[Mike_P]

By way of introduction, I'm relatively new to duplicate and the ACBL so am still a stranger in a strange land. So be gentle.

I've begun to attend newcomer duplicate events at local clubs and am having a great time. But so much of it seems so 20th Century. Usually there are match results on the walls reaching the floor (produced by dot-matrix printers on fan-fold paper) -- reminds me of the output of my Altair years ago.

At the end of the evening's play, in addition to giving me my own copy of the dot-matrix printout, I'm also given a sheet of paper with the "hand records" of the evening. In some cases, the hand records are also available online at the club site, usually in .pdf format.

Why in the world is the latter not routinely available electronically (either by download or email) in a popular computer-readable format (.pbn for example?) so I can immediately replay the hands on GIB, Bridge Baron, Jack, etc.? I must be missing an important issue -- this seems to me to be a no-brainer and drop dead easy, espcially given how many smart folks play the game and given how much automation there is already online.

As far as that goes, with today's technology I don't quite understand why we're frantically trying to maintain board by board personal scoring with a lead pencil. Isn't that information on the scorecard and (with admittedly more data entry needed by the club manager of course) this too could be attached electronically and automatically?

Any insight welcome. Thanks.

-- Mike

[P_Marlowe]

Hi,

simple answer: the demand for an electronic
form is low, the demand may rise, but currently
it would only be a nice to have.

If I would make a bet, more than 90% of players
visiting a face to face tournament do not own a
play program.

With kind regards
Marlowe

[Gerben42]

It's just a question of demand as P_Marlowe says. At the World Championships in Verona you would get the hand records (including double dummy results for each declarer and denomination) and a personal scorecard (showing contract, lead, result, opponent and how many MP you got). All this information you put in electronically during the game, of course. Results were available about instantly. Quite a difference.

It CAN be done of course, but many people don't want to.

[pigpenz]

even here on bbo there are alot of people who play on the bbo online tourneys that arent very computer literate! There are alot of people I have tried to send Full Disclosure files to and they have no idea what to do with them. So posting *.lin files for them with hand records and results would be confusing to most, in most cases pieces of paper seem to work the best....why i dont know...but i guess its instant gratification.

[inquiry]

pigpenz, on Aug 16 2006, 11:24 AM, said:

even here on bbo there are alot of people who play on the bbo online tourneys that arent very computer literate! There are alot of people I have tried to send Full Disclosure files to and they have no idea what to do with them. So posting *.lin files for them with hand records and results would be confusing to most, in most cases pieces of paper seem to work the best....why i dont know...but i guess its instant gratification.

A piece of paper can be more than a static document, of course. Each player in homebase gets emailed a complete document with their bidding, their play, and the results at all the other tables, along with the makeable contracts. Of course in a F2F club, the what you did would not be part of the record, as that would be too time consuming to enter, but if you use a comptuer to calculate the results, and used predealt hands, you could have something with the hands, the makeable contracts, the results from all tables, the final scoreboard available to all. I really like seeing what happened at all the other tables... and if I can't see the play, at least show me the contracts and the results.

A reasonable minimum that could be achieved is something like this...example but with an overall leader board added. If all the information is already electronic this is not hard to do.

[Stephen Tu]

no .pbn:
As other posters said, not much demand, most players are older, only computer literate up to the point of using e-mail/web. Many directors aren't much more so - some club games don't even give hand records, still rely on manual shuffling! Also, directors who do use hand records are often using old ad-hoc hand generators made by someone else, before pbn became an accepted standard.

If you would like pbn hand records, hunt down programs on the web to generate them. Make some easy to run script that will spit out both pbn & something directly printable as a hand record (I like ones with additional features like printing double dummy par results for each denomination), give them to the directors, show them how to use it, & those that are already using preduplicated boards almost certainly will accomodate you if it's not significantly more cumbersome than what they are currently using.

-personal scoring with pencil
You can request personal score by computer printout; the commonly used ACBLScore program provides this feature, and I usually ask the director for a copy after the game. Keeping score yourself though is a way to defend vs. errors/illegibility on the travellers/pickup slips. Directors will occasionally come back to you & ask you what you have down as a personal score if there is a discrepancy. Personally I haven't kept one for years, as I find my concentration on the hands always makes me to forget to write down the personal score leaving it incomplete; I rely on my partners to keep score.

[Mike_P]

P_Marlowe, on Aug 16 2006, 10:20 AM, said:

If I would make a bet, more than 90% of players
visiting a face to face tournament do not own a
play program.

Wow. I would have guessed just the opposite, but I'm much too new to have a useful opinion.

I'll still bet there are a number of folks manually entering hands from hand records from their last FTF event to see how they could have played the hands better.

Even if they're not generated at the source, I would have thought that someone on the planet would have cobbled together a utility, even if it were as barbaric as extracting the hand information from the raw .pdf file offline and converting it to .pbn. Anybody know of such a thing?

