[luke warm]

i'll add my thanks to ben and the panel... ben, i know it *must* take a lot of your time, especially having to find hands that fit in your search criteria... if i could help, i certainly would... at the moment i simply have very little available time... however, it's possible that someone out there can take some of the load

i do like the idea of a revolving panel, but that has its own set of problems

[Chamaco]

Ty very much to Ben and the panelists !

[P_Marlowe]

Hi Ben,

one possible source of problems is the forum itself,
altough the hands got discussed, it does not mean that
this would be a bad thing.
And if the hands are older than 3-4 weeks, most of the guy
wont recognice the hand, ... well I speak for myself.

With kind regards
Marlowe

[inquiry]

P_Marlowe, on May 9 2005, 03:55 PM, said:

Hi Ben,

one possible source of problems is the forum itself,
altough the hands got discussed, it does not mean that
this would be a bad thing.
And if the hands are older than 3-4 weeks, most of the guy
wont recognice the hand, ... well I speak for myself.

With kind regards
Marlowe

Forum hands are fine. The one thing I know about our experts, they will not let the opinion of others sway their opinion. I have not farmed the BBF for hands, yet. But that day may come. I have three good ones for next poll (at least I hope they are good), looking for two-three more.

Ben

[Walddk]

inquiry, on May 9 2005, 03:10 PM, said:

The one thing I know about our experts, they will not let the opinion of others sway their opinion

Not until perhaps afterwards when they see what other experts think. It's not totally unthinkable that one may change one's opinion after having seen strong arguments for a certain call.

We are learning all the time, and experts can even learn from less experienced players. That's good for everyone, and that's good for bridge.

Roland

[Elianna]

P_Marlowe, on May 9 2005, 02:55 PM, said:

one possible source of problems is the forum itself,
altough the hands got discussed, it does not mean that
this would be a bad thing.
And if the hands are older than 3-4 weeks, most of the guy
wont recognice the hand, ... well I speak for myself.

I'm pretty sure that I'd recognize a hand, and remember the discussion about it, and I know for a fact that several potential participants would remember them, too.

But I think that you have an idea: maybe instead of posting single hands, people could send them to Ben instead. Of course, I don't think that he'd want to see play problems, or "bid both hands" problems, or problems that arise from systems not very compatible with the one that we are using.

Anyway, one wouldn't need to send everything under the sun to Ben (I doubt that he'd appreciate that) but before posting, take a minute and consider if the hand will be interesting to us.

Side question: Does BBF support HTML code or whatever you use on the vugraph schedule to display the time relative to the user? If so, that would be a really cool thing to implement so that people don't have to figure out what time the contest opens and closes.

[Walddk]

Elianna, on May 9 2005, 03:20 PM, said:

Side question: Does BBF support HTML code or whatever you use on the vugraph schedule to display the time relative to the user? If so, that would be a really cool thing to implement so that people don't have to figure out what time the contest opens and closes.

Hope Gerardo reads this. He is the one responsible for our vugraph schedule page. A fantastic job, no more, no less.

Roland

[Gerardo]

There is an option to set your current time zone in your forum profile, with that set up correctly, the time of the posts is shown in your local time, but that wouldn't change posts content, which seems to me is what you want (like maintenance lobby news page does).

What do you have in mind?

[Elianna]

I meant times posted in the text of a post. For example, say I say "Event A will occur at 7:15pm", and I mean this as my time (relative to where I live, in the central (US) time zone). I would want that to appear to someone in Los Angeles as 5:15pm, and to someone in Paris as 2:15am (or whatever the proper conversion is). Exactly as in the vugraph schedule (which is excellently done, btw) but in the TEXT. That way Ben could say "contest will start at time x, and end at time y", and these times appear local to the user.

Does this make what I mean clearer?

[Walddk]

inquiry, on May 9 2005, 03:10 PM, said:

I have three good ones for next poll (at least I hope they are good), looking for two-three more.

Ben

You might have thought about this already, Ben, but lead problems are also quite interesting in my opinion. The reasoning behind a certain lead. Why is that particular lead likely to work better than the alternatives ....

Maybe 5 bidding and 1 lead problem?

