[Wwizzardd]

Why does BBO not make it a requirement that everybody who joins MUST (a) complete convention card and (b) rate their ability according to BBO grades (Novice, Beginner etc.)? Also, can there not be an option when seeking a partner to stipulate a minimum level of ability?

[Hanoi5]

The learning curve for bridge is very high already. If the most popular website to play online made it mandatory for players to indicate so much information a lot of people wouldn't even try it.

Create a group of friends, join a club. And if you find a newbie without information recommend him/her kindly to study the game, to join a beginner's group or to read more.

[Free]

Welcome to the forum. There have been a lot of discussions about ratings, rankings, ability,... and personally I like BBO's approach. Since everyone is free to fill his profile as he wants, there's no point in giving it any value. So filtering on "Expert or World Class only" is completely useless.

But let me turn around some questions and ask you a few:
a. people play with a lot of different partners online. What use is 1 CC? And if everyone fills one in, which one do I play when I sit in front of a complete stranger? His CC or mine? What if we both have conventions on there that the other one doesn't know?
-> without a CC, people play something standard which doesn't even need a CC. If I play sayc and the auction goes 1♣-1♠, do you need a CC to know what it means?

b. there are guidelines to rate your ability, but BBO doesn't have the resources to check if everyone fills their rating (novice, beginner,...) honestly. How do you propose to check this?
-> suggestions have been made to create some kind of form with questions to determine your skill level automatically. Several problems arise here: you'll know all the questions when you've created a few users, theoretical skill is not the same as applying it in practise, bridge is not always an exact science, bidding methods differ from country to country so it's impossible to test that,...

[Wwizzardd]

Free, on 2011-November-03, 04:03, said:

Welcome to the forum. There have been a lot of discussions about ratings, rankings, ability,... and personally I like BBO's approach. Since everyone is free to fill his profile as he wants, there's no point in giving it any value. So filtering on "Expert or World Class only" is completely useless.

But let me turn around some questions and ask you a few:
a. people play with a lot of different partners online. What use is 1 CC? And if everyone fills one in, which one do I play when I sit in front of a complete stranger? His CC or mine? What if we both have conventions on there that the other one doesn't know?
-> without a CC, people play something standard which doesn't even need a CC. If I play sayc and the auction goes 1♣-1♠, do you need a CC to know what it means?

b. there are guidelines to rate your ability, but BBO doesn't have the resources to check if everyone fills their rating (novice, beginner,...) honestly. How do you propose to check this?
-> suggestions have been made to create some kind of form with questions to determine your skill level automatically. Several problems arise here: you'll know all the questions when you've created a few users, theoretical skill is not the same as applying it in practise, bridge is not always an exact science, bidding methods differ from country to country so it's impossible to test that,...

[Wwizzardd]

My wish was simply this: to be able to find MORE QUICKLY a compatible partner when I don't have one at all. True, some people may misrepresent their ability level, and several appear to have no idea what a convention is! But if everybody was required to classify themselves according to BBO guidelines, and to state at least the bare minimum about what they play (e.g. SAYC, Acol, Precision), then at least there's a more reliable way to filter out partners who are never likely to be compatible. BBO locates available partners very rapidly, so it's scarcely a problem to perform a simple check on their ability level against my minimum target (e.g. I just show in my Profile that "Intermediate" is the lowest level I would partner with, and the system then only offers me partners with that classification or higher). Of course it won't be perfect, but frequently I find that I have to go past 10-20 offerings before locating somebody compatible. With no disrespect to Beginners or Novices (we all were once!), I don't now get any pleasure playing with or against them, so wish to avoid and to find a partner closer to my own level

Also, somewhere in the BBO Help, there's a suggestion that when starting a table it's possible to stipulate the preferred level of partner (and/or opponents?). I've never found how to do this. Is it a false claim?

[georgeac]

Do you play a few hands with the beginners or just automatically assume that their skill level means they are terrible and leave. If it is the latter that seems like judging a book by its cover. I know quite a few junior players who are considered expert that put their skill level as novice just to avoid getting annoyed by people they don't want to play with. It seems absurd to assume that someone that is a novice skill level in their profile without playing a few hands with them.

This annoys me in f2f bridge too because at the partnership desk the volunteers just ask for a number. This number or skill level is not an absolute of how good a bridge player is.

[barmar]

Wwizzardd, on 2011-November-03, 17:46, said:

Also, somewhere in the BBO Help, there's a suggestion that when starting a table it's possible to stipulate the preferred level of partner (and/or opponents?). I've never found how to do this. Is it a false claim?

When you start a table, you can optionally fill in a Description. You can write something like "Experts only, please".

[Free]

barmar, on 2011-November-04, 01:43, said:

When you start a table, you can optionally fill in a Description. You can write something like "Experts only, please".

That's no solution, you get a lot of fake experts with a red flag in their profiles who don't even play transfers after 1NT...

