[CarlRitner]

There are a few other unresolved issues here, which I suspect Uday already anticipated. If I type fast enough I can get my hand and the auction into another window so that if I am declarer, my own computer program can advise me. I can enter the dummy (and the OL) when that comes down while I'm thinking, Since my bridge program uses the GIB bridge.exe engine, I only need to make a few changes here and there, like adding known cards as they are played. It's not foolproof, but it's better than my card play, for sure.

On defence I am still thinking about the options.

I realise not everyone in BBO land is writing their own bridge program, but I'm not particularly clever. What I've described is really an advanced card combo analyser and a double dummy simulator. I'll bet there's 50 folks here than could improve on it.

I'd never even bother just to impress anyone, but where's there pennies involved....

Cheers,
Carl

[uday]

No subtleties here. In an ideal world, an unfinished hand would be replayed at 1st opportunity, perhaps, or given to a panel of judges for arbitration. In the begining, we might have to assign scores by hand until we write the code to have robots play out the deal (and, perhaps, have the result proofed by a human or set of humans). We'll see.

I don't think there would be much fun in having the robots offer advice. I would never dare put 2 robots up against one robot and one human if the robots were playing for my money; I think the robot-pair would get chopped up.

I think angry emails can be fended off by making the conditions of contest clear to participants up front.

[cherdano]

uday, on Mar 12 2006, 07:01 AM, said:

I don't think there would be much fun in having the robots offer advice. I would never dare put 2 robots up against one robot and one human if the robots were playing for my money; I think the robot-pair would get chopped up.

Well a human with robot advice could well be better than both a human or a robot alone. (A well-known and studied phenomenon in chess by the way.)
But I agree it's unlikely that someone will go through the pain of doing this.

[Deanrover]

Just had a deal terminated and was booted from the room because a player was too slow. That player? GIB!!!!!!

[Deanrover]

BTW, I played 2 sessions yesterday. When I logged in the second time my account had been reset to $100, but now that I log in my account balance has been remembered from the level it was after my 2nd session

[uday]

When you enter a "fun money" table you are given 100$, and this is not remembered once you leave the table.

The real money tables remember your balance, of course.


It is possible that the FAST settings are occasionally too fast for GIB; I'll check/tweak. we've slowed down GIB since the early days and havent bumped up the max-time-to-think settings. It is also possible that gib is crashing or something, of course.

[chicken]

i assume the average player wont play enough hands to even out the luck factor. i still wld appreciate (and use!) russian scoring with the human always beeing the declarer.

[uday]

The money bridge tables are now available on production. There is a limit on fun-money tables (3 for now ). No way to add $ yet, tho.

How valid is this russian scoring stuff? A quick google search shows that you use a table to determine theoretical value of hand based on HCP, and imp table result against that theoretical value.

[CarlRitner]

cherdano, on Mar 12 2006, 04:09 AM, said:

But I agree it's unlikely that someone will go through the pain of doing this.

My post was more provocative than anything else, since 1) I don't play online and 2) I don't cheat, and 3) my program is not quite that far along. But it would definitely be cheating to use any sort of calculation tool or memory aid when playing online, and you really can't prevent that under any workable scenario. A scratch card to track cards played isn't very sophisticated, but it is practical.

At a dollar a point (and I mean 1 point = 1 point) it's worth the pain to get whatever help you can, if you are so inclined to cheat.

I don't know what the rules are, if any, for online poker; I'd certainly want to count cards, unless the shoe is infinite.

Cheers,
Carl

[hrothgar]

There has been some VERY serious work done regarding regarding the best way to cheat on various online poker sites. I can point to a couple interesting papers where someone was able to crack the seed for the pseudo-random number generator used to deal hands. This permitted folks to have perfect information regarding all of the hands at the table. Fun stuff.

While this type of effort is certainly within the real of the posisble, it requires an awful lot of work. The scale of online poker justifies the investment. Poker is popular enough that you can make very good money if you crack the system. I severely doubt that BBO's money game would be significant enough to invite serious attempts at cracking the system. Its unclear whether a commercial program like Jack is necessarily strong enough to give a player a significant edge.

[Deanrover]

A program like Jack could definitely be used to help in declarer play problems. Deep Finesse too. Not that rare that a player will find himself in a situation where he more or less knows everybodies cards, but the situation is highly complex and he doesnt know the best play. DF would get it in an instant. I do agree that it is unlikely to be a major problem in the foreseeable future. Bridge bots are currently at the perfect level for this kind of venture - good enough to make reasonable partners, not good enough to facilitate widespread cheating.

[chicken]

uday, on Mar 12 2006, 09:28 AM, said:

How valid is this russian scoring stuff?  A quick google search shows that you use a table to determine theoretical value of hand based on HCP, and imp table result against that theoretical value.

that would be agood task for the bridgebrowser wouldn`t it? i wont mind playing against other scores than the original stuff if they are prooven by a sufficient number of deals.
as far as i know the original list is based on the data of 2.500.000 boards.

