[pescetom]

paulg, on 2020-May-02, 01:42, said:

I'd be happy enough if everyone adopted the USBF system summary form, which is a form of pre-alert that tells me the key things I should be concerned with. I provide a completely full WBF system card with six pages of supplementary notes, but it is a bit intimidating and it seems that the directors prefer it rather than the opponents.

As a fellow director I prefer the WBF system card, but I take your point

What if any is the EBU policy about which BBO client to use (PC/Flash, PC/V3, Android/V3), and are there any system-card issues arising from non-conformance?

[Vampyr]

pescetom, on 2020-May-02, 13:31, said:

You either have a different reality from ours or a different perception of it. Whereas in regular f2f club play about 70% of partnerships were more or less stable, online that has dropped well below 50% for us. Add in a few substitutes and that means 45% at most are playing with a regular partner and several are in pure guesswork mode.
Also the BBO "default" cards would be almost useless to our players - I guess the modern ACOL one might be useful in EBU.

Almost all of the players in the EBU tournaments are in stable partnerships, and I expect that the same will be true when our bridge club gets up and running — well there may be pickup partnerships but it will at least be people you know.

There can only be one pair of substitutes, right? To fill in a 1/2 table?

[pilowsky]

On the topic of Partnerships - and 'stability' a word that we are all a bit wary of these days,
This is probably the best (as defined by most fun) paper (1) that we ever discussed at a Journal club. One of my graduate students, who was famous for throwing 'grenades' into the lunchtime conversation, brought it along. I think that it has wide applicability to the question of partnerships in bridge.

The paper discusses the behaviour of two types of rodent. The prairie vole and the meadow vole. The technical aspects of the paper are fascinating, but one interesting take-home message is that "The prairie vole (Microtus ochrogaster) is a socially monogamous, biparental rodent species in which both males and females may participate in philopatric cooperative breeding in the parental nest ". "In contrast, closely related meadow voles (M. pennsylvanicus) are promiscuous breeders with no formal social structure that show comparatively abbreviated, uniparental care of pups".

I have often thought that partnerships in society come in many shapes and sizes. Bridge partnerships seem to be no different. There are monogamists, 'promiscuists' (to coin a word - meaning people that play with many partners) and even serial monogamists! I'm sure that you can think of many other types.

1) Burkett JP Andari E Johnson ZV Curry DC de Waal FBM Young LJ (2016) Science Oxytocin-dependent consolation behavior in rodents 351:6271; 375-378



DOI: 10.1126/science.aac4785