[whereagles]

To forum admins:

Discussion of what belongs in the "expert forum" is creating a bad atmosphere. I suggest you shut down skill level-based foruns and merge "expert", "int/adv" and "interesting hands" into a single "interesting auction and cardplay issues" forum. (Leave the beginner forum, at least it's more clear what belongs there.)

Maybe the forums are all right and it's the people who are wrong. But humans are what they are. You can't force them to be educated (unless you want to start a banning spree), so we might as well adopt a forum structure that is less likely to lead to flames.

0.02 cents. Delete at will if found unsuitable

[diana_eva]

Yep we have a simpler way to categorize forums, but the project got stuck at some point when we realized we need to shut down the forums for a day or so to be able to make all the changes. No day seemed like a good day

I would personally love a real expert forum, but it's tough to keep it expertish. I don't really know what fits and what doesn't, and so far my impression was the forum kinda self moderates, but judging by the complaints, it's not good enough. Need a few expert gate keepers to report unsuitable topics and then mods will just move them.

[eagles123]

I suggest people stop getting on their high horse about such an irrelevant issue so what if something is out of place in expert forum just don't reply to it/report to mods if you are so offended

[mgoetze]

Putting random "expert-class" topics in the BBO News really doesn't help, by the way.

Anyway, I demand that the "Youth Bridge" and/or "BBO Juniors" forum be closed first.

Also, I would prefer seperate bidding and cardplay forums, not both together.

Finally, please be sure to NOT close the "Interesting Bridge Hands" forum. I am still working on improving my play on mundane, normal bridge hands so a forum full of freak hands that I can ignore is greatly appreciated.

[MrAce]

 whereagles, on 2015-February-03, 04:17, said:

0.02 cents. Delete at will if found unsuitable

Oh trust me, if they start to delete "unsuitable" posts, your 14.000 posts count would drop to 2 digits.

I really don't mind expert forum being shut down or not. But I know one thing for sure, idiocy will be recognized regardless of which forum it was posted. Which means people can remain silent to bs constantly produced by shallow knowledge only for so long. Then you may even ask for the BBF to be shut down.

Just saying.

[whereagles]

 eagles123, on 2015-February-03, 05:00, said:

I suggest people stop getting on their high horse

Not gonna happen. People who do that on a regular basis need it.

[NickRW]

I think there are too many forums as well.

The people getting uppity thing - it has ever been thus - having less won't stop it.

[barmar]

 MrAce, on 2015-February-03, 07:08, said:

Oh trust me, if they start to delete "unsuitable" posts, your 14.000 posts count would drop to 2 digits

Pot, meet Kettle.

[mikeh]

 eagles123, on 2015-February-03, 05:00, said:

I suggest people stop getting on their high horse about such an irrelevant issue so what if something is out of place in expert forum just don't reply to it/report to mods if you are so offended

The expert forum was originally intended, according to the description on the site, to be a place where experts could discuss points of interest to them: presumably points that are somewhat esoteric for the average reader.

That was never going to be followed closely, since we all know that many bridge players think of themselves as better than others would think of them. The BBO self-rating problem is maybe not quite as bad on the forums as it is on the playing site, but it is pretty bad.

In addition, there is in my view no reason why it takes an expert to post a hand that has interest to experts.

However, it also seems to me that some non-experts get 'on their high horse' when they are called out for claiming to be expert when they are demonstrably not.

Nuno's recent spate of posts, and the response thereto (perhaps especially mine), probably underlies his beef here. Nuno means well, and is clearly an intelligent person with a deep interest in the game, but it is equally clear that he is nowhere near as strong, in relative terms, as he thinks he is. He explains that he lives in a part of the world with no other good players, and I know first hand how difficult that makes it, and how easy it becomes to think that since one is the best player in the area, one must be expert. Been there, done that. Then I moved to a place with several real experts, and quickly realized that what I thought of as a deep understanding of the game was mere surface detail. Fortunately, some of these real experts played with me and, more importantly, talked the game with me.

There is nothing wrong with being a non-expert bridge player!!!! Indeed, my own view is that one is more likely to be a well-rounded person if one is NOT an expert bridge player than if one is. Ever see a group of bridge players mingle in a social environment with non-bridge players? Within a few minutes, most of the players are clustered together, giving 'you hold....' problems to each other, ignoring all the other people in the room.

My sister-in-law had to do a Masters Thesis on abnormal psychology, and she chose a small group of bridge experts, friends of my wife, as her subjects, precisely because these bridge experts were so different from most young adults (we are going back a lot of years here).

I think there is a place for the expert forum. I think non-experts should be able to post there, but that non-experts should be very careful of the problems they post, since it is in my view fair game to call out repeat offenders. Look at the hands Nuno posted, from real play, in the last month.

Some of them had some points of interest. My take is that it helps all of us, including experts, to see how experts think about problems...that is why I rarely just state my bid...I explain why I make the choice, and so do others.

