teams match LINs were auto-archived on the BBO website in a similar way to vugraph archives.

 

The details that are currently on the BBO website at http://web04.bridgebase.com/tourneyhistory...&d=Team%20Games don't have the actual match LIN.

[uday]

We do store the hand records in myhands for several weeks, tho. We actually have them for longer , buried in the archives - I suspect you could get them from sfbp's archive

 

Why would it be useful to treat team games like vugraph ( save the team game data in vug format and keep them around "for ever" ) ?

[inquiry]

You in fact can get all the team games in bridgebrowser, np. In addition, he is going to make a push to add the vugraph hands there as well.

[mrdct]

Why would it be useful to treat team games like vugraph ( save the team game data in vug format and keep them around "for ever" ) ?

"forever" isn't quite necessary, but I'm involved with coaching of a couple of teams that have regular practice matches on BBO and from time to time I'm not around at the time that the actual matches are played so can't capture the LIN myself.

 

I'm also aware of a number of people who like reviewing match LINs involving high-profile players, such as the Cayne matches.

 

Teams match LINs are usually of much better quality than vugraph LINs due to better completeness of play details and alerts/explanations.

 

In the lead-up to a major face-to-face tournament, I may want to do some analysis of potential opponents' playing style to go into player briefing notes. BBO teams match LINs would be an ideal source of that data.

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the information available in "myhands" is one LIN per board per table and not a single LIN file with all the bidding and play from both tables in the BBO teams match. Obviously, it's quite a tedious process to go through the LIN files hand by hand and problematic to produce written reports and analysis.

 

I'll have a poke around previous threads about bridgebrowser in a moment, but if it hasn't been explained elsewhere, could you tell me how, for example, to access all of the LIN files of the Cayne matches for the last 7 days?

[mrdct]

We actually have them for longer , buried in the archives - I suspect you could get them from sfbp's archive

Again, the information in myhands isn't really useful for my purpose. I'm looking for something similar to what gets logged on my hard drive when I kibitz or play in a teams match.

 

Is there a url for those archives? What, who and/or where is "sfbp"?

[inquiry]

First, you can also find bbo team games for the last day in a special place on the bbo server. BBO Team game lisiting. This data is a little more user friendly, but not much so.

 

SFBP is the online nickname for Stephen Pickett, the author of the BridgeBrowser program.

 

You asked, can you find every team game played in a Cayne match over the last week using bridgebrowser. The answer is no. Whilie myhands has very current data, but not a lot of old data, Bridgebrowser has all the old data but is not updated daily or weekly. Currently, the most recent data in any BridgeBrowser database for BBO is teh end of Feb 2007 (that excludes homebase events which are a special database updated on day of play). You could probably make arrangement with SFPB to update selected team games in a similar matter, but since the data is available in myhands for free, I doubt you would be willing to assume the cost to get that done.

 

But the question is would having the data from the last week be the most critical to you? If your oz guys play a team game, they can email you their lin files. And for scouting of other teams, well, does it make any differnce if the hands were from last week or last month? Each BridgeBrowser database contains from 6 to 13 million played hands (two old ones have 23 and 19 million hand plays). For the BBO the databases are divided into two types -- main room play, and tournament/team game play. In the next new sets of database, there will be three databases probably, as team games may get separated from tournaments. The most current Tournament/team game database runs from Sept 2006 until the end of Feb 2007, and contains 9,408,937 hand plays. Of these, 4626 where unique hands played in Cayne matches (so for hand records, there will be 9252 play records). If you were to look up all the jec hands, the browser will pull up not the 4626 he played but all 9252 at the same time. Or you could limit the search by date, or by opposition, or by partner with jec, for example, jec partnered weedo for 46 boards during this time period.

 

You can do a lot of other stuff as well. Want to find out how often either jec or his partner opened at the one level with less than 10 hcp? Or how many times they opened 2NT (63 times total, 8 times with 19, 31 times with 20, 17 times with 21, and 7 times with 22) or overcalled a one bid 2NT (17 times). Or you can do the same not for the partnership, but look just at jec's bid, or for the opponents bids. You can also find hands with specific opponent (or specific partnership) at his table (dano was at his table as an opponent 29 times, more times at the other table). And so much more, it is a database program after all.

[mrdct]

First, you can also find bbo team games for the last day in a special place on the bbo server. BBO Team game lisiting. This data is a little more user friendly, but not much so.

Yes, I was well aware of that link but it's not really useful for reviewing and reporting on a 28 board match as you need to open 56 individual LIN files.

 

The code must already exist in BBO to create a single LIN file of a teams match as these already get saved to your c:/bridge base online/hands/username/ directory every time you play in or watch a match. Would it be a big deal to have this data save itself into a directory on BBO's servers that can be accessed for a few days after a match is played?

 

Bridgebrowser sounds pretty useful for some other purposes and I wouldn't mind checking it out in more detail at some point.

[fred]

The code must already exist in BBO to create a single LIN file of a teams match as these already get saved to your c:/bridge base online/hands/username/ directory every time you play in or watch a match. Would it be a big deal to have this data save itself into a directory on BBO's servers that can be accessed for a few days after a match is played?

The code exists on the BBO client, not on the BBO server (which is where the code would have to be in order to do what it is you are requesting).

 

Don't be surprised if we do this one day, but I strongly suggest that you don't hold your breath waiting for it to happen. As I am sure you realize, the time we have to put into programming changes is limited. We try to spend this time working on improvements that we think will benefit many BBO members. The feature you are requesting does not fit into this category in my view.

 

If your bosses at OzOne want to spend some of their yearly $1 million budget to see this happen more quickly, please have them contact me.

 

For now I suggest you ask one of the players to e-mail you a copy of whatever team match .lin files you care about.

 

Fred Gitelman

Bridge Base Inc.

www.bridgebase.com

[mrdct]

If your bosses at OzOne want to spend some of their yearly $1 million budget to see this happen more quickly, please have them contact me.

My request/suggestion has nothing to do with OzOne. I generally have no difficulty getting OzOne LINs as I'm either kibitzing the matches myself or I can get a player to email the LIN to me on the few occasions that I've missed it or it hasn't captured itself properly on my machine.

 

The request relates to my desire to get better access to BBO teams match records for general entertainment and research purposes. I'm surely not the only person who has an interest in browsing through teams match LINs involving high profile players.

 

My interest in this was sparked by Ulf Nilsson's excellent blog http://viewsfromthebridgetable.blogspot.co...at-service.html in which he refers to Masakatsu Sugino's PS-Bridge reports which, at the time, had been set up to produce PDF reports of all BBO vugraph matches by automatically pulling the relevant data from http://bridgebase04.bridgebase.com:81/vug/?C=M;O=D. At Ulf's suggestion (and without any input from people at OzOne) PS-Bridge began doing a similar thing with LIN files published on the OzOne website.

 

I know Ulf has been looking for a way to get his hands on LINs and/or match reports of Cayne matches which are generally played at an inconvenient time for Europeans to kibitz. Sure it would be possible to get Charlie Weed or Jimmy Cayne to email the LINs from their hard drive after every match, but it would be a bit of a hassle for the individuals concerned with the amount of manual handling involved. Also, if I understand the way PS-Bridge is set-up, it all happens automatically by regularly polling the websites with LIN files and then automatically generating a PDF report if and when it finds a new LIN.

 

As you suggest, I wont hold my breath, but it remains something on BBO that I'd really like to see and I'm sure would be of interests to many people.