[snarf21]

First let me apologize if this is not the correct spot to post.
I am new to BBO and to bridge in general.

I write software for a living and was thinking of making a mobile app
to help me learn that might also be helpful to others. I think BBO is
great and have enjoyed playing and watching matches. This is intended
to be a different tool for a different purpose and hopefully free for all,
not as any kind of competing resource.

My idea is to kind of have a "Hand of the day". You would log in and
pick the bidding system (SAYC or 2/1) and bid with computer partners
and opponents. I know you can do that on BBO but here comes the next
part. The system would be able to track all the bids for the same hand
and come up with a consensus as to what is likely the best bid. There
would also be a chat/board feature where you can read and post comments
after you are done bidding to help you discuss and learn about different
options.

The second part would be to do a similar thing with the planning of your
play. After the lead is shown you would click a basic plan of the play without
actually playing through the whole game. The way I envision this is that you
would pick a card from your hand and the dummy and they would get marked
as trick 1. Then pick a card from your (or dummy's) hand to lead or what you
expect the opponent to lead and what you would lay for trick 2. Continuing
until you've created a plan for how you think all 13 tricks would get played.
Again, your decisions would be compared against the group and you would
be able to read and post comments about what how you approach the hand.

(Note: Hands would be randomly generated and ones picked that E/W would
likely pass. You would play the hand as declarer even if N was in the bidding.
I could even change the second section to allow for planning defense and
remove the restriction for E/W passing hands but I think you need some help
from your partner in terms of signaling.)

Something like this already exist? Is this something people would find useful?
Any other suggestions?

-Rosco

[hrothgar]

Hi Rosco

I have oft considered combining such a system with some classification and cluster analysis algorithm.

Watch how various individuals bid / declare a set of hands.
Use the information to divide them into different clusters.
Then, develop classification algorithms that could predict players that might make good partners.

Ultimately, the goal is to determine a small set of sample hands with the greatest discriminating power.

Essentially, you'd be designing E-Harmony for the partnership desk...

One hard part is getting a sufficiently large corpus of hands to draw inference from.
You'll need some way to entice players to participate...

[snarf21]

I appreciate your feedback.

My initial goal wasn't the angle of finding players who are likely to bid and play like me.
That is an interesting extra piece that I'll consider.

My main focus was to help people (esp me hehe) become better bidders and at planning
the play. It would be easy to switch from random hands to one observed on BBO and list
what the "expert" did as a key for what is the right approach. I was mainly looking at it as
a tool where the users would decide what the right bids or plan was by consensus and that
the merits of differing options could be argued in the chat part.