[kenberg]

I begin with apologies to all who work on the FD card. But am I the only one who finds it a great source of frustration to play against?

Here is what came up today, playing in the online acble game.

LHO opens 1S. FD pops up, drawing my attention from the hand, telling me the bid shows spades. Yes I should reas the rest of it, but its a timed event. Partner passes and rho bids 2H. The pop-up tells me thhis shows hearts, 10+ points, and is non-forcing. Huh? Well, I have a pass so I pass. LHO bids 3H and RHO bids 4, passed out and now I have to lead. As is so common in playing against FD, I have no idea what the opponents are doing. I ask if they are playing a forcing club system "Yes, as announced earlier" Well, excuse me. I ask if 2H was really non-forcing (yes, it's a little rude to ask but I am trying to reconcile "non-forcing" with "10+ points". I am told to read the pop-ups for a full explanation of their bids. Well, nuts. I have to finish this hand w/o a slow play penalty so I do. No big deal in the score but aggravation, delay, and a feeling I am being had.

Perhaps my biggest objection is that the interesting information (playing precision, for example) is buried with information such as that the opening spade bid shows spades. If we had world enough and time, we could read all this stuff and maybe, with good natured assistance from the opponents, figure out what they are doing. As it stands, I dread the FD pop-up.

Truly no offense intended, but I find "FullDisclosure" to in reality be anything but full disclosure.

I could rant further, but there is a tournament starting.

[DJNeill]

I agree that FD is a good stab but is not as satisfactory to the opponents as would a lee edwards type of WBF convention card (a la OKB's ACBL CC). I am one of the few who really fill it out to an insane degree but I use it more to practice and record intricate systems.

Can BBO consider development of the "old style convention card" into the above-mentioned wysiwyg graphical one? Opponents as it is can't be trusted to click the extra [...] buttons anyways.

Dan

[keylime]

I'd like it if F/D would not only say, "such and such have loaded a card" but also included the system description in that auto-syntax.

[kenberg]

Perhaps an "auto-alert" could be added. As it stands, trivial agreements (opening 1S shows spades) have the same status as alertable agreements (forcing NT) or even bizarre (or at least agreements likely to be unfamiliar to most players) agreements (opening 1D shows spades). In the case of alertable agreements, and especially bizarre agreements, there could be a click to get more information. The purpose of disclosure is disclosure. FD satisfies the letter (perhaps) but evades the spirit.

[1eyedjack]

I don't "do" the FD thing myself, but I would be interested to know if you can get access to the explanations of all historical bids in the auction, ie after they have been superseded by later bids. The wording of the OP suggests not, which seems odd and, if so, could do with amendment.

[kenberg]

Yes, 1eye you can. If you click on a previous bid the explanation comes up.

[zasanya]

I have taken some pains to fill up 3 different FD cards .I find it very helpful and so far all my opponents have found them satisfactory.I must add that I very rarely play timed tourneys .Most of the time I play team matches set up by myself.
Our alertable calls are always alerted and I believe one is obliged to do so even when using FD; so in a tourney if a call is not alerted TD should be informed.

[paulg]

I think this rant is poorly targeted.

Most people who have completed FD cards have spent an enormous amount of time trying to provide full disclosure of their methods. Far more time than others will have spent completing a convention card of what their opening bids mean, which is all a traditional CC tells you.

Occasionally an FD pair may have forgotten to fill in the system summary, but otherwise it is easier to see this than try to decypher the old CC for the system.

"Dread the FD pop-up" - it is something I welcome as I know that the pair is trying to disclose their methods. Far better than someone who only says they are playing SA, SAYC, 2/1.

In terms of FD improvements, it would be nice if there was an automatic alert for calls marked as artificial, so at the moment I do this manually.

Paul

[Gerben42]

I love the FD thing. Playing Precision it should have said: 11 - 15, 5+♠, NOT just "shows ♠" or so.

I try to be detailed in my explanations with FD - that is what its for!

[kenberg]

Cardsharp may be right about "poorly targeted" which I take to mean that I should be objecting not to the FD card itself but rather to the manner in which it is sometimes used. Point taken (or apologies offered if I have missed the point).

FD could indeed be useful. My experience encountering it in timed events against random opponents, as opposed to untimed events playing against friends, has been pretty uniformly negative. They fill out their FD card, or some of it, very briefly and often wrongly (for example I am guessing that the "non-forcing" I mentioned in the original post was intended to say that 1S-2H wasn't game forcing rather than non-forcing, but I was never able to get an answer) and then they adamantly refuse to answer questions. I imagine this was not what the creators of FD intended, but it is what I often encounter.

The "nugget hidden in the trash" problem is real though. There is a flood of information along the lines of "1S shows spades" that distracts attention from the hand and discourage reading the card. Again, especially in timed events. My partner, for example, was unaware that the 2H bid was described as non-forcing.

I am glad to hear the opinion and hope it is actually a rule that alertable bids still require an alert. They are not generally given.

[hrothgar]

As I've commented before, the FD system automates announcements. It doesn't do anything to automate alerts.

Long term, I'd like to see a system in which the FD application is able to do matching operations between pairs of FD cards. The FD application would automatically generate an alert any time the two cards did not match.

Assume for the moment that you were playing SAYC (and had a SAYC card loaded). The opponents were playing 2/1 GF and had a 2/1 Game Force card loaded. Furthermore, you told your FD application to alert any bid that the opponents made that didn't match SAYC.