-- Mike

[Stephen Tu]

Quote

I'll still bet there are a number of folks manually entering hands from hand records from their last FTF event to see how they could have played the hands better.

There probably is a number, but that number is pretty tiny. If you are betting that there are a lot, you lose the bet. At the club, you'll find a lot of people that are just there to play, they aren't in to carefully reviewing their play for every single error & trying to markedly improve. They play for years & years, never get much better. So these people aren't going to take the trouble to replay the hands on computer. As Marlowe says they probably don't even have the program in the first place.

Then you have a group of better players who do analyze hand records, but for most hands, they don't need a computer to find the errors. The errors are easily spotted with very fast manual analysis, at most a pencil required to cross off cards. A lot of the time the error was already known before the hand was finished . It takes a pretty complex hand to require a computer. I only find a hand I find interesting enough to use computer analysis once every few sessions or so.

As a newcomer, I'd advise you to seek out & join better players who go out after the games for drinks/meals & to discuss the hands. You'll get better insight into how they think about what to bid/play than what you can get out of a computer program. (The best players won't be right in their opinions 100% of the time, and often there is no single "right answer" esp. for bidding, but you can review the logic presented & decide if you agree with it later. Beware of advice presented as "this is right because I say so" without backing logic, especially in bidding; there are many possible successful styles/agreements in a lot of areas.) A computer program will always be able to tell you the optimal double dummy play, but it won't warn you when playing in that sequence would be anti-percentage, even ludicrous, single dummy. They can be used for answering questions like "could that hand be made/defeated", but will often be inconclusive about "should that hand be made/defeated" until you are skilled enough to analyze that question for yourself.

Reading a lot of books helps, if you see & understand a lot of hands analyzed in books eventually you will be able to analyze the hands quickly yourself just seeing the hand record.

Quote

Even if they're not generated at the source, I would have thought that someone on the planet would have cobbled together a utility, even if it were as barbaric as extracting the hand information from the raw .pdf file offline and converting it to .pbn.  Anybody know of such a thing?

There's no standard for hand records pdf, so no one is likely to write a parser for pdf. It would be easier to find out what program(s) they are using to generate the pdf, then obtain source code & modify it with an option to spit out pbn also. Who knows, maybe their program already can.

[pigpenz]

yes there are very many people who just like to play cards and are only interested in what their reult is for that particular hand.

I have always been amazed at the number of people who play in ACBL BBO games and never go back to look at the table results and look at play/lead problems with either Deep Finesse or GIB doulbe dummy analyzer.

Now like Ben is talking about....Homebase club offers up Steve Pickett's excellent
Bridgebrowser program for even further analysis of hand patterns etc....Only Steve and Ben would know how many of the Homebase players utilize it.

[awm]

Hmm.... I have a number of friends who like to enter an interesting deal into the computer and analyze all the play permutations ad nauseum. I think they've spent multiple hours doing this for a single deal.

Personally I'm not all that interested in double dummy analysis. On the vast majority of hands I can correctly analyze after the play, and if not I don't see it as all that important. I'm much more interested in how to best play/defend with limited information -- what's the best opening lead looking at my hand and the auction? What's the highest percentage line of play? Is there a "swindle" that might be wrong double dummy but would work on real players most of the time? Analyzing hands via computers won't tell me these things. Talking to other players might.

In any case even amongst good players who are computer literate and have access to the software, analyzing hands on computer is far from universal.

[mike777]

pigpenz, on Aug 17 2006, 12:02 PM, said:

yes there are very many people who just like to play cards and are only interested in what their reult is for that particular hand.

I have always been amazed at the number of people who play in ACBL BBO games and never go back to look at the table results and look at play/lead problems with either Deep Finesse or GIB doulbe dummy analyzer.

Now like Ben is talking about....Homebase club offers up Steve Pickett's excellent
Bridgebrowser program for even further analysis of hand patterns etc....Only Steve and Ben would know how many of the Homebase players utilize it.

We do not use Gib or DF because we do not know how to use or understand it. I have tried it for quite a long time and still have no clue how the thing works or even if it does work on my computer.

As for bridgebrowser, well I know it works on my computer I just have no idea what to do with the thing.

[Mike_P]

Apologize in advance for beating this dead horse -- couldn't help myself -- had to resurrect this dead thread.......

Like almost everything else, I am struck with how far the internet extends my reach in terms of ways to learn the game, either interactively via on-line play, or via access to a zillion bridge columns on newspaper sites or dedicated online bridge columns, etc., etc.

But it still seems so unnecessarily primitive and hard-copy-centric.

In an instant I can download any of a thousand bridge columns from a thousand newspaper sites, and then I can try to follow often complex play by reading the commentary and staring at the page and trying to follow what's been played and what's not, etc., etc.

