[helene_t]

I think systems are overrated. Of course in a serious partnership you have to know how forcing a 2/1 response is and if you play walsh or not. But if a pick-up partner leaves midhand it is not because he suddenly realized that he plays a different system than I and therefore doesn't understand my bidding. It is much more likely to be because
- he suddenly realized that he urgently needed to feed his hamster or watch coronation street, so had to log out of bbo.
- got upset because I failed to lead his void in a suit contract
- got upset because he only got 8 HCPs, two hands in a row
- got upset because I hogged the contract
- got upset because I rate myself as advanced but play like a gozilla
- got upset because opps can't explain their bids in Mongolian
- got upset because he bid a great 12.5% slam and then due to Uday's stupid dealing algorithm, one of the three finesses was off
It could also be due to misunderstandings related to bidding, leads and carding, such as:
- got upset because I made an overcall with only 8 points
- got upset because I made a t/o double which he took as penalty
- got upset because I thought transfers were off in competition
- got upset because I thought change of suit after our overcall was forcing
- got upset because I led the king from AKxx.

but such misunderstandings occur when people don't take the time to make detailed partnership agreements, and agreeing to play "SA", "2/1", "Prec" or "Acol" won't solve the problem. Agreeing to play SEF, SAYC or WJ2000 ought, in theory, to solve most of those problems but in practice it doesn't, at least not for SAYC.

[ian302]

There seems to be a lot of negativity to this suggestion based upon situations where it may not work. I made a similar suggestion a few months back that a person's registered grade be colour coded for the same reason - it takes too long to find out if we would like to play with someone before making a decision and have to look at their profile and then finding that the place has been taken. If someone has multiple systems, then it can be shown they can play multiple systems. It also allows us to avoid those who won't even admit to playing any system. This is a great suggestion - don't rubbish it because it isn't suitable to your own circumstances/preferences.

[Antrax]

To me, this feature would be useful. Not sure if it can be measured, but it feels like an 80-20 situation. To the very good players in this forum (the 20%) completely useless, but to us schmoes who just want a partner that opens strong NT, weak 2s and five card majors, it would be great. The delicate auctions are rare enough that I don't really care if we botch them, unlike with a regular p.

[mtvesuvius]

Personally I would never need or use this feature since I don't play pickup games on BBO, but IMO it is a very good idea and would greatly improve the experience for plenty of people while not ruining it for others. It seems like an improvement that has many ways to win and no ways to lose.

A small symbol on a profile, quite similar to the number representing the number of MPs won, would work best IMO. Just one or two letter abbreviations are fine:
P = Precision
PC = Polish Club
2/1 = 2/1
STD = Standard American
FP = Forcing Pass
HM = Homegrown System
O = Other
SSSOFAGTIACGWAP = Several Small Species of Furry Animals Gathered Together In a Cave Grooving With a Pict

etc...

[babalu1997]

Volcano man, only one thing missing from your post:
KS

I suggested before that, among the online stock pictures a few logos be added to identify system, for those who CHOOSE to use it.
That way they can change their log picture if they want to change system.

Some clubs do have the icons added to the stock photos.

Can someone submit a few?

mtvesuvius, on 2011-July-11, 00:29, said:

Personally I would never need or use this feature since I don't play pickup games on BBO, but IMO it is a very good idea and would greatly improve the experience for plenty of people while not ruining it for others. It seems like an improvement that has many ways to win and no ways to lose.

A small symbol on a profile, quite similar to the number representing the number of MPs won, would work best IMO. Just one or two letter abbreviations are fine:
P = Precision
PC = Polish Club
2/1 = 2/1
STD = Standard American
FP = Forcing Pass
HM = Homegrown System
O = Other
SSSOFAGTIACGWAP = Several Small Species of Furry Animals Gathered Together In a Cave Grooving With a Pict

etc...

[hrothgar]

mtvesuvius, on 2011-July-11, 00:29, said:

Personally I would never need or use this feature since I don't play pickup games on BBO, but IMO it is a very good idea and would greatly improve the experience for plenty of people while not ruining it for others. It seems like an improvement that has many ways to win and no ways to lose.

A small symbol on a profile, quite similar to the number representing the number of MPs won, would work best IMO. Just one or two letter abbreviations are fine:
P = Precision
PC = Polish Club
2/1 = 2/1
STD = Standard American
FP = Forcing Pass
HM = Homegrown System
O = Other
SSSOFAGTIACGWAP = Several Small Species of Furry Animals Gathered Together In a Cave Grooving With a Pict

etc...

I can't be the only one who is leery about have "STD" listed on their profile...

On a more serious note, I'd bet dollars to donuts that the users who would most benefit from this type of features are the ones least likely to understand what expressions like STD and PC mean.

