[pescetom]

blackshoe, on 2024-February-16, 11:31, said:

What do you mean by "computer based scoring"?

I mean that the scoring is done by a computer (rather than some poor TD with a piece of paper and at most a slide rule or log table) and that no effort would be involved in applying a "whatever we averaged on the other boards" score for one pair when that would be fairer.

[blackshoe]

Are you referring to artificial adjusted scores? That's built in to ACBLScore, and I would have thought it would be in any widely used scoring program.

[pescetom]

No,I'm referring to the average score on all boards played, which it would be reasonable to assign to one or both sides in several situations if the laws were updated to allow this.

[blackshoe]

Hm. Not sure I agree that the laws should be changed here.

[pescetom]

blackshoe, on 2024-February-20, 10:56, said:

Hm. Not sure I agree that the laws should be changed here.

You think that for a pair without fault and no possible bridge result on this board, 60% is a fairer reward than the percentage they were actually scoring in the rest of the tournament, be they struggling to avoid last place or fighting for victory?

[blackshoe]

Are you not aware that if they're having, for example, a 72% game, and they are awarded Average plus on a board, they get 72% of the matchpoints on that board, not 60%? Yes, if they were having a less than 60% game they get a bit of a bonus here, but if they were not at fault, perhaps they're due a bit of a bonus, since the irregularity prevented them from playing the board.

[jillybean]

blackshoe, on 2024-February-20, 20:55, said:

Are you not aware that if they're having, for example, a 72% game, and they are awarded Average plus on a board, they get 72% of the matchpoints on that board, not 60%? Yes, if they were having a less than 60% game they get a bit of a bonus here, but if they were not at fault, perhaps they're due a bit of a bonus, since the irregularity prevented them from playing the board.

IMO, A+ is not applied often enough, the Director is more likely to give AVG to both pairs. Damned if you do, damned if you don't (call the TD)
I often hear "it was a simple mistake". on the part of the OS, and the NOS does not "deserve" A+ I believe that this rewards infractions while demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of the Laws. If the misuse of A= was addressed players may pay more careful attention to their actions at the table.

[pescetom]

blackshoe, on 2024-February-20, 20:55, said:

Are you not aware that if they're having, for example, a 72% game, and they are awarded Average plus on a board, they get 72% of the matchpoints on that board, not 60%? Yes, if they were having a less than 60% game they get a bit of a bonus here, but if they were not at fault, perhaps they're due a bit of a bonus, since the irregularity prevented them from playing the board.

Yes you're right that the pair fighting for first place will get their 72% rather than 60%, sorry.
But 60% to the struggling 43% pair seems unmerited. Yes the irregularity (or some other fact beyond their control) prevented them from playing the board, but in all likelihood they would have taken a hiding from the 72% pair.
So not only is 43%/72% fairer than 60%/72%, but something like 24%/76% (using some algorithm to combine their percentages to predict the likely outcome, such that they get their respective percentage only when the other is 50%) would be even fairer.

[blackshoe]

jillybean, on 2024-February-20, 21:09, said:

IMO, A+ is not applied often enough, the Director is more likely to give AVG to both pairs. Damned if you do, damned if you don't (call the TD)
I often hear "it was a simple mistake". on the part of the OS, and the NOS does not "deserve" A+ I believe that this rewards infractions while demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of the Laws. If the misuse of A= was addressed players may pay more careful attention to their actions at the table.

Do you have actual data on how often the director awards A+ vs. A?

A director who falls for that nonsense should tear up his director card.

pescetom, on 2024-February-21, 09:53, said:

Yes you're right that the pair fighting for first place will get their 72% rather than 60%, sorry.
But 60% to the struggling 43% pair seems unmerited. Yes the irregularity (or some other fact beyond their control) prevented them from playing the board, but in all likelihood they would have taken a hiding from the 72% pair.
So not only is 43%/72% fairer than 60%/72%, but something like 24%/76% (using some algorithm to combine their percentages to predict the likely outcome, such that they get their respective percentage only when the other is 50%) would be even fairer.