Roland

[bearmum]

inquiry, on May 10 2005, 03:15 AM, said:

Well, I was thinking once every two weeks with the following schedule.

1). Hands posted on Friday (well late Thursady night local time for me)
2) Voting through Monday some time local time
3) Hands opened for discussion on Monday night local time for me
4) Long about Friday, I post the vote of the panel, the scores, and the winner.
5) Next week for further discussion of the hands as posted, system changes, etc.
6) New set of problems on the next Friday.

It seems clear, that a short time between posting problems and then posting the solutions in needed. I can expand the pool of invited gold stars and as long as we get six or seven to reply we should be ok. I invited 14, 9 replied, this time. Maybe a different subset will reply next time.

But once every two weeks is going to be very hard on me. The reason is two fold. First, it is not easy to come up with hands the panel will find either non-trivial, or that they will object to the intial actions. Second, i have to extract their answers to go with each problem, and third, deciding what scores should go with which bid takes some time after you read the "intent" of the panelist. So maybe once every three weeks is better.

The next problem set (only six questions) is almost ready. So we will give this another go. I wll ask Uday if he can post news about it for the days it is active, to see if we can drive more players here to participate. Let's see how round two goes (and of course, last weeks winner is on the panel this week....).

Ben

I think whatever frequency you decide on is fine and the idea of voting at weekend is great

[pigpenz]

how about when you post the questions do it in a poll format so we can see what the consensus of people are voting.

[inquiry]

pigpenz, on May 12 2005, 01:04 PM, said:

how about when you post the questions do it in a poll format so we can see what the consensus of people are voting.

Ok, but it is the votes that are sent in to Eliana that count (well the ones that REALLY count are the ones the "experts" send in to me).

Ben

[luis]

pigpenz, on May 12 2005, 05:04 PM, said:

how about when you post the questions do it in a poll format so we can see what the consensus of people are voting.

Don't do this Ben it will be confusing.

[cherdano]

I guess many would just cast their vote to Eliana according to the majority in the poll... And others will think they have participated in the Poll when they have clicked in the Forum poll.

Arend

[inquiry]

One thing I did was establish tie-breaker in case multiple people ended up with the same score. Selfishly I made earliest entry the winner. This was to encourage people to vote quickly. The idea was to see how the response was going to go. Maybe that is not the best tie-breaker for who gets to participate on the panel.

The options are:
1) Earliest submission wins in case of tie
2) Entry with the most 100 scores wins
3) Starting at question A, entries tied entries are removed by the the first non-100 score (if tow are tied and but only one gets 100 on first question it is the winner
4) Why worry aobut it, let all ties be on the panel the next time.
5) Other ways to break the ties? (Ben likes a good bottle of wine...hehehehe)

Any ideas?

Ben

[luis]

I would let the entry with the highest minimum win, I think it's better to be consistant, 4 60s should be better than 3 80s and a 0.
If there's a tie there then the player with more 100s wins.
If they are still tied then let them both be on the panel :-)
I woudn't use time since we are in different parts of the world.

[Free]

luis, on May 12 2005, 08:41 PM, said:

I would let the entry with the highest minimum win, I think it's better to be consistant, 4 60s should be better than 3 80s and a 0.
If there's a tie there then the player with more 100s wins.
If they are still tied then let them both be on the panel :-)
I woudn't use time since we are in different parts of the world.

Good idea! But I'd combine some:

- highest minimum
- most 100s
- if both these are equal, then either accept both players or use earliest submission

[Elianna]

Quote

  I would let the entry with the highest minimum win, I think it's better to be consistant, 4 60s should be better than 3 80s and a 0.

I'm not entirely clear on what you mean by highest minimum. For example, with five questions:

Person A gets 20, 40, 100, 100, 100 for a score of 360.

Person B gets 40, 80, 80, 80, 80 for a score of 360.

Do you want Person A to win, because he has the highest number of scores that are the minimum of the 10 (positive) scores, (it could be so, following your example)?

Or, by looking at the words "highest minimum", do you want person B to win, because the minimum of his scores is greater than the minimum of person A's scores (that makes more sense to me)?

Or is there another interpretation that I am missing?