Moreover, I'm guessing that no one would use this function (just like no one bothers to fill outthis information in the existing profiles)

[mtvesuvius]

That's a very manageable way to do things with the current system, the trouble is that in order to see the picture, you have to be on the web version, and have to view the person's profile, although it certainly makes it easier for "at a glance" purposes.

Sorry I left out K-S... I probably left out a few others that didn't come to mind last night.

[fred]

While I sympathize with the problem that the OP is trying to solve (that it is difficult to find an empty seat at a suitable table before that seat is filled), I don't think the proposed solution is a good one for several reasons:

1. There is very little screen space available for each player's name in the current table list design. Using icons beside each name would not be workable. Changing the design to allow more space for each player name (and hence room for adding icons) would have drawbacks especially for those with low screen resolutions. Giving users a choice of table list layouts might work, but we have learned the hard way that only a small % of our members are even aware that most options exist.

2. Using colors is out. We already color player names to distinguish between friends/enemies/neutrals/hosts and the web version allows members to create their own user categories (each of which is represented by a color) - a very useful feature by the way.

3. While the bidding system that a given member can play may be among the most important criteria for partner-selected for some people, the comments in this thread suggest that it is not important at all for others. No doubt some of these others would like to see other factors made available without having to look at a profile. Like preferred bidding systems, some of these factors (country or real name for example), can be displayed in each user's profile. Other potentially useful factors (such as an attempt to compute the user's skill level or an indication of the number people who have "enemied" the user is question) are not presented in the software at all. Probably you will start to see some new useful statistics displayed in user profiles (at least in the web client) in the future.

Yes of course we could give the user a ton of options as to which of these many possibly relevant factors should be represented in some way alongside each player's name, but my clear sense is that such a facility would be far too complicated for the average BBO member to deal with. IMO there are much better ways for our programmers to spend their time (in terms of providing much greater benefit to much larger numbers of members).

Keeping the player names small and simple and making plenty of additional information available through the profile popups themselves has several advantages. The concept of making each player's name be able to act as its own mini-profile does not feel right to me.

4. Possible complications due to the fact that there are two BBO client programs (Windows and web) and that we have stopped working on one of them (Windows). No particularly serious complications immediately spring to mind, but I wouldn't be surprised if some exist.

5. Even if we could come up with a workable implementation of the proposed solution, I am not sure it would actually solve the problem. If software changes make it easier for a given user to find his or her dream table quickly, it will also make it easier for all other users to do the same thing. But you would still have roughly the same number of people competing for roughly the same number of empty seats. Speeding up the average time that a given user can find a suitable table will not increase the chances of the seat still being available (because those competing for the same seat will also become speedier as a result of the hypothetical software changes).

The bottom line as far as I am concerned, is that the OP is trying to solve an unsolvable problem. The real problem is this: once a list of tables gets sufficiently large and sufficiently many people are competing for the empty seats, browsing that list is not a good way to find your dream table.

Partitioning the site into various "bridge clubs" is one possible solution, but this hasn't worked especially well for us in the past. A notable success is the "Acol Bridge Club" which happens to be defined in terms of the bidding system that players are expected to use, but I doubt the same thing would work for systems like SAYC or 2/1 that are much more common on BBO than Acol is.

Another possibility is to make the software smarter in terms of presenting shortish lists of recommended tables and/or in terms of selecting a destination for "help me find a game". My personal belief is that this is the direction we should be going in and, as far as I can tell, Uday feels the same way. So it is not coincidental that we have been taking steps in this direction and I expect that this will continue. Maybe one day we will include bidding system information as part of the selection mechanism in these facilities.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[shintaro]

mtvesuvius, on 2011-July-11, 09:36, said:

That's a very manageable way to do things with the current system, the trouble is that in order to see the picture, you have to be on the web version, and have to view the person's profile, although it certainly makes it easier for "at a glance" purposes.

Sorry I left out K-S... I probably left out a few others that didn't come to mind last night.

Why leave out the Best System

Acol

[cmsjw5]

shintaro, on 2011-July-15, 10:23, said:

Why leave out the Best System

Acol

[cmsjw5]

Good point. That's the only one I'd want to look for.
These days I have a regular partner and we play in the Acol Club, so no more worries.
I really can't see why the same arrangement should not work for other systems

[Zelandakh]

A workable solution for this that would to some extent address fred's issues would be to have a small number of checkboxes in the profile creation window for the major systems; say SA, 2/1, Acol, Precision, Polish Club as a starting point which could be extended if it proved to be successful. The systems which are checked could be displayed immediately above the profile in the profile pop-up. The real point of this method would be within the "Find a Game" option though, where you should be able to specify that partner has one or more check boxes ticked if desired.

