[Feegle]

It was a dark and stormy night.
A night some thirty winters ago, and only four of us turned up at the college bridge club . My student buddy and two lecturers. So.....Rubber bridge (as against the usual duplicate).
After about an hour it got a tad frustrating: passing throughout, seeing rubber after rubber (2-0) being written up in the THEY column. As further time elapsed it became quite funny. Eventually we changed seats, changed the deck, muttered strange incantations (.......... no, it was me cursing, I remember now!) All to no avail. If one of the lecturers had been a statistician he could have got a paper out of it.

So, if I were to join a Rubber bridge table on BBO (can't actually, scarred for life) could the same happen? Or is the BBO dealer programmed to share out the HCP's over a (shorter) period of time. If so how much time (roughly)?

[hrothgar]

Fred has stated that he hasn't played arround with the deal generators to try to balance out high card points or anything like that. He prefers to put his faith into the statistical properties of the (pseudo) random number generators. For what its worth, he's used a variety of statistical tests to ensure that the deal generators are fair in the staistical sense.

I very much agree with this philosophy. As soon as you start gimmicking with the system to ensure that everyone gets a fair number of high card points or some such you start creating opportunities for unscrupulous bastards to start developing predictive models

[helene_t]

Yes. In other words, the probability that you get the ace of spades on the next deal is always 25%. No matter how often you have got that card over the previous deals.