[fred]

kenberg, on Oct 18 2008, 01:37 PM, said:

For starters, since I see Fred is reading this, is it possible to shift the permission as I describe above: I am S, I have my N, I have seated someone E, I would like to shift permission to E to seat or not seat a prospective W.

As far as tables in the Main Bridge Club go...

In principle it is certainly possible.

In practice it is not possible that you will see a change like this any time soon (or probably ever - sorry). It would be too much work for too little gain and there are many other ways that we can spend our programming hours improving the software that I believe represent better uses of our time.

I am not saying that I think this is a bad idea.

We might include something along these lines when we try to make it possible team matches to spontaneously start without the host having to specify all 8 players.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[zasanya]

awm, on Oct 17 2008, 06:43 PM, said:

1. You can enter their name into myhands. There is really nothing on myhands that prevents you from looking at other players' imp scores. Of course imp scores depend a lot on who your partner is and who you play against but if someone randomly sits down at your table you can bet that they do a fair amount of randomly sitting down at tables and their imp scores will reflect playing with a pickup partner against the "bbo field."

Just curious.
I find that in last 1month i played 413 hands mostly 8 board teammtaches usually against players i know who are at least as good/bad as me.Most of the times these matches were set up byme taking care to see that opponents were evenly matched.My partners are usually players known to me.My imp score is minus 0.29.What skill level does that denote?

[kenberg]

If I really wanted to evaluate you I would not look at the imps score for exactly the reason that you suggest. I would review a few hands that you played. I would look at how you played, not whether you won or lost imps on the hand. If I look at, say, ten hands I will have a preliminary opinion. Subject to revision of course, but I would have an idea. It's not my plan to spend my time doing this.


Most questions of evaluation get clearer if you make them operational: What are you going to do with the results of the evaluation? Rating systems often approach the task with some vague notions of purpose, and as a result serve almost no purpose. The idea that somehow a numerical score can be assigned to everyone on bbo so that I can just look up the scores of two players to determine who is better seems to me to be a pipe dream.

Anyway, as has been stated above, there have been numerous threads along this line, all leading to zip.

[awm]

As I mentioned before, IMP scores depend a lot on your partner and opponents. If you play mostly with/against friends then they are virtually meaningless. Presumably there are plenty of good players (perhaps Jimmy Cayne is an example) who might have low IMP scores simply because they most often play against even better players!

But if you play mostly by sitting at tables on BBO with three strangers (help me find a game!) or in individual tournaments, then your IMP scores are obtained playing with and against the "bbo field" and most of us have a reasonable feel for the strength of this field. At this point IMP scores become meaningful.

[DrTodd13]

fred, on Oct 18 2008, 06:27 AM, said:

kenberg, on Oct 18 2008, 01:37 PM, said:

For starters, since I see Fred is reading this, is it possible to shift the permission as I describe above: I am S, I have my N, I have seated someone E, I would like to shift permission to E to seat or not seat a prospective W.

As far as tables in the Main Bridge Club go...

In principle it is certainly possible.

In practice it is not possible that you will see a change like this any time soon (or probably ever - sorry). It would be too much work for too little gain and there are many other ways that we can spend our programming hours improving the software that I believe represent better uses of our time.

I am not saying that I think this is a bad idea.

We might include something along these lines when we try to make it possible team matches to spontaneously start without the host having to specify all 8 players.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

The correct way would be to have two people form a partnership and then issue a request to sit down at a table jointly. The host of the table may still want to reject one or both of these people (e.g., on the enemy list). Not only that but the partner of the host has an interest as well. What if one of the opponents are on his enemy list? So, I think the right way is for two partnership to be formed first and then one to challenge the other and all 4 players then have to agree before play can commence.

[inquiry]

zasanya, on Oct 18 2008, 11:08 AM, said:

awm, on Oct 17 2008, 06:43 PM, said:

1. You can enter their name into myhands. There is really nothing on myhands that prevents you from looking at other players' imp scores. Of course imp scores depend a lot on who your partner is and who you play against but if someone randomly sits down at your table you can bet that they do a fair amount of randomly sitting down at tables and their imp scores will reflect playing with a pickup partner against the "bbo field."

Just curious.
I find that in last 1month i played 413 hands mostly 8 board teammtaches usually against players i know who are at least as good/bad as me.Most of the times these matches were set up byme taking care to see that opponents were evenly matched.My partners are usually players known to me.My imp score is minus 0.29.What skill level does that denote?

Adam is correct. If you were playing exclusively against EXCELLENT players all the time, a minus 0.29 imps/board would be very good result. If you were playing against VERY POOR players all the time, it would be a horrible score.

If one assumes you play against a large group of random players (and hence, on average, your opponents would be "average"), a minus 0.29 score would suggest that the combination of you and your partners are worse than average.

This is where things like lehman's rating, etc, can help, as they take into account the stregnth of your opponents. I took a look at your lehman's as calculated by BridgeBrowser, and if you are curious, I can tell you exactly where you stand with regards to the "average" BBO player (where average is a score of 50). Just send me a private message if you want to know. To give you a hint, you played 684 hands in the most current database I checked, and played those hands against a total of 199 different opponents, with their own lehmans from 67.15 as a high, to 35.57 as a low. Your opponents were slightly skewed towards better than average, with 123 of the 199 having lehmans over 50.00.
Your average opponents ability (not taking into account number of hands played) was 51.88. If you correct for hands played, was 51.82.

None of the 684 hands I used above were played in the last month, your average imps was similar to those you report, in this case -0.23 imps (you were above 50% at matchpoints, at 54.95%).

[RichMor]

fred, on Oct 17 2008, 05:53 PM, said:

<bunch of snips>

And now for something completely different...

If you really want to know how good other players on BBO are I am afraid that's just too bad, because it is obvious that a substantial majority of BBO members do not want you to know this about them. If they did then they would put appropriate skill levels in their own user profiles and the self-rating system would work OK. The fact that most BBO members fail to do this is either because:

1) They are delusional about their own levels of ability

or

2) They are intentionally deceptive about their own levels of ability

<more snips>

So aside from the "social argument" against any form of automated rating system and aside from my belief that an official test to rate players as Sceptic proposed could never work (impossible to create a sensible test, impossible to prevent cheating on the test, impossible to force people to take the test, and most people would not want others to see their results on such a test), there is a strong "bottom line argument" against any type of official rating system:

<more snips>

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

Fred,

This all seems true and sensible. But how about a 'Minimally Qualified Bridge Club'; a place where a player can drop in and find a reasonable game ?

There are no relative rankings in the MQBC, being a member just means you have a basic understanding of mainstream bidding methods and simple card play technique.

A person can gain 'provisional' membership to the MQBC by taking and passing a series of simple online quizes. Yes people can cheat but so what ? Someone who takes the time and makes the effort to look up quiz answers will probably remember and learn from the experience.

So my profile is marked as 'Provisionally Minimally Qualified' (or maybe somethig a little shorter). Now I can enter the MQBC and anyone who plays with me sees that I am a 'provisional'.

A 'provisional' member is measured for a few weeks. If a provisional member meets some minimum level of plus play, say average .75 IMPS plus over 100 hands, then the provisional label is removed.

No one is removed from the MQBC unless they behave badly.

No one is forced to join the MQBC. If a casual player doesn't want to make the effort then they don't need to.

Does this make any sense ?