Archive-name: games/bridge/style-guide
Last-modified: 1996/01/22 See reader questions & answers on this topic! - Help others by sharing your knowledge The quality of a newsgroup will benefit if its community adheres to certain conventions in presentation and style. In this posting we provide some suggestions concerning contributions to rec.games.bridge. We claim no authority, but hope that contributors to r.g.b. will be able to use these suggestions to their advantage. This posting is not the rgb.FAQ. Here is a quick reference to the bridge FAQ and other online information: IBA & RGB FAQ site : http://rgb.anu.edu.au/Bridge WWW Bridge Directory: http://rgb.anu.edu.au/Bridge/WWW-Bridge.html The Laws of Bridge : http://www.cs.vu.nl/~sater/bridge/nlaws/laws.html OKBridge info. : http://www.cts.com/~okbridge/ BridgePlayer LIVE! : http://www.bridgeplayer.com/~bridge/bplive.html Tournament Info. : http://www.cs.vu.nl/~sater/bridge/buls/buls.html ACBL home page : http://www.acbl.org/~acbl/ The newsgroup news.announce.newusers regularly provides an introduction to the general rules and etiquette of net use. You will find there much commonsense advice: your postings reflect upon you, compose your text carefully, be brief, use a descriptive subject header, summarize previous posts to which you are responding, don't quote more material than is necessary, restrict your lines to 72-74 characters, sign your articles. You will find there also a discussion of the disease of mushrooming meta-discussions, suggestions about when to use private email rather than the net, suggestions about ignoring or dealing with postings that are deemed inappropriate, obnoxious or silly, advice about proper procedure in quoting previous posts and private email, and much else. It is helpful to your readers if you follow a minimal standard format when posting a hand or a deal. Count the cards! List the suits in the order S, H, D, C. In a diagram of four hands, place South at the bottom and rearrange the directions to make South declarer unless there is a special reason not to. Do not use the tab key to compose a diagram, as the diagram may become misaligned on other people's screens and is very likely to become misaligned if your text is quoted and indented. If only two hands are shown it may be better to place them side by side as West and East, and a single hand can be specified inline. The exact distribution of small cards is often relevant for signaling and for communication between the hands, so please do not use xx's to represent small cards when discussing a play problem, and in a bidding problem use xx's only when they may truly be understood to represent the smallest cards in the suit. If you are posting a deal from actual play and you've forgotten all the small cards, then it may be best to make them up in some way so that this newsgroup has a precisely specified problem to consider. Here are some minor points to improve readability. The symbol "T" for 10 is common and its use is recommended, particularly if you don't use spaces between cards. In the auction, use P or Pass and X or Dbl rather than PASS and DBL. A vertical lay-out for the suits in the North and South hands is difficult to read, please don't use that format. Cards are always specified suit first and bids level first (so D2 is a card and 2D is a bid or contract). Please capitalize the symbols AKQJT and use lower-case "x" for the unspecified small cards. When recapping the auction, make sure that East's bids are to the right of West's, else readers may associate the bids with the wrong hand. The recommended format is to list the bids in four columns in the order W-N-E-S. Note all alertable bids and explain the bid in context. Do not explain a bid by convention name if it is not one of the standard bids or if you play some variation that is not standard. You can avoid confusion by describing a bid rather than naming it. When describing the play, take care to specify the type of defensive carding that is being used where this information is relevant. When you post a bidding problem, supply the method of scoring, the vulnerability and the position of the dealer. Do this even if you think the information is superfluous; it seldom is, and takes up very little space. When you post a play problem, again, as a matter of routine, mention the method of scoring and the vulnerability. It is normally right to provide the bidding too. Whenever possible, please give the level of the event. When asking for a director's ruling on a particular deal, describe the level of the event and any relevant circumstances, specify all four hands, and describe the bidding and play completely. (In cases involving unauthorized information you can alternatively provide only the authorized information and ask what are the logical options.) Many postings on r.g.b. are in the "What went wrong?" category. A good original posting of that type describes a deal and bidding or play that is, in the poster's humble opinion, reasonable and without obvious error, but that has led to an unsatisfactory result. The poster asks whether some particular action is to blame or whether the result is just unfortunate. Deals in which the poster already recognizes that some error has been committed normally do not provide good material for discussion. Please do not pose problems of which one component is partnership misunderstanding, partnership mistrust, or flouting of partnership agreements. The net can't help with those problems except by impressing upon you that partnership understanding and