What I really want to do is use the column interactively. As it is, I manually enter it into my computer bridge program and then REALLY explore the point the column is trying to make. This manual entry doesn't take long with today's software, but it seems so unnecessary. If I can download the printed form in a heartbeat, for the expenditure of a few extra electrons I should be able to download something like a .pbn file so it's available to me for interactive play and visualization instantly. This is not brain surgery -- why is this never available?

Yes, perhaps it's because the bridge public is older and not computer literate, and 90% of the existing base doesn't care and wouldn't use it. And yet, I'm thinking if we don't progress, we don't survive -- right?

-- Mike

[Stephen Tu]

Quote

This is not brain surgery -- why is this never available?

A lot of these materials were originally targeted at a exclusively print audience, not an online audience. So the author (often also older & not highly computer literate) just doesn't think to also provide .pbn download. Or perhaps believes it is too much work to make the conversions. So much easier to just link to existing text file.

I have to point out that it's very useful practice to just look at hands in the paper & play them out solely in your head. After all that's what you have to do at the table, visualize the unseen hands in your head & play them out.

When you are first starting out the interactivity is surely helpful, that's what all of the CD-ROMs that BBO sells are for. Just costs more than printed material.

If you have source of columns that you would really like in .pbn format, you'll just have to bite the bullet & write a converter yourself.

[cherdano]

Mike_P, on Oct 21 2006, 03:52 PM, said:

In an instant I can download any of a thousand bridge columns from a thousand newspaper sites, and then I can try to follow often complex play by reading the commentary and staring at the page and trying to follow what's been played and what's not, etc., etc.

What I really want to do is use the column interactively. As it is, I manually enter it into my computer bridge program and then REALLY explore the point the column is trying to make. This manual entry doesn't take long with today's software, but it seems so unnecessary. If I can download the printed form in a heartbeat, for the expenditure of a few extra electrons I should be able to download something like a .pbn file so it's available to me for interactive play and visualization instantly. This is not brain surgery -- why is this never available?

There are some columns published on the web that come closer to what you imagine. The one I liked most is Fred's "Deal of the week", that he has run for several years. You can still find all of them on the BBO website, I think.

Arendb

[inquiry]

And you can shell out a few bucks for content on the web.. for example, bridge masters and a couple of the other BBO products. I really like LArry Cohen's 1999 Life Masters pairs and his favorite 52 (more than 52 btw) and the ancient Robert Darvas Right through the pack. You can also purchase other content, like Woolsey's Cavendish 2000 and have it shipped to you.

[mrdct]

Must be a funny old place ACBL-Land. I can't imagine any bridge club in Australia staying in business if they didn't provide hand records with Deep Finesse analysis.

The more successful bridge clubs provide comprehensive website results services including downloadable hand-records in several formats and individual recap sheets to see how you went on each board.

Have a look at http://www.ksandqs.com/results.php for an example.

[inquiry]

mrdct, on Oct 25 2006, 03:11 AM, said:

Must be a funny old place ACBL-Land. I can't imagine any bridge club in Australia staying in business if they didn't provide hand records with Deep Finesse analysis.

The more successful bridge clubs provide comprehensive website results services including downloadable hand-records in several formats and individual recap sheets to see how you went on each board.

Have a look at http://www.ksandqs.com/results.php for an example.

LOL.. on bbo when you play in homebase you can get all this (including deep finesse analysis), PLUS, have it emailed to you , . And you can use the ENTIRELY FREE homebase bridgebrowser to watch the replay of the hands from any table forever, and see your results compared to all the others. An if really want to, you can click the netbridgevu icon and launch the BBO gaming software and replay the hand as it was played on the BBO ----- or ----- replay it double dummy playing the cards in any order you want (and back up and replay a different card).. complete with the GIB analysis hints and double dummy turned on should you want. ---> For this last features, of course, you must have Fred's netbridgevu software loaded on your computer.

[JoAnneM]

What kind of games are you going to? Our club games are deal and play. Non-profit, playing director, who is going to do all this writing up of the hands, anyway. I think you may be spoiled.

[mike777]

mrdct, on Oct 25 2006, 03:11 AM, said:

Must be a funny old place ACBL-Land. I can't imagine any bridge club in Australia staying in business if they didn't provide hand records with Deep Finesse analysis.

The more successful bridge clubs provide comprehensive website results services including downloadable hand-records in several formats and individual recap sheets to see how you went on each board.

Have a look at http://www.ksandqs.com/results.php for an example.

what?....lucky to play let alone hand records

[the hog]

JoAnneM, on Nov 8 2006, 12:43 PM, said:

What kind of games are you going to? Our club games are deal and play. Non-profit, playing director, who is going to do all this writing up of the hands, anyway. I think you may be spoiled.

You don't need to write it up. If you have a dealing machine you can get te hand records printed out. Dave is right - even a Sunday afternoon Momma Pappa duplicate in Oz has hand records.