[bucmar]

I heard many claims about the status of BBO players. Some people don't like playing with beginners, some pretend to be "expert" and play like a beginner, etc etc.

My proposal on this subject is to replace the system of self-rating with a number of BBO-points, that players can get by playing in tournaments. So, no more personal judgment about being advanced or intermediate, but 100, 500, 1000, or more points, that is an objective criteria.
It could be nice to create something like the ATP tennis ranking
Perhaps only the stars should maintain their rating.
Many thanks for the attention

[mink]

Any permanent rating would create an inducement to cheat for a small number of inividuals who need a good rating for their self-confidence or some other weird reason. Therefore a rating system should not be implemented. Session results as available from myhands and tourney results are no problem because they are forgotten next day.

Karl

[bucmar]

i don't see a good reason for cheating to get a good rating. There is no money or no prizes for anybody, and no official points for bridge federations.
I would prefer something helping the majority of players, rather than take care of few weird people.

[Codo]

just look at the play and hostility which SOMETIMES happen at ok-bridge, where there is a rating.
And hear peple complain about their personal rating, because they are always much better then their own rating.
And read the articles about the ratings, which you get from these tournements. Not really a reason to choose the tournements as an indicator for bridge skills.

Kind Regards

Roland

[luis]

Ratings are evil.
Imagine a professional player, after playing with clients he will have a very bad ranking and nobody will want to play with him or will suspect from him.... And don't suggest unranked tables, if there's a ranking everybody will want to play for the points.
Imagine a good player that usually plays with some beginner friends, if his local archi-rival is ahead of him in the rating he might just refrain from playing with his beginner friends.
Ratings are also discriminatory, tables wanting players with more than X are not fair, young good players without many points shouldn't be deprived from the nice pleasure to pd a world class player.
If you have a rating a player having a bad session with his pd may boot him or close the table, happens all the time in okb and it's a stupid behaviour, many times you are just booting the chance to have a friend or a good pd that has just started with his left foot.
I played for a year in okb closed the account because I wasn't able to pay for it I had a very good ranking something like 57-62 or so in a moment I was better than Soloway and worst than a horrible player that can't count to 5..... nonsense.....
The BBO system is ok, is based in trusting people which is good, if you find a player that you think is better or worst than his level just add a comment to him and you won't have the same problem twice.

[andych]

The OKB ratings does cause hostility because one's rating could be dropped. Establised pairs do have advantages than single players.
Could rating be made as real life situation that it will only raise.
Causal playing in Main Bridge Club shd not count, but only say top 5% in tourney could get some points.

To make it more funny than some sorts of figures in profile, maybe some symbols other than 'stars' could be employed?

[dogsbreath]

Agree with Mink,Luis and others ...pls NO ranking system,, esp not one based on 8,9 or 12-board MP tourneys! What value do points scored in a short free-for-all MP tourney have -v- playing IMPs pairs, which most play here, or team matches which are becoming more popular. Excellent tho the tourney software is, I have already heard rumours of 'cheating' ..so lets just treat tourneys as a fun extra on BBO.
Regards, Dogsbreath.

[keylime]

Rating systems are so insecure and prone to wild swings that I can't support them. I've played bridge on three different services that used a rating scheme (ACBL.com, SWAN, and OKB) and in all three cases my rating would fluctuate, especially depending on the quality of competition played against. There's really no true method to accurately predict someone's true skill level or playing ability.

Furthermore, let's not forget that there are those that would use any resource at their leisure to gain an unfair edge. Cheating is a serious problem in online bridge. Services may claim that they are monitoring traffic, but in all seriousness I have rarely seen any corrective action when there is a likely probability cheating has occurred. Until the codewriters write a mechanism into the GUI that would automatically prevent instant messaging clients from functioning during tourney play, you're going to have some that cheat. Great example of this was an IMP tourney I hosted recently...had a pair that was very much intermediate in system and ability score nearly 37 imps over 8 boards to win the event. I looked twice at their movie and EVERY single play that was needed was made. They were TOO perfect, a big warning sign that cheating occurred.