partnership trust are preconditions for a good game of bridge. Please try to research your problem a bit before asking a potentially common question. Good American and British sources for generic bidding problems include Bill Root's "Commonsense Bidding", Bill Root and Richard Pavlicek's "Modern Bridge Conventions", Alfred Sheinwold's "5 Weeks to Winning Bridge", Dorothy Truscott's "Bid Better, Play Better", and Terence Reese's "Learn Bridge with Reese". These books will often give a better and more complete description than you are likely to obtain from the net. If you are seeking advice or help, consider requesting replies by email, and if your question is of some general interest, be prepared to post a summary of comments received. If you did not announce beforehand that you intended to summarize replies then it is proper to ask permission before quoting from private email. If someone does send you email, it is polite to respond with at least a brief acknowledgement. Before posting a reply to a problem, think it through. Read all the other postings in the same thread; maybe somebody else has already said what you were going to say. Reply only if you believe you are qualified and have an informed opinion, and compose your answer carefully--the time spent on doing so will save your readers much more time in the aggregate. Remember that it is only the careful reasoning that you supply that makes your answer of any interest to the r.g.b. readers. If you are addressing a bidding problem, explain why your chosen bid is superior to the likely alternatives. If it is a play problem, try to provide percentages. If it is a director's problem, state the legal basis for your ruling. Please appreciate that a question that appears trivial to you was not trivial to the original poster and may not be trivial to many other readers. Be polite, succinct and to the point. Quote from the original posting no more than is needed to make your answer clear; attribute your quote properly, but never quote a signature. It is not normally a good idea to make successive postings referring to the same problem or issue, although a discussion may introduce a new topic that merits a second contribution. If you decide you've not made yourself clear in your first contribution, resolve to do better when you comment on another problem. If you decide that your original answer to a problem was wrong and meanwhile someone else has posted a better answer, don't feel that you now must post a correction to your previous answer. Perhaps you should not have replied in the first place, and anyway, the correction has already appeared. Forget about it and resolve to do better the next time. If you've posted an answer to a problem and you read a subsequent answer by someone else that you think is wrong, don't reiterate what you've said before. You've made your point and the readers can make up their own mind. If you see a posting that is plainly wrong or silly, wait a day or two before following up. If you can't stand to wait, send email to the author rather than a follow-up. Chances are other people have noticed too and an excessive number of follow-ups are already on the way. If you see a posting that is rude or inappropriate, an email message should be preferred to replying over the net; replying by follow-up on the net tends to generate flame wars instead of discussion. If you post a hand on this newsgroup you should be willing to accept that some players will strongly disagree with your bidding or play. Please understand that the nature of a public electronic network does not allow you the same degree of social control that you may have in your local bridge club; for that very practical reason you should try hard not to let a style of posting of which you disapprove interfere with your enjoyment of this newsgroup. Articles in rec.games.bridge should normally receive worldwide distribution, so if your posting software inserts some restrictive "Distribution: ..." line, please remove it. And in consideration of your worldwide audience, please avoid bridge slang: "a hook", "to tap", or "red on white" may not be as clear to everyone as "a finesse", "force to ruff", or "vuln vs. not". The rec.games.bridge FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) is maintained by Markus Buchhorn (markus@octavia.anu.edu.au) and is regularly posted to the newsgroup. The FAQ and related archive material, including a variety of Bridge software, is available by anonymous ftp on rgb.anu.edu.au in the directory /pub/Bridge/FAQ, or if you have access to a Web browser point it at http://rgb.anu.edu.au/Bridge. The OKBridge program allows people to play and watch bridge over the Internet. For information send mail to info@okbridge.com or point your Web browser at http://www.cts.com/~okbridge/. Please don't post hands from OKBridge until the end of the week in which you encountered the hand; the same hand may be played by many other r.g.b. readers. Thanks to Bharat Rao, David DesJardins, Doug Newlands, Paul Jackson, Mark Brader, Hans van Staveren, Brian Clausing, Geoff Hopcraft, Franco Baseggio, David Grabiner and Jim Loy for their contributions to this style guide. Bas Braams braams@cims.nyu.edu (address for follow-up email) Steve Willner willner@cfa183.harvard.edu Ted Ying ted@rosserv.gsfc.nasa.gov User Contributions:
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Send corrections/additions to the FAQ Maintainer: braams@cims.nyu.edu (Bas Braams)
Last Update March 27 2014 @ 02:11 PM
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