We then usually wait for the hand to be shown, and sometimes we see that our ideas were vindicated, or that risks we identified existed, and so on. No one hand proves anything, but over time we can see whose ideas seem to work out well.

However, with Nuno all too often when the actual hand is posted, it is apparent that partner was playing at a novice level. All of the discussion about how one should bid becomes meaningless, because partner made one or more ridiculous calls. This sort of post doesn't interest any expert and simply shouldn't be posted here.

I guess we can report these to the moderators, but why should we? This is the expert forum we are discussing, and we are all adults and sometimes blunt language is the best way to communicate.

Please don't misunderstand me. Non-experts should be actively encouraged by the experts here, and we don't need the mods to designate who the 'real experts' are, or have anyone filter the posts. We just need people to be a tiny bit more aware that being a big fish in a small pond doesn't make one a big fish in the larger lake that is the real bridge world. I am one of the best players in my part of the world, but I am not Fred or Justin and if we had a WC forum, I would be very careful before I put forward a hand of mine for discussion there. Equally, I don't think that every hand I post belongs in the expert forum just because I (think I) am an expert.

Finally, some of the most cherished posters here are not experts and never claim to be experts....I have far more interest in a jillybean post in the I/A forum than I do for a lot of the posts in the Expert forum, as one example.

[PhantomSac]

Honestly the best part of the expert forum is it made the beginner forum much better, and it makes I/A better. Let's not forget what it was like when it was b/I and a/e. There was tons of bickering since everyone thought they were advanced and would post in a/e. Then people would say zomg post in b/I! This also made the beginner area non accessible to true beginners since hands like end plays and squeezes might be posted in b/I since some people thought intermediates could obv do this.

The truth is 90+ percent of posters are intermediate or advanced. Many intermediates think they are advanced. I/A is a logical forum since it crosses over and there are less feelings hurt. As a result this makes the beginner forum a place where true beginners can get their hands answered in a suitable forum for them and everyone plays nice.

The expert forum has had some good stuff though it is largely dead right now I think it has a place. It does seem like there is a rise in people saying this doesn't belong here or whatever but it's nothing like when it was a/e. I guess you could just have I/a/e but I think there have been times when the expert forum produced some good stuff.

[kuhchung]

 PhantomSac, on 2015-February-03, 14:09, said:

Honestly the best part of the expert forum is it made the beginner forum much better

So you're saying playing Flannery has an effect even if you don't open it? Interesting...

[ahydra]

I already had so much respect for mikeh that I didn't think I could respect him even more. Turns out, I was wrong. What a well-written post.

FWIW I think the forum distinctions are working very well as they are, but yes, we should try to refrain from posting hands in the expert forum when one person at the table has done something decidedly non-expert. The commentary from (most of) our resident true experts is much appreciated and well-received, so let's not waste their time.

ahydra

[whereagles]

I take personal offense from mikeh's post.

I have never, EVER claimed to be this or that good.

Yet I see many seem to agree it's a good thing mikeh derogating someone who never claimed to be what HE said that someone claimed to be. (If this is confusing, read it over.)

So perhaps I'm wrong and you're all right. Or perhaps you're all better off without one more poster. I really spend too much time here. And lately it's not been quality time.

[mikeh]

 whereagles, on 2015-February-03, 14:52, said:

I take personal offense from mikeh's post.

I have never, EVER claimed to be this or that good.

Yet I see many seem to agree it's a good thing mikeh derogating someone who never claimed to be what HE said that someone claimed to be. (If this is confusing, read it over.)

So perhaps I'm wrong and you're all right. Or perhaps you're all better off without one more poster. I really spend too much time here. And lately it's not been quality time.

I do not want to see you leave. I meant what I said about my view that you seem to be intelligent and deeply interested in the game, and I would very much like to see you continue to contribute.

As for your self-perception, I apologize if I caused offence by misconstruing your posts. As I wrote to another frequent poster, in a pm earlier today, one of the realities of internet posting seems, to me at least, to be that much of the nuance that would accompany face to face discussion is lost in posting, and that often one finds that a post written with one intent is legitimately seen by others as reflecting a far different intent. My own experiences of that include going back to re-read what I have written and discovering that indeed the language I used was very capable of bearing the meaning that others saw in it, even while my true intentions were quite different. As someone who makes his living using language, it behooves me to be more careful, both in what I write and how I read what others post. At the very least, I ought to be more cautious than I often am in drawing inferences, and I apologize to you for doing that, as it appears I may have. I suspect I owe similar apologies to a few others here

I can't imagine that I am alone in that experience of seeing a post read, quite properly, in a fashion other than was intended.

Personally, I have inferred from the tone of your posts and your very frequent posts in and to the expert forum that you do think of yourself as an expert bridge player. If you do, then I continue to suggest that you are innocently mistaken, through no fault of your own...merely due to not having a chance to play with real experts very much, and hence not knowing what you don't know. If you don't think of yourself as an expert, then I shall accept that, and will consciously avoid reading your posts with that notion in mind...a notion which I accept has biased me in the past when responding to your posts. That bias may be due to an early misperception of mine that then coloured my thinking ever since, and if that is what happened, the fault is mine.

