[inquiry]

Wayne_LV, on Dec 29 2006, 11:56 AM, said:

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]

bid_em_up, on Dec 29 2006, 02:23 PM, said:

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...

Quote

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]

Rain, on Dec 29 2006, 04:36 PM, said:

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...

[keylime]

I think i'm going to get a yearly subscription myself and give it to Larry.

[inquiry]

matmat, on Dec 28 2006, 07:13 PM, said:

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

I guess I can't answer that question exactly. For one thing a lot of 2006 data is still missing (got everything from oct 1, and some in the early months).

Oct, Nov, and so far in DEC there has been 7,106,912 main room hands, not counting any hands played against robots and any total points and teaching room tables. In addition there has been at least 3,482,384 tournament and team game events not counting total point tournaments, nor any of the money bridge touirnaments or robot races. That also excludes the last two weeks of tournament play (but the main room is only two days or so out of date).

For comparision, okbridge has 3,516,623 hands in their 2006 database.. but that seems to be from jan 1 through september.

There is at least 60,930,075 bbo hand plays in the online bridgebrowser database, where you can look at the bidding, play of each hand (of course, this is not 60 million unique deals).

[jikl]

Given the number of hands you are able to access, let's look for some freaks.

The odds of a 13 card suit are about (according to a website):

39,688,347,497:1

So this is unlikely.

However a 12 card suit including the Ace is:

367,484,697.8:1

We might have chances here.

Sean

[inquiry]

jikl, on Jan 2 2007, 02:15 AM, said:

Given the number of hands you are able to access, let's look for some freaks.

The odds of a 13 card suit are about (according to a website):

39,688,347,497:1

So this is unlikely.

However a 12 card suit including the Ace is:

367,484,697.8:1

We might have chances here.

Sean

freak odds are thrown off due to the "frequent" gholash tournaments.

So if I was going to look, I would look at main room only... I have seen 11 and 12 card suits in the past in gholash events...