Where this works well is that it is a completely optional system. The only thing you really lose by not checking the boxes is the occasional drop-in from "find a Game". Meanwhile those that do use the check boxes have effectively gained some profile space since you can remove the playable basic systems from it. The only downside from this implementation would be one additional line in the profile display plus the development effort. On the other hand, for those that use "Find a Game" regularly, this is precisely the sort of development that might encourage them to make the switch to the new client, providing that enough players actually chose to use it in their profiles anyway.

[Cthulhu D]

I reckon you don't want to use the profile feature for this, and you also don't want to present options like 'ACOL' because no-one knows if you mean dutch or english.

I reckon a better idea is to provide a matchmaking service. I am aware this is my solution to every problem, but in this case it is a useful solution. This is broadly in line with Zelandakh's idea, but subtly different.

When you use the matchmaker you specify which of BBO's stock convention cards you want to use (note: This is very different from the previous proposals), and it matchmakes you with a random partner that has picked the same stock CC. You can also have a 'don't care' and 'natural bidding' option. Ideally it would be a full disclosure card so people can mouse over their bids and see what they mean

This solves Fred's problem, and mostly solves Ken Free's problem.

A typical user experience might be: You click on the 'take me to a table!' button. The system then prompts 'which system do you want to play?' and shows a list of the convention cards on BBO with 'don't care' and 'natural bidding' at the top. You click on the one you want and then BBO grinds its gears until it finds you a like minded partner, then dumps you at a table.

The first time you use the feature, it can also prompt 'would you like to set this as your default system selection? This can be changed at any time <whereever it can be changed>'

Users who have made a default system selection are not shown the second prompt. Instead their preference is used.

This will greatly increase the efficiency of getting you at the table with a like minded partner.

I'd recommend ordering the convention cards something like this:

Don't care
Natural bidding <-- potentially cut this one
SAYC
BBO Standard or whatever it is that the GIBs use.
The national system of the user playing, determined by country <-- populate this for the big countries, so Taiwan and China = Precision but Belize = unspecified and not used. I define 'big' as 'played in the last bermuda bowl' This is important as it gets something familiar to the top! The US gets a miss because SAYC and 2/1 GF are already entries 1 and 2.
English ACOL
Precision
Dutch ACOL
WJ2000
SEF
Whatever else.

[Vampyr]

fred, on 2011-July-15, 06:46, said:

Another possibility is to make the software smarter in terms of presenting shortish lists of recommended tables and/or in terms of selecting a destination for "help me find a game". My personal belief is that this is the direction we should be going in and, as far as I can tell, Uday feels the same way.

I don't know whether BBO players usually post the provided convention cards or ones they have created themselves; if it is the latter, it would presumably be pretty simple to list first the tables with players that have frequently used the same convention cards you have used.

Edit: by "lattter" I meant "former". I guess that is obvious.

This post has been edited by Vampyr: 2012-July-13, 19:56

[mgoetze]

I nominate cmsjw5 for worst necro of 2012.

[FM75]

One solution that could work (after some elapsed time) is for a player who wishes to only play in one system (or even more than one system) is to make friends of players playing the corresponding system(s). Use the category to identify each friend. After some time you will see plenty of people playing your desired system(s) and join the tables at which they are playing.

A nice enhancement for the BBO software might be to treat categories as tags like google, instead of attributes, like BBO (1:n, instead of 1:1). That would allow you to tag friends to more than one label. For example, 2/1, Precision, intermediate, advanced, friendly, intense, grumpy, etc. The downside is that the coloring scheme quickly starts to fail here. There seems to be a natural limitation to this type of self-selection, though.

Socialization of the existing club system.

The idea of setting up "clubs" seems like an idea that needs more development. It has the advantage of being consistent with version 1 software. The trick with the clubs, is to have clubs at which all 4 players would agree to the same goal. This carries with it the implied commitment of the players at a club to play consistently with the goals of the corresponding to the club for the duration of that table. These clubs would just extend the idea of the "main" club and the "relaxed clubs. They would be public, and the "enforcement" would be social/table host. It might even work better than main/relaxed. I have seen plenty of "relaxed" players asking for "faster play, please" - maybe they just ended up at the first available table - that probably should only be an option for a particular table type(?).

Extending the public clubs could be in more dimensions than just bidding systems. There could be speedballs, moderate, and slow, French, English, Urdu, single, married, soccer lovers, high school players, college, retirement village, etc. Natural selection would sort it out. Clubs that remain empty for too long, would be folded by the software (after the public had already stopped going there).

Yogi Berra fans might like the clubs that are so popular that hardly anybody goes there anymore.