[stev_hav]

Last sentence, of first paragraph of prior (8/15/03 1708) post, reads:

"There's really no true method to accurately predict someone's true skill level or playing ability."

I fully agree that, as long as four human players are involved, there's no clearly-valid way to determine a given player's skill level.

In the fairly-recent past, competence of bridge-playing programs has improved, to at least the "weak intermediate" level. Able to bid reasonably well, at least while both sides are restricted to playing SAYC. NEVER guilty of clear-cut failure to count to 13.

Events in which all of the human players were South, partnered and opposed by the same program, might be of considerable interest.

[hrothgar]

Last sentence, of first paragraph of prior (8/15/03 1708) post, reads:

"There's really no true method to accurately predict someone's true skill level or playing ability."

I fully agree that, as long as four human players are involved, there's no clearly-valid way to determine a given player's skill level.

I'm not sure that I would even go this far. As Stev notes, there are a number of ways to mechanically test the quality of an individual's play/defense. Par Contracts are one obvious example. Fred's Bridge Master program is another. [BTW, if Fred ever wanted to do something really silly, he could create a par contest using a new set of BridgeMaster deals as content]

I persist in believing that it is possible to design an accurate player rating system using nothing more than board results as input. Four or five years ago I actually started playing arround with using Discrete Time Kalman filters for just this purpose.

I am now older and maybe wiser. I still think that the Kalman filter approach can be modified to create accurate results. However, I have come to the conclusion that any rating system that is accurate enough to be worth using is going to be too complex for the average end users to understand. Accordingly, there isn't any real reason to implement such a system.

[tapi2]

Hi, everone has a idea rate me or not

So I SUGGEST A MÝNÝ POLL

Actually my suggestion is 1 room that is rated and 1 room that is not rated , and make everybody happy.

[BurnKryten]

Quote

Actually my suggestion is 1 room that is rated and 1 room that is not rated , and make everybody happy.

Um... ratings are evil. I would rather have the relaxed, friendly atmosphere that makes BBO stand out from the rest of the sites.

IMO, where there are ratings, people are less likely to partner with poor players, more likely to be rude, more likely to show anger at mistakes, more likely to cheat, etc.

Please, no ratings ever.

[keylime]

In retrospect, wouldn't a rating system be the direct contrapositive of what BBO represents? Think about it, a membership that is open, accessible, diverse, and skilled having to now cope with an arbitrary measure of acumen? I can only predict gloom and bitterness.

[inquiry]

What makes BBO different, if you haven't noticed, is that it really is setup to serve as an educational tool....

The lecture room
Teaching tables
Partnership bidding tables
Chat rooms
private clubs (often used for lessons)
double dummy problems
direct links to BBO's excellent educational software

The environment coddles beginners and novices, and that carries over here in the BridgeBase Forums.

Are ratings evil? Not in and of themselves. Think about it, as an educational site, wouldn't it be useful to find players of better skill level to kibitz or ask questions? The "gold star" players worth watching helps with this. What is bad is ego...people who can't stand a bad result, who "NEVER PLAYS WITH BEGINNERS...or intermediates...or whatever". Those people and their boarish behavior will be with us with or without a rating system per se... sit down with them, and make a bid (even an expert bid) that they don't agree with... they will label you a beginner or novice... and act with the same behavior.

Now, having said that. I am not all that wild about changing the "self" rating system. What i am looking forward to is ladder team play, ladder tourments, etc, just for the fun of competiting.

Ben

[rimbus]

a useful and simple rating could be :
a small windows opens when a player leaves,
and other can (must ?) rate :
0 to 3 "oranges" for : nice fellow
0 to 3 "lemons" for : old brat
0 to 3 "stars" for : good player

[DrTodd13]

There are several problems with this approach aside from potential abuse of the system. First, how is a bad player to know how good another player is? Plays that may look incorrect to a bad player may in fact may be a correct expert play. The converse is also true.

