[geoffff]

I am an Intermediate player. I was playing an instant automated tournament, I opened 1 club with 14 points, 6 clubs and a singleton spade. Partner replies 1 NT. I followed with 2 clubs. Opponents had bid 2 hearts, followed by 3 hearts over my club bid. I decided to retire from the auction with a modest response from my partner and a limited hand. At this point my partner decides to bid 3 spades. Oh well, I think, he has 6 of them and we have a chance of sorts. Opponents bid a 4 hearts game (which can be made as it turns out). My partner then bids 4 spades, gets doubled. My mind is saying ‘I hope you have got 7 spades’. It turns out he has 4 spades queen high and 5 clubs. 5 down doubled. I think ‘he must be a so called expert’ Some expert. Note: he ran away during the hand – quelle surprise
Fortunately, 2 hands later my opponent manages to bid 5 hearts over our unachievable 5 diamonds, which we double and he goes well down. I checked – he was another expert!
So I managed to retain a mid-table position.
Would you trust an expert?

[wanoff]

Trust me. I'm a doctor.

[barmar]

 geoffff, on 2016-June-09, 02:08, said:

I was playing an instant automated tournament

Did you misread the forum name Offline Bridge?

I've moved the thread to General BBO Discussion.

[Zelandakh]

Geoff, your partner is not here to defend himself, which is itself somewhat unfair. Let me give you the logic he was following. His 1NT response over your 1♣ opening is essentially suggesting 0-3 in both majors. So your train of thought on his having 6 or 7 spades is simply failing to think. What he meant by his later spade calls was to offer a choice of denominations. I am not going to suggest that that was a good idea playing with an unknown intermediate but it might help you to imagine how such "impossible" calls might be used in the later auction. Basically your partner denied the hand you were playing him for with his initial 1NT response so you are also partially to blame for the resulting disaster.

As for trusting an expert, in truth the majority who self-rate as expert are simply not close to that standard. Rather than going by the self-ratings, I would suggest you look up their hand records for the last month and use that as a guideline. Your partner appears to have a rating something above 50% so my tentative evaluation would be that he is a good intermediate. For comparison, you have a little under 50%. Naturally, this ignores the quality of the opposition, which makes a huge difference. If you are regularly playing against world class opponents then your score is considerably more impressive.

[barmar]

 Zelandakh, on 2016-June-10, 07:10, said:

Basically your partner denied the hand you were playing him for with his initial 1NT response so you are also partially to blame for the resulting disaster

To be fair, he also denied the hand he actually had, since he had 4 spades and showed 2-3 with his 1NT bid. But that's only 1 card difference, not 3 cards as the OP assumed.

[johnu]

 Zelandakh, on 2016-June-10, 07:10, said:

Geoff, your partner is not here to defend himself, which is itself somewhat unfair. Let me give you the logic he was following. His 1NT response over your 1♣ opening is essentially suggesting 0-3 in both majors. So your train of thought on his having 6 or 7 spades is simply failing to think. What he meant by his later spade calls was to offer a choice of denominations.

He had 4 spades IIRC, some (really bad??) players respond 1NT with a weak jump shift in the majors type of hand. Opener has shown 6+ clubs and you have 5 clubs yourself. 11+ clubs and you are offering a choice of denominations? Maybe in your world, not in mine. And sitting for the double? I would invite his partner to come to the forum and defend this so called expert bidding.

[lycier]

Please don't worry about such silly things.
It seems likely you are a newcomer, you should know most of bbo players are beginners or intermediates, too many self-rating expert or world class are fake.
Please keep calm, do not expose, because anyone loves vanity, including you and me.

[661_Pete]

I think the best approach to the so-called self-ratings that appear on people's profiles, is to ignore them entirely. That's what I do. In fact I would go further than that, and say, why don't BBO remove this feature altogether? Seeing as it's far too open to misuse, and is therefore of no value.

If there were a system in place, whereby the BBO admins or robots could adjust players' self-ratings in accordance with their average performance here on BBO (or in response to a challenge from another player), well, then that would be a different story. But, as I understand things, that doesn't happen here. Or does it?

As to disputes with partners - well don't we all get those? And don't we all go on thinking "I'm right, my partner's wrong" regardless of the actual situation?

I suppose, in a regrettable spat with partner that I suffered the other day, I do firmly believe "I was in the right" (correct me if you want to). I'm sure I had a case: my partner made a bid that was clearly wrong in Acol, but would have been right in a 5CM system like SAYC. But we were in the Acol Club. He got his bidding mixed up: an error which I would have readily understood and condoned, if partner had given me the chance! However he chose to not only sabotage the subsequent bidding, but to accuse me of mis-bidding the hand, before flouncing. For that conduct, I would welcome it if he were forcibly down-rated from "advanced" to "beginner". But .... ho-hum! In my dreams!

[Zelandakh]

 661_Pete, on 2016-June-13, 02:38, said:

I'm sure I had a case: my partner made a bid that was clearly wrong in Acol, but would have been right in a 5CM system like SAYC. But we were in the Acol Club.