[Free]

Wwizzardd, on 2011-November-03, 17:46, said:

My wish was simply this: to be able to find MORE QUICKLY a compatible partner when I don't have one at all. True, some people may misrepresent their ability level, and several appear to have no idea what a convention is! But if everybody was required to classify themselves according to BBO guidelines, and to state at least the bare minimum about what they play (e.g. SAYC, Acol, Precision), then at least there's a more reliable way to filter out partners who are never likely to be compatible. BBO locates available partners very rapidly, so it's scarcely a problem to perform a simple check on their ability level against my minimum target (e.g. I just show in my Profile that "Intermediate" is the lowest level I would partner with, and the system then only offers me partners with that classification or higher). Of course it won't be perfect, but frequently I find that I have to go past 10-20 offerings before locating somebody compatible. With no disrespect to Beginners or Novices (we all were once!), I don't now get any pleasure playing with or against them, so wish to avoid and to find a partner closer to my own level

Also, somewhere in the BBO Help, there's a suggestion that when starting a table it's possible to stipulate the preferred level of partner (and/or opponents?). I've never found how to do this. Is it a false claim?

I definitely understand what you want, and I agree that such functionality would be helpful for some groups of members (for example new members who don't have friends online yet). However, what you're asking is for BBO to put a lot of effort and time in a project to achieve an imperfect result. From a business point of view this is simply not done.

Everyone knows that self ratings on BBO are pretty worthless, so unless that is somehow solved, any system working with those self ratings will never be implemented ("trash goes in, trash comes out"). BBO has made clear that they don't care about solving this.

From my experience, I can give you the following recommendations:
- private: can be anything, but don't bother when they also don't have a flag
- novice/beginner: this is usually accurate
- intermediate: you can find some decent players there, but many are already playing several years and because of that don't consider themselves beginners anymore.
- advanced: on average, this is probably the group with the best players. If you can choose between people of different levels, pick this one.
- expert: most of the time they are worse than advanced players. If they have a red flag, don't even bother.
- world class: many of those are decent players with a large ego. They might be resulters or want to teach you bad bridge.

[barmar]

Free, on 2011-November-04, 06:53, said:

That's no solution, you get a lot of fake experts with a red flag in their profiles who don't even play transfers after 1NT...

True.

What I was forgetting is that many users use "Take me to the first seat available", which can't read these descriptions.

We're quite aware that this is inferior, and we've been discussing ways to improve it.

[bart_rx7]

barmar, on 2011-November-04, 09:55, said:

True.

What I was forgetting is that many users use "Take me to the first seat available", which can't read these descriptions.

We're quite aware that this is inferior, and we've been discussing ways to improve it.

HI,
As a software engineer I have a couple of suggestions that would probably be easy to implement....

1. When looking for a partner at a table with empty seats how about indicating the "skill" level for each player at the table
so that one does not have to hover his cursor over "every" potential partner to glance at their profile.
This would minimize the searching.
Additionally, one could potentially list their country...since a matching system is important to a lot of players

2. How about adding a selectable "display" filter when looking at tables with open seats where you could
indicate the "levels" that are allowed for the players at the tables that are to be displayed to you?
This would also minimize the "hovering"

thanx....mark

[Vampyr]

Free, on 2011-November-04, 06:53, said:

That's no solution, you get a lot of fake experts with a red flag in their profiles who don't even play transfers after 1NT...

Why must someone play Jacoby Transfers to be considered an expert?

[TylerE]

Honestly, I'd rather BBO just took out the skill level field entirely. Much gnashing of teeth would be avoided...

[psantaana]

Hello:

Could it be possible to implement something like the ELO system used in chess?

http://en.wikipedia....o_rating_system

It measure your skil against your oponents and your results against them.

I think it could be possible to adapt the system to bridge.

We did something like this with some friends for another card play (called Podrida).

Regards...

Pablo.

[mycroft]

Does ELO work well for Tandem Chess? Does ELO work well for Tandem Chess with random pairing? Will ELO reliably predict the result of a Tandem Chess match between two pairs, both of which are equally experienced with Tandem Chess, but one pair is two random people and the other a pair that plays Tandem Chess with the same partner on a regular basis?

Oh, and how does your play relate to your ELO when sitting playing blitz chess on the computer and petting the cat and making coffee (and shooting the breeze with other people playing their own matches on IRC?)

[wmb1956]

Four observations: (1) I view it as my duty to play with beginners a little, although I often remind tham that it is better to make a mistake than to play too slowly, (2) I do think that once someone has logged in 500 times or so they should be required to post at least a simple card, (3) I think that BBO could help the learning process by, when it sees a player with horible results, sending them a link to the SAYC summary, to a learning opportunity or something like that (BBO knows how good and bad players are from their cumulative results, and the law of large numbers does apply), and (4) I wish that BBO posted game completion percentages so that hopper would be encouraged to complete the hand befor hopping off.

[BunnyGo]

wmb1956, on 2012-February-11, 17:20, said:

(4) I wish that BBO posted game completion percentages so that hopper would be encouraged to complete the hand befor hopping off.

This is done. You can restrict hand completion percentages for people joining your table. I usually set mine to 95% if I'm playing against randoms.

[Antrax]

Chess servers typically have several ELOs based on the variant and time controls used. That being said, those servers also typically have newbie bashers and sandbaggers (people who deliberately drop ratings to qualify for various tournaments).

[kaltstart]

Vampyr, on 2012-January-04, 05:56, said:

Why must someone play Jacoby Transfers to be considered an expert?

I think the op was talking about pick-up partnerships in the main room. Expert nor not, if someone can´t or isn´t willing to play transfers after a 1nt opener, whereas all potential partners are expecting to at least play those, it´s calling for trouble - I made those experiences. The simple reason is either that the majority won´t know how to bid without transfers to reach a 5-3 major fit or what other bidding sequences (without transfers) would mean. The result will always be that the game can´t proceed, most often because players leave.