[nige1]

1eyedjack, on 2011-August-06, 12:20, said:

When playing pickup games and indis I have taken to calling up the basic stats of my partner in MyHands in a separate window, to review average imps or MPs per hand over the last couple of months. It is not particularly reliable and to be taken with a pinch of salt (you have no idea of the competence of his partners and opponents or of whether his other partners are regulars), but is perhaps more reliable than the self-assessment stated in profile. You have to take care not to hold up the game, so do it when dummy or not your turn to bid. But it occurs to me that BBO could make the exercise a bit more painless by auto-imprinting those stats in the visible profile of the player. They are a matter of public record and all that BBO would be doing is making it a little easier to access information that is available anyway.

1eyedjack's suggestion is worth exploration. Many players (like me) would regard it as a benefit. Objections by those with privacy concerns are understandable. Allowing players to suppress the display of such information won't placate the latter. Another possible compromise: would there still be objections if such displays were confined to members of a private club within BBO?

helene_t, on 2011-August-08, 07:35, said:

terrible idea. rating is already a bad idea and this is worse because it gives us all the social issues related to rating while only giving us a very shaky performance indicator. I agree with hotshot that myhands should be available only for the players involved.

IMO, restricting myhand information to the players involved is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

babalu1997, on 2011-August-08, 11:44, said:

no, no terrible idea marshall miles plays very late in the night and i go to my hands to watch him play the next day. what i think is this: if one is sufficiently anal retentive to go searching play statistics in order to play main bridge and free games, then, DO IT!!!!!, go to my hands or subscribe to that software service that provides it. i always hate blanket solutions to selfish problems.

Agree with Babalu that it is fantastic to be able to belatedly follow the exploits of your favourite players. However, the enormous hand database is also a wonderful resource for analysts.

[Free]

What I'm also wondering: what do you think to achieve by getting these stats anyway? The only probable conclusion one may draw is that someone with a very poor result will probably be a poor player. However, you don't know who he played against, why he's got such poor score (it may be his partners),... People with high scores can easily be cheats, or can be noobs playing against even bigger noobs. From the average, you can't draw any conclusion about this player.

I don't think manually going to the myhands site is much effort compared to the huge amount of analyse you need before you can draw any decent conclusion.