dustinst22

First to bid, all white. Teams

Apparently that's not much of a help: Shane Frederick first noted many years ago, more than fifty per cent of students at Harvard, Princeton, and M.I.T. gave the incorrect answer to the bat-and-ball question.

We've been grinding out games on Yahoo, lol (Kings Quarter). Head on over, we need more decent opponents. Generally play later at night though.

Joe, good to see you in Bridgebase, lol. The format is a standard "500 game" format. Generally there is a round robin, and a set number of teams with the best record moves to a "play off round". From there, you play in knock out matches which consist of a "best of 3 games" format. Hopefully we can get another tournament going -- in Vegas this time, Joe.

Really? He isn't paid by Nickell?

good suggestions. I thought of just using a teaching tbl, the problem is of course that you can see all 4 hands so it kind of defeats the purpose.

One useful way I've found to improve my declaring skills is to play in the individual ACBL tourneys. It would be nice if you could rent the advanced GIB's and set your hand strength similar to what it is in those tourneys for declaring practice. This would be a great way to get in a lot of volume of practice without having to spend much $.

Open your doc, and then go to the file tab, then to publish to the web. It will generate a URL.

My partner and I used google docs to create a spread sheet. Here it is: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?hl=en_US&hl=en_US&key=0Asd9RNMrA1VPdHlqOEd2d0xnYVRPdHRkdkNmN3NQX3c&output=html

These are interesting, but I don't think critical for partnership compatibility. I think 2 people on opposite spectrums in many of these categories can still be a great partnership -- perhaps better than if they were exact replicas of each other. For example, there are many top level players who have read/studied very little on theory and instead relied on other methods of getting to where they are, and then there are others who read a great deal. Would the above really matter to form a partnership? I also don't think its such a bad thing if one player is a more aggressive bidder than his/her partner, in fact sometimes that can be optimal. In the Meckwell partnership, Rodwell is obviously the member heavily into bidding theory, etc. Meckstoth is the opposite of this. This obviously works great for them. So I think it's a mistake to simply look for someone who closely resembles yourself. Sometimes the best compliment is a partner who has many differences. Imagine using this approach to try and find a compatible spouse. You'd end up dating yourself. I think the old fashioned approach of parding a wide variety of people and then seeing if you click is probably the best option. In my opinion, the most critical factor is always how competitive each of you are.

Yes I'm aware that live shuffling produces flatter hands, but that wasn't what I was referring to. I guess it's just me, but particularly in the ACBL individual tournaments, there seems to be a high frequency of "theme"-oriented hands and very few "boring" flat hands. Maybe i'm insane.

Does anyone have any information regarding the paramaters of the deals in this format? Other than the fact that you're dealt the most HCP, it seems to me that a fairly large % of the deals always have some sort of "theme" present -- much higher than random deals (similar to say a level 3 bridgemaster deal -- for example, the trumps seem to split poorly much more often, or you're punished much more often for taking an inferior line than you normally would be, etc). I personally like this as I think it improves my declarer skills, would just be nice to know if it is intentionally programmed this way. Has anyone else noticed this?

Hey, the bot kept you out of a bad 4 spades contract :)

Thanks, he edited the post to explain.

Can you post a link to the particular hand? Everything is alerted and generally explained in the alert. Now and then I've noticed some 'bugs" or errors in the programming, but its not common.

It is posted right on the BBO homepage. http://bridgebase.com/doc/gib_system_notes.php

What is the vulnerability? Imps? MP?

lol, some people like telling the same story over and over.

The web version allows you to create a team match and wait for others to join...but unfortunately this rarely works and isn't utilized. IMO, this is one of the huge things lacking in the web version (lobby chat capability). If this one thing were added, I'd no longer need the client version.

Lead? Assuming club, dont you just get started on the heart suit?

Howard Schutzman has a few good articles on using the weak NT in a 2/1 context. http://www.bridgesights.com/hondobridge/#weaknt

Ok you've convinced me. I guess most experts don't use standard jacoby these days anyway. Any suggestions on a good follow up structure?

So did you mean to vote for 4♦? Regarding the splinter, the only reason I don't like this here is because I think the hand is too powerful for a splinter (despite the "only" 10 HCP, the hand on its own is 14.75 on K+R evaluator, and likely worth 17+ after 1S opener). I like my splinters to be a very limited GF hand in strength and having little to no extras (around 12-15 total pts). A splinter also ignores your excellent shape here with a powerful 6 card heart suit. The question you should ask is "is slam out of the picture if we have wasted values in diamonds?". The answer is clearly no, so no reason to take up so much space imo. Regarding Jacoby, I think again the hand is far too distributional for it -- at least in the "traditional sense" of jacoby, it should be a more balanced hand and definitely not a freak distributional hand imo.

Glad to see you know your smokers, brr. Didn't realize there were any bridge players who knew smoking :) Nothing better than a pork shoulder smoked in a WSM. Also, a "reverse seared" Ribeye (Finney method) using a WSM is the nuts. If you try this you'll never cook steak the traditional way again. Take a bone in ribeye (after letting it rest with Kosher salt for about 40 min to reach room temp first -- btw this should be done regardless of method, you want the steak room temp before you grill it), use indirect heat (WSM) set to about 200-220 degrees and smoke the steak (i prefer hickory) until the internal temp is about 115 degrees or so (this is for rare, the final sear will bring the temp up another 10 degrees, so simply remove once it reaches 10 degrees below your desired final temp). Remove the steak, tent it and let it rest for about 15-20 min. Take off the top of the WSM, stoke the coals and get the fire as hot as possible and move the grate directly over the fire. You may even need to add more coals -- you want that fire super hot. Now you sear the steak for about 1-2 min max on each side. Best steak you'll ever eat. With a traditional method, you get a lot of gray spots and the cook is very uneven with red towards the center and gray on the outer part, this method produces a nice uniform cook throughout with the outside seared. I did this one a few weeks ago http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showpost.php?p=27356050&postcount=3204 More info on the "Finney Method" or "Reverse Sear" for those interested in trying it -- http://www.swfl-news.com/askabutcher/id/7