Playing ability is one dimension. Niceness is the other dimension. Both ability and niceness have huge potential abuses in such a system. Why shouldn't I be allowed to rate everyone at the table when I leave? If so, then a bad rating in either category can be used to punish people for any offense. Some people get mad when you reject them from a table because their ability isn't up to par. Some people get mad when they find out I'm playing a forcing pass system. Personally, some people have pissed me off so much that I'd be tempted to join then leave their table just to get a chance to give them another bad rating.

Would this apply to tourneys as well where you have no choice who you play? Also...psychology comes in. People less likely to go through the effort of rewarding someone but very likely to give mad ratings when they are unhappy. The more you play the more likely it is someone will get mad at you. Therefore, those who play the most will have the most negative reports. You'd have to divide lemons by number of hands played to get any reasonable measure.

[inquiry]

This is a solution without a real problem to solve.

I mean, what difference does it make if player A, who is a total idiot at bridge rates himself as "world class"? If you only want to play with players of advanced or higher skill, and you catch player A as a partner one day, a few hands will show you the light. You open your little note thingee by right clicking on player "A's" name and make a note that he is a world class chump.... If your partner or opponents minimum or maximum skill level is important to you, you can fairly quickly size up players who meet your requirements and mark them in the comment field, with friends, enemy marking, etc.

In fact the problem really is most serve at EXPERT and private levels. Actually 80% of the beginners, novices and intermediate players correctly identify themselves, or out of self defense so they can find someone to play give themselves no rating. Few advanced, expert or world class players rate themselves as beginners, etc (a few do, presumably to be funny or maybe to make it easier for beginners to ask them to play...those are the true saints). So if a player is marked beginner, novice of intermediate, odds are VERY good that they are.

The advanced group should be fairly small, but there are tons of "advanced players" here. I estimate that it has some experts who down grade their skill level a notch, and lots of intermediates who over rate themselves. IT takes a brave beginner to rate themselves as advanced. If I had to guess, I would think that your odds of getting a truely advanced player who rates themselves as advanced is roughly 60%. That is, slightly more than half the "advanced" labeled people are in fact correctly labelled.

Experts, should be a very small group indeed. But in fact, my last few random surveys of just pointing at name after name in the list show that generally there about the same number of EXPERTS playing at any one time as there are advanced players, and fairly often more EXPERTS. Simply thinking about the math on this indicates that this can't be right. I suspect that the problem here is that a fair number of intermediates and low level advanced players have no idea how good a real EXPERT really is. Perhaps in their little hamlet, village, or retirement community, they almost always win when they play bridge (the "local expert"). And these players of limited skill really, truly think they are experts. I suspect that 1 out of 4 players labelled as expert in the BBO is probably close to or actually really is an expert.

But I agree with a comment from LUIS who said ratings are evil. This is right. Lehmen's rating has ruined OKBridge for many people.

Ben

[Cascade]

Quote

But I agree with a comment from LUIS who said ratings are evil. This is right. Lehmen's rating has ruined OKBridge for many people.

Ben

IMO Lehmen is not a sound rating system (unless they have changed the formula since I last played at OKBridge). That is at least part of the problem.

Ratings are not evil. We have a mini-rating system every time we play a tournament or even hand.

The problem lies not in rating itself but in how some players behave when they are being rated.

Wayne Burrows

[pbleighton]

"The problem lies not in rating itself but in how some players behave when they are being rated."

True, but isn't the effect of ratings on players the most important thing about them in an environment such as BBO? Worldwide or national ratings are one thing, but the ratings of a private organization such as BBO should be implemented ONLY if the net effect on the participants is positive.

There is enough rude and egotistical behavior on BBO (and bridge in general) as it is. Let's not make things worse.

Peter

[hotShot]

Well i see the problem with kind of mathematical based rating.

How about a friend based system, anyone who marks another as friend
one can say if he see's his new friends skill level as modest, appropriate or optimistic.
This rating can be applied via +=- to the displayed skill level.

One can trust his friends, can one ?

hotShot