RHO opens 1♠. The FD application compares the text string describing the 1♠ opening contianed in the 2/1 card to the text string describing the 1♠ opening in the SAYC card. Determines that these are both identical (down to the same spelling error). Therefore FD does not generate an alert. As the auction progresses, you pass and LHO responds 1NT. The FD application notes that the text string for the forcing NT doesn't match that for SAYC's non-forcing NT. Therefore, the FD application automatically generates an alert.

This example describes an alert system in which you want to be informed anytime the opponent's make a bid that has a different meaning than your convention card. In theory, this type of matching operation could be customized to a wide variety of different alert regimes. For example, the ACBL alert structure is designed such that players alert any bids that don't conform to some standard system. If you wanted to use the ACBL's alert system, you'd instruct the FD system to compare the opponent's FD card to a card that BBO wrote documeting the default system and use this for the comparison. If you preferred an English style alert system in which all artifical bids are alertable, you'd instruct the FD application to alert everything artificial.

This type of system isn't perfect. As I tried to suggest, this system requires that everyone uses precisely the same nomenclature to describe the same bids. If I wrote "Forcing NT" and someone else wrote "Forcing Notrump" the system would consider these descritions to be separate and distinct even though they mean the same thing. However, this should be relatively easy to code. Furthermore, over time I'd hope that standard bids would start to be represented by a standard vocabularly.

[kenberg]

I would find an alert system based on "ccs differ" to be disorienting but maybe I could cope. I am not yet ossified. But that's tomorrow. Meanwhile, today, ....

DJNeill's suggestion that there be a cc such as the Lee Edwards card is very attractive. The current "old" cc for bbo is very brief. There often isn't room to finish a description, even using abbreviations. I fully agree that this is unsatisfactory.

Most of us play, most of the time, against opponents who are playing a system that we mostly understand. We don't need any pop-ups for 1S-3S-4S. We need to be informed if 1S-2H is non-forcing though, so if the bidding goes 1S-2H-3H-4H we can judge whether the 2H bidder can have 16 points or is pretty much limited to around 12. We need to know if jump shifts are strong or weak. And so on. The FD card seems to me to be a case of the desire for perfection driving out the good. If it worked as envisioned it perhaps would be wonderful. But it words as it does, and I would far prefer an ordinary cc.

[hrothgar]

kenberg, on Nov 25 2006, 05:19 PM, said:

I would find an alert system based on "ccs differ" to be disorienting but maybe I could cope.

Don't get hung up on the implementation... You don't need to understand how a fuel injection system works to drive a car. You don't need to be able to build a Cathode Ray Tude to watch television.

From an end user's perspective all you really need to worry about is what type of alert regime you prefer:

1. A British type system in which all artificial bids are alerted.

2. An American type system in which the sponsoring organization defines the "standard" meaning for individual bidding sequences. Anything that departs from that standard is alerted

3. A personalized system in which the application alerts anything that you yourself aren't playing.

From the sounds of things, you're most comfortable with the second type system.

[kenberg]

A somewhat tentative view of what I might like:

FD card, for the moment, as is.

Pop-ups appear only when summoned.

Alerts as done w/o FD.


For example: 1S-3D
1S is not alerted since it is a normal 1S bid. No pop-up appears.

3D, let us suppose, is alertable. Maybe it's Bergen, maybe it's six diamonds and invitational strength, whatever. So an alert box would appear. The opponents could click on the alert and get the pre-packaged explanation. If the explanation was not clear to them, they could inquire further, within reason.

Opponents could still click on the other bids (the unalerted ones) if they wanted to.

I think this would cure some of my complaints.

One of them was that I get distracted/annoyed by a pop-up that informs me that 1S shows spades. Further, it lulls me into not reading pop-ups since so often they tell me nothing that I didn't know already.

Another complaint is that FD users don't alert since their FD card already pops up. Now it has been said above that they should do so, but I don't think they are aware of this (often) and this arrangement would make it clear.

Also, by focusing on the alertable bids it would encourage better explanation of those bids. The explanations that appear are often much clearer to the practitioners than they are to the rest of us.

As to exactly what is alerted (European versus American style, if that is a correct dichotomy) I'm easy. Just so I know.

[A2003]

deleted.

[kenberg]

Thanks for the response. The episode you describe triggered my post, but I wanted to address what I see as a generic problem. Your post however can be a good source for me to explain in more detail and I hope that's ok.

After 1S-2H the FD card indeed says non-forcing so it is filled out correctly given that you play it as non-forcing. But it also says 10+ points. So I am left wondering if your partner can make a non-forcing bid of 2H holding, say, 16 hcps. It's what the card says, but it would seem surprising to me. It seems you would often end in 2H with a combined 27 count that way. So, before leading, I asked.

I understand completely about it taking time to type out an answer to an unexpected question, especially one where the question is, basically, "Does the card mean what it says?". But time was running and it wasn't personal impatience but a realistic view of the clock that prompted me to just forget it and lead.

Now about alerts. There is something to be said for alerting 1S since it is more or less limited to 15 hcps, but that is not so critical. But 1S-2H non-forcing seems to me to require an alert. I know the pop-up says it is non-forcing, but the problem with this is that FD floods us with trivia such as 1S shows spades, along with important issues such as 2H is non-forcing. The alert system draws our attention to bids that have unexpected meanings and stays silent about bids that are as expected. FD makes no such distinction and I think we, the opponents, suffer for it. Some responders to my post say that there must still be an alert but none was given here, and I have found this to be a common practice with FD users. Among other purposes, if I got an alert on this then I would probably say "I guess they really mean 2H is non-forcing". As it was I thought it a typo, something that we all do at times.

I thank you again for responding and for responding gently.

I'm still curious as to what your partner does holding 16 points and five hearts.

Best wishes,
Ken