[CarlRitner]

Deanrover, on Mar 12 2006, 11:19 AM, said:

A program like Jack could definitely be used to help in declarer play problems. Deep Finesse too. Not that rare that a player will find himself in a situation where he more or less knows everybodies cards, but the situation is highly complex and he doesnt know the best play. DF would get it in an instant.

Counting is one of the more critical assets to have in bridge, of which I am just not as sharp as I used to be. A person who has a faultless way to keep count has a decided edge over the field, in my opinion.

Now, when you evolve that little counting cheatsheet into something like Jack with Deep Finesse, you are going to take people's money unfairly; stealing is the word that comes to my mind.

I certainly won't predict failure for this venture, but it doesn't motivate me in the least. My hope is that BBO makes enough money from this to put a decent effort into progressing the bidding database for GIB. It's a very promising but neglected product at this point.

Cheers,

Carl
www.carlritner.com <-- bridge books

[fred]

As I understand it, the analytical software available for both poker and backgammon is much more powerful than anything that is available for bridge.

Considering that there are a lot of people playing both of these games for money on the Internet, I think the dire predictions expressed in this thread are way off the mark.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[pigpenz]

I am curious is there an advantage for the player seated to the right of the other human?

[fred]

pigpenz, on Mar 12 2006, 05:02 PM, said:

I am curious is there an advantage for the player seated to the right of the other human?

Maybe and maybe it is better to sit to the left of the other human.

Your position with respect to the other human is randomly determined before each hand that you play.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[Deanrover]

The analytical software available for poker is much much weaker than that for bridge. The opposite is true for backgammon. I believe that the bot problem in backgammon has had a significant effect in curtailing the market for online backgammon, particularly at the higher levels.

[Sigi_BC84]

uday, on Mar 12 2006, 03:28 PM, said:

How valid is this russian scoring stuff?  A quick google search shows that you use a table to determine theoretical value of hand based on HCP, and imp table result against that theoretical value.

The Russian Scoring table is "valid" in the way that it represents the expected score for a given combined holding of HCPs. This has been determined by double dummy analysis and averaging of the par scores. So when using this table to adjust the scores, you are playing against the average. The averaging has been done for both vulnerable and nonvulnerable scores, so basically there are two separate tables.

This still allows for lucky swings of course, since you can have a 20 HCP game or a 24 HCP slam or whatever. Therefore it doesn't eliminate luck but diminishes the effect of having "good cards" since better (higher) cards mean you need to score higher.

The Russian Scoring table was made for f2f games, in an online world you could even calculate the par score for every hand and compare against the perfect score. This is as fair as you can get on a single table I would say. The question is if people want that (I understand that part of the thrill when playing rubber comes from the possibility of getting good hands).

--Sigi

[Sigi_BC84]

Deanrover, on Mar 12 2006, 04:19 PM, said:

A program like Jack could definitely be used to help in declarer play problems. Deep Finesse too. Not that rare that a player will find himself in a situation where he more or less knows everybodies cards, but the situation is highly complex and he doesnt know the best play. DF would get it in an instant. I do agree that it is unlikely to be a major problem in the foreseeable future. Bridge bots are currently at the perfect level for this kind of venture - good enough to make reasonable partners, not good enough to facilitate widespread cheating.

DF (or GIBs DD analyzer) doesn't help you at all here. You need perfect knowledge of all four hands in order to to double dummy analysis.

Now for computer assistance: Matt Ginsberg (the author of GIB) has claimed several years ago already that his program plays on "expert level" (he also conducted experiments and pitched the computer against experts, Rosenberg among others, to prove that). Since then he has improved the program considerably and there is a lot more computing power available now (steadily increasing). Considering this, I think it is quite feasible to obtain very valuable automatic or semi-automatic computer assistance by running GIB (or Jack) client side to help with the card play. I would probably bid myself (GIB sucks at bidding) and then let the computer play the hand for me (maybe after giving it hints on the meaning of the bids and so on, which is easily possible with GIB).

You can check GIB's strength yourself by pre-dealing hands, setting the final contract and playing against it.

--Sigi

[Sigi_BC84]

chicken, on Mar 12 2006, 04:35 PM, said:

uday, on Mar 12 2006, 09:28 AM, said:

How valid is this russian scoring stuff?  A quick google search shows that you use a table to determine theoretical value of hand based on HCP, and imp table result against that theoretical value.

that would be agood task for the bridgebrowser wouldn`t it? i wont mind playing against other scores than the original stuff if they are prooven by a sufficient number of deals.
as far as i know the original list is based on the data of 2.500.000 boards.

After calculating the pars for 2.5 million boards you are probably really close to the perfect average for most HCP counts. Maybe I'll repeat the calculations myself one day using GIB to see how quickly the figures converge.

Bridge Browser has 100 Mio hands but my prediction is that you wouldn't get different numbers when analyzing all these hands and calculating the means (I'd certainly be very interested in actual results, but I don't own the hand records).

Zar Petkov has analyzed 10 Mio hands to validate his point count and is offering the records on his web site. DD analysis has already been done on those, so you'd only have to average the scores and compare to Russian Scoring.

--Sigi