[Kingside]

I am pretty new to BBO. I have played a few tournaments and have noticed in the Individuals you get some partners who just seem to do wild bids (presumably hoping to get a top). In practice you normally end up with a very bad score which can totally spoil the tournament.
Is there anything you can do about this ?

[hotShot]

Your observation is right.

Unfortunately there is not much that can be done about it. Some people think that playing online is just fun and others take the competition so seriously that they want to win at all cost.

To win a tourney with only few boards to play, you need tops. To get tops, you need to play better, bid more, double more often or redbl if it makes sense.
Some overdo this and produce random results.
The only cure would be tourneys with more boards, so that constant good play is more important than a lucky result in one board. Longer tourneys suffer from player that leave mid tourney, producing random results because a sub, can't deliver a good performance if he has to start mid game, not knowing the tricks that were played.

[Codo]

yes, relax...

In an idividual you face partner who have no idea what to do. They do these cowboy things.

You find people who try to bid on every hand.

There are guys who believe that there are not here to be dummy, so they nver raise your suit and bid NT as soon as possible.

You have to lif ve with them. They are there.

If you cannot stand to play these guys from time to time, don´t play Indies.

[Aberlour10]

Kingside, on May 27 2008, 06:54 AM, said:

I am pretty new to BBO. I have played a few tournaments and have noticed in the Individuals you get some partners who just seem to do wild bids (presumably hoping to get a top). In practice you normally end up with a very bad score which can totally spoil the tournament.
Is there anything you can do about this ?

From my experience only this: there are few (free) tournament "series" , where this problem is unincisive, but it need time to find it out...maybe individuals with "country restriction" for ex.,with stock of same players, who play very often (daily)in it.

Robert

[barmar]

I think there are a few reasons why this happens.

1) Your partner doesn't take the tournament seriously. This is common in online bridge.

2) Your partner doesn't really know how to play. That's the risk you take in an indy, but luckily you only have them as a partner for a couple of boards.

3) Your partner knows how to play, but assumes YOU don't (he's been burned by #2 enough times), so he tries to take control.

An Individual is a real crapshoot, even if everyone tries to play seriously. That's why they're not very common in f2f bridge. AFAIK, in the ACBL we have only one tournament with Individuals -- the Keohane Regional in New England every January. I think there are also some high-level tournaments that are individuals, but when all the players are world champion calibre, you don't have to worry so much about partner doing silly stuff.

[helene_t]

I don't think there is anything inherently bad about indys, I would actually like to have much more indys at the local club. In indys you don't have the problem with undisclosed agreements. For that reason, I always chose the indy format when TD'ing on BBO.

Socially, I think it's a good thing that everybody gets to play with everybody, and the fact that it's just for one round means that p is less likely to get mad because I can't count to 13, and even if he does it is less likely to bother me.

But probably some players don't take online indys very seriously since they don't have any ties with there partners so it is not so important to make a good impression.

[Kingside]

Thanks all for your comments. Some of the so-called experts are the worst. One recently opened 1NT with a void in !S !

[barmar]

Yes, in theory indies should be a good way to meet potential partners. Unfortunately, in the lax environment of online bridge, it just doesn't happen. It's similar to the problem of people joining a MBC table, and leaving the first time their partner does something they consider stupid (as if they've never made a mistake at the bridge table themselves).

At our club, we have a beginner class that we teach in January, then the novices play in a separate game from Feb-April. In May we stop the novice game and invite the new players to the regular game, and our first two games are a pro-am (so the beginners all get to play with an experienced partner) followed by an individual, so that all the new players get to meet everyone.