[pantas]

i would like to pose some generall questions regarding Money Bridge .

1. Is it possible to have the moovie button presenting all the hands that were played through a session?That will allow players to study and adjust bidding and carding style according to GIBs playing prefferances ...and improve the game standards in money rooms.(it looks to me like only last hand is visible)

2. Is there any way to assure that normal distribution of HCP is fair?Players always get worried about the possibility of cheating,hacking and any other forms of unothorised interfierence with a software that deals bridge hands!

3. I bought a copy of gib since the 1st verion was out back in the 90's (and have uptaded regularly up to ver.6.x) and although the machine plays above average it seems to me that some departments of GIB's game can very easilly be improved...like leading singleton trump or shifting to a new suit at NTs after wining trick 1...etc

4.What inpact on GIBs game have the settings CLOCK speed\ fast -medium-slow.?

Overall the money bridge rooms adds a flavor to bbos environment but it lacks in the respect that the 1 cent and 2 cent rooms need to be regulated in a more secure manner so as to make players feel more comfortable when they really want to play the money game which for years and years has supported the bridge scene and made champions out of players who would never reach the master status if they were only playing todays boring club tournament bridge!

[fred]

Thanks for your interest in Money Bridge. Answers follow...

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1. Is it possible to have the moovie button presenting all the hands that were played through a session?That will allow players to study and adjust bidding and carding style according to GIBs playing prefferances ...and improve the game standards in money rooms.(it looks to me like only last hand is visible)

You might want to try playing Money Bridge with our Flash client (you can access it by clicking on the yellow link on our home page - www.bridgebase.com). Through this program you can always see a complete record of all the deals you played in a given session of Money Bridge.

It is unlikely that we will introduce this functionality into the Windows client any time soon (or any time at all for that matter).

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2. Is there any way to assure that normal distribution of HCP is fair?Players always get worried about the possibility of cheating,hacking and any other forms of unothorised interfierence with a software that deals bridge hands!

I don't think it is a good idea to deliver anything other than totally random hands (which of course are totally fair in the long run).

About worries concerning hacking... I do understand that players might be worried about this, but I don't think there is much we can do to alleviate these concerns (other than making posts like this one and responding similarly to e-mails that we receive on this subject).

Really what it comes down to is that Money Bridge players are going to have to trust us (us being BBO) to doing everything in our power to prevent hackers from being able to get into our system, to detect and get rid of people who try, and to give people their money back should we learn that someone has figured out a way to cheat against them.

It happens to be the case that despite my experience as a computer programmer and despite the fact that I have access to all of the BBO source code as well as the ability to log in to our servers with programs other than the BBO client, I would not be able to gain any real advantage for myself as Money Bridge player. Uday is the only person on earth who *might* be able to do this if he wanted to. Good news is that not only is Uday super-honest, but he does not play Money Bridge (except occasionally with his friends).

I don't play Money Bridge either (except occasionally with my friends), but if I was incapable of cheating even if I wanted to despite all of the advantages I have, I think it is safe to assume that nobody else could either.

Obviously it is possible that I am lying to you about all of this. That is why, at some basic level, you are going to have to trust us (both in terms of our technical competence and in terms of our honesty). If you are not willing to take this leap of faith and if you are really concerned about hackers, then you probably should not be playing Money Bridge on BBO.

Even if you are not willing to simply trust us, there is a strong practical argument for us being super-paranoid and super-honest: think about the potential consequences for us if we allowed hackers to penetrate our systems or if we intentionally helped certain players to cheat. There are some rather scary end-of-the-world scenarios for us (jail, lawsuits, going of of business) that are clearly in our best interest to avoid!

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3. I bought a copy of gib since the 1st verion was out back in the 90's (and have uptaded regularly up to ver.6.x) and although the machine plays above average it seems to me that some departments of GIB's game can very easilly be improved...like leading singleton trump or shifting to a new suit at NTs after wining trick 1...etc

You are correct that GIB has a lot of room for improvement, but it is unfortunately a lot more difficult to improve even "simple" things than you might think.

Improving GIB has been one of the most important goals of our company for over a year. We have spent a lot of time on this ourselves and hired various people to try to help us out. So far we don't have much to show for this effort, but we have not given up or anything. I think it is really just a matter of time before we find the right programmer for the job (or until Uday finds enough hours to do the job himself).

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4.What inpact on GIBs game have the settings CLOCK speed\ fast -medium-slow.?

GIB, like most human players, tends to play a better game of bridge if you give it longer to think. As a general rule, I believe that the impact of giving GIB various amounts of time tends to be greater in declarer play and defense than it is in bidding.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[uday]

What I could do for interested parties ( and for all, if there is enough interest) list all their hands out and show them the #points held per hand and on average . I've done this on occasion for individuals who cared.

I do store all the hands somewhere. currently each player can access them by browsing his account. There is no denying that this is a painful way to compute averages, and I'd be happy to produce a better tool

[NickRW]

pantas, on Aug 21 2008, 03:29 PM, said:

2. Is there any way to assure that normal distribution of HCP is fair?Players always get worried about the possibility of cheating,hacking and any other forms of unothorised interfierence with a software that deals bridge hands!

In general with this sort of application, the action pretty much all happens on the server. The client program allows you to see your hand and make your legal bids and plays - that's all - and, even if you wrote your own client program (which in principle you could), you still wouldn't be able to do any more than that because the interface between the server and client is only designed to allow legal bids and plays.

Short of hacking the server itself, there isn't anything a would be cheater can do.

Nick

[fred]

NickRW, on Aug 21 2008, 05:59 PM, said:

Short of hacking the server itself, there isn't anything a would be cheater can do.

Nick is correct.

Client-side hacking is not something that we can completely prevent, but we were very careful to design our money games in such a way that a person could not gain any advantage in this way.

Server-side hacking could, in principle, result in a security risk for our money games, but "in principle" should be stressed. Even if a hacker could get in the front door and had all of our source code and passwords, just figuring out what to do in order to cheat at money bridge would be very difficult and time-consuming. We would know if someone even tried to do this and we would take whatever steps were necessary to stop such a person (including getting the police involved).

Anyone smart and patient enough to figure this out, if it is even possible, would be much better off applying their "talents" elsewhere

And if we ever thought that there was a risk on the horizon, we would shut down our money games until steps could be taken to deal with such a risk. Our players are not the only ones who want to keep our money games honest - we have a vested interest in this as well.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[barmar]

Question: Why are you using GIB? It was certainly the leading bridge-playing program during its prime, but it was left on the shelf for several years while other programs have had continuing development.

[fred]

barmar, on Aug 25 2008, 02:41 AM, said:

Question: Why are you using GIB? It was certainly the leading bridge-playing program during its prime, but it was left on the shelf for several years while other programs have had continuing development.

We enjoy a strong personal and professional relationship with Matt Ginsberg, the programmer who created GIB.

Matt has given us complete access to GIB's source code which means, in principle, we have the ability to improve GIB. In practice this has proven to be more difficult than you might think, but this is mostly because we have so far been unable to find the "right" programmer to hire for this task (and also because Uday, who could likely do an excellent job, always seems to have too many other things on his plate).

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com