[joemanjo]

Folks:

Last year, around Christmas time, there was a post from Uday Ivatury asking for suggestions and feedback on how to make Bridge more popular (perhaps thru the medium of BBO?). I can neither recall nor find the original post to see what was in it, but I have what I wrote in response to it; it is reproduced below.

I am sure that Uday would have received many suggestions from the user community, so he could not reply to each one who gave suggestions. I wd like to know, has there been any follow up on the suggestions given by all of us to Uday? Were there posts after that collating the suggestions received with comments by Uday? I am not a BBO Forum user or follower, so would appreciate if anyone can point me to or brief me about what they saw as discussion and developments which followed. I had offered to help in anyway I can. I certainly hope these suggestions are collated and made available to everyone and any action taken on the same by BBO management be, as far as possible, made visible to the Bridge community at large.

Best wishes to everyone for a enjoyable holiday season ahead, have a wonderful Christmas and a great new year 2016.

My original post/response (edits in parenthesis) to Uday: "I will focus on your questions from a software writers point of view, both of us are in that field while being Bridge players. The Learn to Play Bridge (LTPB) software produced by ACBL written by Fred (and you?) has enough potential to bring forth new Bridge players. The main issue I found in teaching is this.
1. The software is not available in a mobile phone platform (MOBILE SUBSCRIBERS outnumber Internet users two to one) - a cell phone has much more chance of bringing up a new bridge player than an internet download of a windows only program.
2. Bidding followup - while we have enough and more play teaching software (like Bridge Master for beginners by Audrey Grant, Sands Janitschke etc), there is hardly any software that gives enough "problems" for people to exercise with the Basic Bridge system taught in LTPB. People have no way of knowing what is right and wrong without a teacher at hand.
3. BBO Bots do not play (the simple) Basic Modern Standard taught by the LTPB software. So how does one practice, question asked by my students after the preliminary Bridge course?"
If we address these few issues, then this is a much more user friendly, freely available, self paced (and comprehensive) learning platform.

Manoj.

[Lovera]

Hi joemanjo. Do you remember in what section you have wrote about ?(Lovera)

[Bbradley62]

Since basic searches should be able to find this if the above is the actually-posted reply, and it's nowhere to be found, I wonder whether Uday's post was in the "BBO Today" section of the main BBO site, not in the forums.

[Lovera]

It is possible to find it. To semplify i have asked for, but i can tell already now .

[Bbradley62]

Found this link on Facebook:
http://webutil.bridg...tch.php?id=2437

See post #96 on 12/27/14

[captyogi]

@ Joemanjo,

This year Fred Gitelman has uploaded one superbly worded article on the Major Issue that rocked Bridge World in 2015.

Which is truly EyeOpener for entire Bridge Fratenity, NBOs included.
You should have uploaded that on discussion group you are moderator.
I have sent it to you twice. You have not uploaded.

I don't know for such a sensitive and important issue of tackling / curbing Cheating, you are afraid to upload.

Brgds

Yogesh

joemanjo, on 2015-December-20, 06:01, said:

Folks:

Last year, around Christmas time, there was a post from Uday Ivatury asking for suggestions and feedback on how to make Bridge more popular (perhaps thru the medium of BBO?). I can neither recall nor find the original post to see what was in it, but I have what I wrote in response to it; it is reproduced below.

I am sure that Uday would have received many suggestions from the user community, so he could not reply to each one who gave suggestions. I wd like to know, has there been any follow up on the suggestions given by all of us to Uday? Were there posts after that collating the suggestions received with comments by Uday? I am not a BBO Forum user or follower, so would appreciate if anyone can point me to or brief me about what they saw as discussion and developments which followed. I had offered to help in anyway I can. I certainly hope these suggestions are collated and made available to everyone and any action taken on the same by BBO management be, as far as possible, made visible to the Bridge community at large.

Best wishes to everyone for a enjoyable holiday season ahead, have a wonderful Christmas and a great new year 2016.

My original post/response (edits in parenthesis) to Uday: "I will focus on your questions from a software writers point of view, both of us are in that field while being Bridge players. The Learn to Play Bridge (LTPB) software produced by ACBL written by Fred (and you?) has enough potential to bring forth new Bridge players. The main issue I found in teaching is this.
1. The software is not available in a mobile phone platform (MOBILE SUBSCRIBERS outnumber Internet users two to one) - a cell phone has much more chance of bringing up a new bridge player than an internet download of a windows only program.
2. Bidding followup - while we have enough and more play teaching software (like Bridge Master for beginners by Audrey Grant, Sands Janitschke etc), there is hardly any software that gives enough "problems" for people to exercise with the Basic Bridge system taught in LTPB. People have no way of knowing what is right and wrong without a teacher at hand.
3. BBO Bots do not play (the simple) Basic Modern Standard taught by the LTPB software. So how does one practice, question asked by my students after the preliminary Bridge course?"
If we address these few issues, then this is a much more user friendly, freely available, self paced (and comprehensive) learning platform.

Manoj.