If a pair is struggling to achieve a 43% game, one A+ is not going to move them up very far in the standings. As to your last sentence, you're going to have to explain what you're talking about. How did two pairs who might have got A+ on a board (playing against different opponents) suddenly become two pairs playing against each other?

[pescetom]

blackshoe, on 2024-February-21, 15:57, said:

If a pair is struggling to achieve a 43% game, one A+ is not going to move them up very far in the standings.

Agreed, but that is no reason not to use the computer to do better.

blackshoe, on 2024-February-21, 15:57, said:

As to your last sentence, you're going to have to explain what you're talking about. How did two pairs who might have got A+ on a board (playing against different opponents) suddenly become two pairs playing against each other?

I also have to ask what are talking about: I may well have misunderstood, please give an example.
In a "not played" situation where neither side has fault I suspect my suggestion has merit.

[jillybean]

blackshoe, on 2024-February-21, 15:57, said:

Do you have actual data on how often the director awards A+ vs. A?

A director who falls for that nonsense should tear up his director card.

No, I have no data at all. My comment is only based on memory , instructions I have received from other Directors, Club/Game managers and gut feeling.

A specific comment I recall. XX are consistently slow. "We don't want pairs expecting a top board when they play against XX"

[blackshoe]

pescetom, on 2024-February-21, 16:16, said:

I also have to ask what are talking about: I may well have misunderstood, please give an example.
In a "not played" situation where neither side has fault I suspect my suggestion has merit.

As I understand it, we're talking about a situation where a table cannot play a board they're scheduled to play, through no fault of either party. The current law would give both pairs average plus on the board. You want to treat the board as not having been scheduled for them to play, thus reducing the number of boards they are scheduled to play by one. I do not see why the latter is more fair than the former.

[mycroft]

This week has been interesting at the club.

On Monday, a pair that I guess averages 43% in the open game, and I wouldn't bet on >50 in the NLM game - won. In a 6 table Howell, granted, but a pretty strong field. From discussing a number of the hands after, it looks like there were a lot of cases (say 5 or 6?) where bidding the normal contract fails, and not being capable of getting to game with 24-and-a-stiff worked well. Guess what happened?

On Tuesday, that same pair, in a (relatively weak) 10.5 table "Mitchell", came first in C by a landslide, and fourth their direction, with 51%. OTOH, I played (that direction) that day, and had two 0-point hands, and didn't get anything over 11 until round 6 (Okay, so a 21 and a 17 and 15 later, but still). We were defending "all day" (we compete a lot, but still declared 9/27 hands). When that happens, you're at the mercy of the opponents (good defence will get you up there, but you can't win - even win C - without help).

All I'm saying is that yes, the 43% pair should *expect* to give up 70-ish on the round, but there is a chance - a not 30% chance, maybe not a 43% chance, but a chance - that this is one of the "expert trap" hands where they are going to get 80+%. Is not 60% suitable recompense for that chance? Is it really going to be a problem - even if it pushes their good game up to 49 instead of 48 (which, sure, likely would have been 46 if they had played, but could have been 50.xx!) and they win C as a result?

[McBruce]

There is in fact a simple formula to determine what Pair A is expected to get against Pair B, having missed a board for some reason, based on their percentage score on boards actually played, presumably against a fairly balanced field:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log5

Simplified, the score for Pair A against Pair B is ( A x ( 1 - B ) ) / ( ( A x ( 1 - B ) ) + ( B x ( 1 - A ) ) ), A and B being decimal percentages in the range 0 - 1.

So if Mr and Mrs Garbonzo play against Mr and Mrs Haricot and fail to finish the round on time because of a discussion about beans, and the TD determines that both are partly at fault (maybe the men were arguing beanery while the ladies were urging them to fop starting around and continue playing), a fair adjustment would be to use the Log5 formula and compare their final scores on boards played and give an expected result on the board that way. A 60% pair against a 35% pair gets 77.8% by the Log5 formula. The Laws don't allow us to do this, probably because the lawmakers are smart enough to realize that the pairs that use that extra time to get 60% aren't going to be penalized much by the formula and will quickly realize that Log5 is their friend, so there is a compound winkle squeeze out there on every deal and I am taking the time to find it.