I hope that at some time, if the notion interests you (which it may well not), then you get a chance to up your game, because I suspect you are capable of it. Meanwhile, let me stop where I started: I hope you continue to be an active member of the community.

[Stephen Tu]

 ahydra, on 2015-February-03, 14:25, said:

FWIW I think the forum distinctions are working very well as they are, but yes, we should try to refrain from posting hands in the expert forum when one person at the table has done something decidedly non-expert.

Does it really matter if partner did something ridiculous? The situation may still be interesting to an expert, what do you do assuming everyone has their bids, what should certain sequences mean and what do you choose. I often don't post partner's hand and what actually happened/would have worked at the table because I don't see that as particularly relevant. I just want to know people's thought on what you would do in the given situation. Then if there is consensus it's usually relatively easy to determine whether the problem was what was chosen, whether partner's bid was ridiculous, or if it was simply bad luck. Sometimes I'm like 99.9% sure partner was insane, and just want my own sanity checked. Sometimes I think it's a real difficult problem if partner really had their bid, and am curious what I should do, even though in real life partner went nuts and nothing would have worked.

The problem to me is that I don't really know a clear definition of what makes a play or bidding problem "expert" worthy. I post problems where I don't find the answer clear cut, because if I thought the answer were clear, why do I need to post? My problems are generally clearly not "beginner" material, but what's the difference between an "advanced" problem and an "expert" problem?

To me there should be a "play/defense problems" forum, and a generic "bidding problems" forum with perhaps categorization between "bidding judgment" problems and "what should this mean" problems, perhaps just encouraging people to use some descriptive categorization in the post titles.

[Fluffy]

Posting wrong on the Expert forum can be very annoying when there are a number of active posts going on, and then someone posts 2 or 3 spamming the real expert suff.

But this hasn't happened much lately as topics of interest are reduced, so some low quality post do not bother much.

[jogs]

Is it possible to stop new members(those with under 100 posts) starting a new thread in the expert forum? A known expert would of course be allowed to start a new thread even when they are a new member.

[Fluffy]

If anything was that easy.... who is going to choose who is worthy?

[Fluffy]

 mikeh, on 2015-February-03, 15:22, said:

As for your self-perception,

The problem is not his perception, but that it trasnpires that you disagree with his self proclamation. I know Nuno has made an effort to not self proclaim himself as Expert, I know that you have also taken care not to do it, not even Justin has self proclaimed himself an Expert. Nobody really does.

Well I Call myself World Master as at least that is something objective. On the other hand Fred used to call me "player with zero bridge credentials"

[MrAce]

 whereagles, on 2015-February-03, 14:52, said:

I take personal offense from mikeh's post.

I have never, EVER claimed to be this or that good.

Yet I see many seem to agree it's a good thing mikeh derogating someone who never claimed to be what HE said that someone claimed to be. (If this is confusing, read it over.)

So perhaps I'm wrong and you're all right. Or perhaps you're all better off without one more poster. I really spend too much time here. And lately it's not been quality time.

Nuno

Don't take personal offense from Mike's post. I really will hate to see you leaving and I know this may be surprise to you. But instead try to gain something from what he said.

Diana told me that she had 4 complaints about the way I handled my issues with you on forums. Barmar implied that I also have "unsuitable" posts like you. I am not offended neither by Diana, Barmar who I respect a lot, nor the people who complained. Instead I asked myself to reevaluate my actions and look at myself instead of choosing the easy road and fooling myself with "they are wrong" I may not completely agree but I am not stupid. If Diana and Barmar, who i respect a lot, and 4 members of the forums thought how I handled this was inappropriate, they probably have a point. Which made me go back and reread what I wrote and came to conclusion that they had more than just a point.

I apologize. There is not really a good excuse for me to hide behind. I mean it.

About expert topics and people being on high horse, I had my issues with you mostly out of the expert forums. Those in the BBF who plays with me in BBO, knows that I don't even self-rate myself as an expert, because I am not. Being an expert requires much more than experience, talent to card play. It needs constant work, following publications, participating, exercise about a lot of positions to save energy at the table to make your quick moves to avoid leaking info, to avoid legal issues without getting into tank because there will be a lot of other positions that you need to go into tank. Playing vs experts, even winning a team full of WC players now and then does not make anyone expert necessarily. So please stop thinking that reactions to your posts are because some people think they are expert and you are not. At least this is not the case on my end.

I hope you stay. I am pretty straight forward dude. I have no reasons to tell you that I hope you stay unless I mean it. Nobody forced me to make this reply. In another recent topic, someone wrote nasty things to another member (To Nige1) who I like a lot. I took the risk the be banned from the forums and went straight on the offender, simply because I believed and still believe that it was unfair fight where offender was getting away with it because everyone including the mods were trying to go around the bush instead of dealing with him. I did not apologize to that person and I never will. I hope this makes you believe that I mean it when I say I hate to see you leaving.