I do plenty of things that various people have suggested is "clearly wrong in Acol" and perhaps it is for them. A simple example is raising partner's major suit opening with 3 card support but there are plenty of more interesting cases. It may well be that you are indeed right about your partner's bidding in this case or you might just not be aware of an aletrnative style. If you are interested in knowing for sure you could of course make a thread on the subject providing you do so in a way that does not lead back to the partner in a negative way (quite possible after giving part of the story here).

Let me give you a tip though. The community within the Acol Club is a comparatively small one. What I do is record the monthly averages in their profiles on the occasions when I happen to look players up - the minimum and maximum scores. That means I have a fairly reasonable record of the standard of all of the regulars and many of the occasional players. You play a lot more often than me so you would have a full database of entries rather quickly if you took the effort to use this approach. If you find the self-ratings frustrating, this is the answer and it is really very easy to do using the tools BBO offers.

[661_Pete]

You are quite right, it was a case of 'raising partner's major with 3-card support' - but I won't be any more specific. As far as I'm concerned, the matter can drop: I was not happy at the time but I've had time to sleep on it....

As far as logging players' averages are concerned, yes that might help, good point. But averages tend to seesaw quite a lot (well, mine has, at any rate! ). It may be down to getting a bad partner for a while, having an 'off' day, or simply the 'luck of the draw'. Even with the evening-out process of duplicate, there is still a luck element: one table takes a finesse the right way, another table takes it the wrong way, etc. etc.

Maybe I'll do that, all the same - though if I go deep 'into the red' - as I do from time to time, I just hope too many people don't look at my average!

Ideally I need a pool of partners whom I can get on well with: those who can both give and take criticism without anyone getting in a huff. The worst thing for a bridge-player to have is a 'short fuse'. Mea culpa. Something I should work on.

[eagles123]

the truth with the acol club on bbo is that the overall standard is so poor that a lot of players overrate themselves.

[661_Pete]

 eagles123, on 2016-June-13, 07:12, said:

the truth with the acol club on bbo is that the overall standard is so poor that a lot of players overrate themselves.

I shall treat that remark with the contempt it deserves...

In fact I can do better than that. How does "eagles123" rate their bidding in this recent hand (against robots)?

[barmar]

 661_Pete, on 2016-June-13, 10:03, said:

I shall treat that remark with the contempt it deserves...

In fact I can do better than that. How does "eagles123" rate their bidding in this recent hand (against robots)?

It's very common to bid strangely against robots. Upgrading hands to 1NT is a common strategy, and it works extremely well.

[eagles123]

lol dude it wasn't meant personally, I was just warning you that when you partner up with an expert in the acol club most of the time they wont actually be experts and the same for a lot but not all of the advanced

ps as for the hand i've done far more dumb things than that - sometimes against the robots i'm playing really quickly and miscount, but if you were to look you'd see my imp average over the past month over 500 boards (almost exclusively against robots, bbf people and TM's is +0.41 per board)

[robert2734]

In defense of "experts". I find very few people who call themselves experts or advanced are completely clueless the way many people who call themselves beginners or intermediate. A few are actually good at this game although most aren't that either.

The issue came up whether these self-descriptions are useful. I'll try a no alert needed convention like michaels or unusual with a partner that calls himself an expert. I find people self-labelled beginner or intermediate usually don't recognize it.

[barmar]

There's little reason for anyone to under-rate themselves, so if someone labels themselves as a beginner, you can be pretty sure that it's accurate. But lots of people over-rate themselves, because most other players don't want to play with intermediates or worse.

[lycier]

 barmar, on 2016-June-13, 11:27, said:

There's little reason for anyone to under-rate themselves, so if someone labels themselves as a beginner, you can be pretty sure that it's accurate. But lots of people over-rate themselves, because most other players don't want to play with intermediates or worse.

Not necessarilly.
Too many chinese experts who label themselves as a beginner never be weaker than you because we believe that modesty is a virtue in Chinese traditional culture.

[lycier]

Almost players with the profile " created 2005-03-01 5000+logins " are sure to be pretty decent.

[1eyedjack]

 lycier, on 2016-June-13, 14:06, said:

Not necessarilly.
Too many chinese experts who label themselves as a beginner never be weaker than you because we believe that modesty is a virtue in Chinese traditional culture.

There are bound to be exceptions, and this may cause offence, but my perception is that each country has a national trait when it comes to modesty, some ranking more than others. China is not alone in favouring that end of the spectrum. A year or so ago I suggested in these forums that it would be a good idea to enable players to conceal their BBO master point ranking. The response of BBO management was that they lacked the imagination as regards why anyone would want to.

[lycier]

Yes,yes, I agree.
In fact, some bbo star players also label themselves as a beginner / intermediate / advanced.
For example, Dano de falco, he always be a bbo star in our hearts, always be a great expert in the world.




So self-rating ranking is useless.