![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
More frequent, shorter posts, you say? How about trying to keep to one topic per post and splitting things off which don't really need to be lumped together?
Bonus 1) Unrelated to football: Sky Arts are broadcasting Celebrity Grand Slam this week, every day until Sunday. If poker on TV is established, why not bridge? As much as rubber bridge may be played at the highest level for stakes which might make poker players pay attention, and as much as some lovely and fun people play the game, I think it fairly inherently has an all-business sobriety to it that freeform ramblin' gamblin' poker does not and the show plays with a fairly staight bat even when the players goof and gaffe. The decision to have celebrities rather than experts play is an entirely reasonable one, not least because all the players stick to one fairly simple bidding system rather than irregular monstrosities with strong, forcing passes and the like. The play heavily concentrates on the bidding rather than the cardplay, which seems strange to me, and even based on what I remember about bridge duplicate scoring I can't work out quite how their four-pair duplicate scoring works. Hat tip to Bother's Bar.
Bonus 2) The CiSRA puzzle competition has its first round of puzzles online already, with rounds two to five released daily from Monday 27th onwards. The hunt is for teams of up to four and is entirely online, very similar in pattern to the University of Melbourne's maths society's hunt, with hints released to earlier puzzles every day. It's a sound format and exactly the sort of thing that means there exists a puzzle hunt season, of sorts, for people not lucky enough to live in the very few puzzle-geek-heavy towns.
Bonus 1) Unrelated to football: Sky Arts are broadcasting Celebrity Grand Slam this week, every day until Sunday. If poker on TV is established, why not bridge? As much as rubber bridge may be played at the highest level for stakes which might make poker players pay attention, and as much as some lovely and fun people play the game, I think it fairly inherently has an all-business sobriety to it that freeform ramblin' gamblin' poker does not and the show plays with a fairly staight bat even when the players goof and gaffe. The decision to have celebrities rather than experts play is an entirely reasonable one, not least because all the players stick to one fairly simple bidding system rather than irregular monstrosities with strong, forcing passes and the like. The play heavily concentrates on the bidding rather than the cardplay, which seems strange to me, and even based on what I remember about bridge duplicate scoring I can't work out quite how their four-pair duplicate scoring works. Hat tip to Bother's Bar.
Bonus 2) The CiSRA puzzle competition has its first round of puzzles online already, with rounds two to five released daily from Monday 27th onwards. The hunt is for teams of up to four and is entirely online, very similar in pattern to the University of Melbourne's maths society's hunt, with hints released to earlier puzzles every day. It's a sound format and exactly the sort of thing that means there exists a puzzle hunt season, of sorts, for people not lucky enough to live in the very few puzzle-geek-heavy towns.
