[pellinore]

I just played speedball with a partner with a rating of 8. His biding was atrocious and his play terrible, down at sure contracts.
My rating is only 6 gained after many fractional master point wins. I think my play is solid, 1,200 master points in club games and I regularly get partial points with pickup partners at speedball. I love speedball and get pleasure from from good contacts and play even when losing so I will keep on playing. I just don't the rating system,

[paulg]

The rating system is cumulative, like your club master points. Very few bridge players want their rating to go down, so it is no surprise that they do not decay over time.

[smerriman]

I would say it's not even a rating system, and wasn't designed to be. It's more an indication of how much you've played, rather than how well you play.

[FrankerZ]

It is not a rating system, the same as your raw total of IRL master points is not a rating system

[LBengtsson]

I have watched on VuGraph many star rated players - experts from their own countries - and some of them are bad. Very bad! I find that there are players that want to learn more about the game and play, defend and bid properly, and there are many who reach a certain level and will not progress any more, even with lessons. Maybe they just got to a stage in life that actually improving their game does not matter: they play for enjoyment only.

Chess has an ELO rating which is imo quite accurate. Players have to play a certain number of games each year for their rating to be updated. As my forum colleague, smerriman, has said, the BBO system is only an indication of how much a player has played, not how good they are, but logically you would think that the more someone plays a game, the better they get. Unfortunately, that is not the outcome in certain players.

[mycroft]

While everything said here is accurate - frankly, the right answer has always been "if you can't figure out the fish at the table after 4 hands, ..." A bit of an issue if you've signed up for 18-27, of course.

Re: ELO: where's the ELO for Bughouse? (if you don't understand why I'm asking that question, that's also a point)

Because if playing with these "claim to be good" players is going to affect my Lehmans ELO, well then, maybe I shouldn't play instead? Or only play with regular partners (so much for teaching games, or bringing "too good for C" players into the A game, or...), or "47-49 Lehmans only", or ...

What everyone *wants* is a player rating they can trust, so they don't have to play with poorer players. Of course, they want their rating to reflect *their opinion of their ability*, so they can get "players at their level". Because otherwise, everyone else "don't have to play with poorer players"... Oh, they also want "limited games, so we don't have to play *against* stronger players". Which ELO would help with, I agree. If we could trust it. If players won't sandbag. If...

But mostly they want, as always, to be able to find "a partner slightly better as good as them, to play against opponents slightly worse at their level."

And back to OP's complaint, the answer is to find partners you are compatible with (style, timezone, and relative play level) and yoink your way out of the permanent pickup pool. Remember not only is the rating cumulative, but it also gets added by any BBO event that awards BBO MPs - say, 10 robot games a day, every day,... It will be frustrating as you find them, of course.

Also remember that this could just have been a bad day - distractions (in a speedball, this is critical), place of play, not enough sleep last night, fight with family,...Everybody has their bad days - in fact one of the huge skills of the expert is a) to be able to minimize "bad days" by doing everything to avoid the conditions for them, and b) being able to minimize the effect of "bad days" (plus of course, playing so well that "bad days" are only 60% games).

[Chas_P]

smerriman, on 2023-January-18, 02:53, said:

It's more an indication of how much you've played.

Yeah. It reminds me of Paul Soloway's reply when asked about his masterpoints (he had over 50,000 when he died). He said, "It just proves that I have a good attendance record."

[jillybean]

Points are for ACBL marketing and peoples' egos, and have a questionable relation to skill. The exception of course are with numbers like that of Soloway, you won't get to 50,000 without being great.

[pilowsky]

pellinore, on 2023-January-17, 19:40, said:

I just played speedball with a partner with a rating of 8. His biding was atrocious and his play terrible, down at sure contracts.
My rating is only 6 gained after many fractional master point wins. I think my play is solid, 1,200 master points in club games and I regularly get partial points with pickup partners at speedball. I love speedball and get pleasure from from good contacts and play even when losing so I will keep on playing. I just don't the rating system,

You do realise that when you make a post here, anyone can look up the hands played by you and your partner and form their own judgement about quality of bidding and play?