In reality, the difference between 40%-50%-60% on a board is usually only a couple of matchpoints, which may be the difference between a place or three, but far more often is not, and arguing that it was the mean director who caused you to be listed a few lines further down in the final rankings, when there were surely countless ways to recover the few matchpoints lost over the course of a session (among them, playing a little faster), is kind of like the time I lost an 32-board IMP League match by 2 IMPs, went to congratulate the other team, and when I returned found that my teammates (who possessed between them vast numbers of university degrees in various applied sciences) were specifically discussing the six boards where there was a two IMP swing the other way, carefully ignoring the handful of deals where 10 or 12 IMPs were on offer had we avoided quite obvious pitfalls....

Plus, a decade or more into the BridgeMates in clubs era, players are finally starting to realize that the arguments that worked in 1977 absolving them of slow play are no longer working when the Director can see on the Round Monitor screen that the Usual Suspects are doing what they usually do. We know who's behind, whether it's N-S or E-W, well before the half-way mark, and we get the pair numbers of the slowest first and match them up with player names later. And usually nod knowingly. It's no use telling us you're blameless by the time we actually decide it's time to say something about it, before the BridgeMate Round Monitor screen becomes an African flag (green: finished the round, red: more than two boards to enter, yellow: on last board).

[McBruce]

mycroft, on 2024-January-31, 09:33, said:

Hurry Up And Think, as mcBruce says.

https://www.blakjak.org/splay.htm

Written in about 1997 for the local newsletter, reduced to 8.5pt to fit the space and few read it; but, just last week I got another request to reprint it from a nice chap in Berwick-upon-Tweed. Thanks to David's posting it on his site, I have gotten requests to reprint this in many different places in the years since I wrote it. The current stock reply is a Stephen Leacock quote: my little article has been to "every quarter of the globe, and at times into every eighth or sixteenth of it."

[jillybean]

Thanks, I wouldn't have expected any less from Verbose McBruce. 😉

[mycroft]

McBruce, on 2024-March-12, 17:42, said:

https://www.blakjak.org/splay.htm

Written in about 1997 for the local newsletter, reduced to 8.5pt to fit the space and few read it; but, just last week I got another request to reprint it from a nice chap in Berwick-upon-Tweed. Thanks to David's posting it on his site, I have gotten requests to reprint this in many different places in the years since I wrote it. The current stock reply is a Stephen Leacock quote: my little article has been to "every quarter of the globe, and at times into every eighth or sixteenth of it."

Heh. The fourth hit, to this day, for me for "acbl new alert procedures" is a little thing I wrote for our unit(s)...

But, apart from a little cleanup (travellers being a thing of the past, thankfully very few smokers - most of them old hands that actually play quickly), it's still one of the best articles on the subject.

[jillybean]

I've been accused of many things but slow play is not one of them.

Micheal, for those of us who can't stomach reading the alert charts, your explanation is very useful. 🙏🏼

[pescetom]

mycroft, on 2024-March-13, 11:36, said:

Heh. The fourth hit, to this day, for me for "acbl new alert procedures" is a little thing I wrote for our unit(s)...

Thanks for this too.
I am impressed with the courage of ACBL in at least partially revising some previous mistakes, also the clarity on issues like transfers, semi-forcing and could have 4M (I tried to obtain the same from FIGB without success).

[mycroft]

For those who are still using that version of my guide, a few changes (and "changes"):

• They got rid of the weird double/redouble exception to transfers. Now, any call (except pass) that shows a specific suit is Announced (with the name of the suit shown).
  
• One thing I would have added to the "common auctions where Alerting has changed" section: There was an exception to "minors need to show 3, or Alert" for specifically the auction 1♥-1NT; 2♣, if the only exception was "4=5=2=2, we don't play Flannery". That exception was taken out, deliberately. I *still* catch myself late-Alerting that one, because it's so "obvious". Of course, I bet the Flannery players still catch themselves on 1♥-1NT "Forcing, may have 4 spades" for the same reason.
  
• One in the "uncommon auctions..." section that was pointed out to me by the Texas Directors: a passed-hand 1NT, if it's Sandwich or minors, is not a "do not Alert". Nobody used to Alert these...
  
• And of course, I think the charts themselves have suffered link rot.