[bezalel]

Is BBO blocking BBO skill updates?

[1eyedjack]

I suspect that they have better things to do with their time. Even if they felt so inclined. But I doubt that they would have the motivation, even if it required the expenditure of a scintilla of effort. Why block an irrelevancy?

[bezalel]

1eyedjack, on 2014-June-02, 13:07, said:

I suspect that they have better things to do with their time. Even if they felt so inclined. But I doubt that they would have the motivation, even if it required the expenditure of a scintilla of effort. Why block an irrelevancy?

I mentioned the possibility because a year or two ago, they did block bboskill...it was querying the BBO database so often that it was slowing things down for BBO. This was mentioned in an older post.

[1eyedjack]

ah ty

[1eyedjack]

I was just looking at BBOSkill site and I have to say that I don't understand some of the blurb.

From their FAQ link

http://bboskill.com/how_we_do_it.php

"Every time you make request we keep data and through the time skill level and rating will be more accurate."

And from their What's New link

http://bboskill.com/whatsnew.php

"Every next request you make (or system makes for you) is added to previous score, making your average score more precise"

It may be that English is not their first language, but I find it passing strange that my skill is a function of the frequency with which I interrogate the site, rather than (say) the result of the hands that I play on BBO.

But if the system inherently encourages you to make multiple requests then I can sort of understand how BBO might be justified in throttling it.

[barmar]

Suppose you're a good player, and you usually do well. But you have a bad session one day, and that's when you first go to bboskill. They'll base your rating on those recent results, which will be low. You need to go again after some good results to get your average closer to your true assessment. If you keep going back, they'll add more and more results, and the rating will become more accurate.

[Bbradley62]

I think they started with "all" the data at some point, but then it became harder to get, so they now only get data when queried. If that's the case, established players aren't starting from nothing, they're starting from whatever that "method switching" point is. But, it does appear to me that the stats haven't been updating recently.

[Zelandakh]

The trouble with that Barry is that if I am a bad player that plays cocasionally and only go to bboskill after a good session I can atrificially inflate my rating. Each additional request reinforces the innaccuracy and will in many cases make the rating more inaccurate.

Of course there are no bad players using bboskill. Almost everyone I know (except Han) is Advanced or better. That is despite the fact that almost everyone I know is intermediate by the BBO definitions.

Jack, a while back bboskill initiated polling for players from the BBO database. That was what led to it being blocked. The agreement now is that bboskill will only request hand records when a player specifically requests a rating. They keep all hands obtained from polling in their database. The trouble is that they do not nearly have enough cross-sampling to adjust ratings accurately so beating up beginners will score you many more points than scoring 50% against experts, even when the latter is considerably harder.

[1eyedjack]

Gods, I hope they never cripple Double Dummy Solver like that.

[Bbradley62]

Zelandakh, on 2014-June-04, 09:46, said:

Of course there are no bad players using bboskill. Almost everyone I know (except Han) is Advanced or better. That is despite the fact that almost everyone I know is intermediate by the BBO definitions.

The players in free Robot dupes have a much broader bboskill spectrum than that, including some correctly rated as Beginners.

[ericol]

Hello,

Can you update my score on BBOSKILL, you would be pleasant.

Cordially

Ericol ( pseudo bbo )

Olivier DUFOUR

[Zelandakh]

Eric, as has been pointed out many times, bboskill has nothing todo with bridgebase.com whatsoever so the staff here cannot provide you with such an update. My suggestion to you is to forget about bboskill and start tracking your scores directly from BBO using the Hand Record page.