Antrax

Rogue is a good class if you know how to play an aggressive tempo style. That's what I had to do with this deck since it had no staying power - very little late game and very poor card quality, with no card draw or AoE. Conceal was a least-of-evils pick (first over undertaker and booty bay bodyguard when my deck already had several 5-drops, second over sinister strike and silverback patriarch), but it fit the only possible play-style, since it denies the opponent the possibility of making trades, so you get an extra turn of pushing in face damage, very similar to sap. It certainly won me games where I could play it just as the opponent began to stabilize, and one game vs. mage where I dropped a 6/6 and concealed it with some small guys, and now his flamestrike means I push 6 damage in and get to rebuild my board. Fluffy, they cost $10 a piece and do nothing except look cool. What you want to look into, as a rejoining player, is the tavern brawl mode, available from Wedensday afternoon (EU) until Sunday night. You get a free pack and it's a very fun environment.

I'll see your rogue runs and raise you this 12-1 run: http://imgur.com/CQjaYvD It was actually very close to being the dream (12-0) but I got paired again with an opponent I beat and his familiarity with the fact my deck sucked let him beat me - he knew he didn't need to save removal for good targets and that he can overcommit freely. billw55, I haven't spent a dime on the game and I have most cards you'd want in your collection. There are about 2.5 decks (one isn't completely serious) I can't play, and they're not "the best" in any sense. Tomorrow I'll know how I placed in ranked play but I'm in one of the top percentiles (rank 6 was I think the top 3% of players?), so it's possible to be a cheapskate competitive player. The game is very well designed in that sense. Never has anything felt less cash-grabby. As a design principle, anything that has any impact on your chances to win can be gotten with no monetary investment. The only things you have to buy are cosmetic in nature.

My first deck was ProsBloom. BTW the turn wasn't shortened, it was 70 seconds since the beta but they changed it so you don't get extra time from animations during your opponents' turn or something. In any case, the equivalent of choosing when to go face with aggro is using burn on blockers or on face. Most aggro mtg decks run combat tricks or damage that can turn into extra damage or removal etc. Also wrath of god is 4 mana so it's much safer to overcommit to the board in HS when playing aggro. So, it looks the same to me, though I'm not really an aggro player in either game.

This is an interesting point. I originally thought "instants -> infinitely more decisions -> mtg wins". However, when I started watching some tournaments I noticed that in control vs. control match-ups at least, both players can expect to draw their entire decks, which makes the match-up a lot more skill-intensive than the mtg variant, which is more about not missing land drops than anything. So, now I'm kind of on the fence. Combo decks are much easier to play in HS (Freeze Mage being a good example of this principle to the extreme) due to lack of hand disruption and generally having turns to your own, control decks in HS seem much harder (difficult to say, I can't afford Wallet Warrior) and zoo/sligh is roughly the same.

Mage and Paladin are popular and I think have a slight edge, but I don't feel I sacrifice too much when picking classes based on daily quests or just what I haven't played for a while. Playing against paladin in arena isn't that difficult, just be ready for the minibot, so if you're playing a class with no ping and your hand is like 3 3/2s, mull one of them away or something. In general I'm very impressed by how balanced the game is, especially if you compare it to mtg. BTW, based on my limited experience, if you play arena in the off hours you'll get a higher variety of classes. Noobs tend to pick only mage and paladin since they're the easiest hero powers to use well, and in the peak hours you naturally get more weak players.

It's not even my goal to reach legend, I play HS for fun. The thing is, I have the most fun when I challenge myself and it looks like the high ranks are good for that. I'll admit that I looked down on HS at first because it's so much simpler than mtg. Then I realized it's still a ton of fun, and I can play a game and be done in like 10 minutes instead of having to clear an entire hour, which suits me much better now (another case against Bridge, it's a bit pointless to sit down for just a couple of hands). I may have ranked higher but the first tavern brawl was all I did while it was open. The second one was less appealing to me since it was pretty obvious how to break, and thus has the most stale meta ever.

I saw Cyberyeti and now Fluffy mention it, so I'm curious: who here plays Hearthstone, and what are you going for there? I actually take HS a lot more seriously than bridge :ph34r: because it doesn't require a partner and because my mtg background allows me to be much better for considerably less effort. I invested no money in it out of some silly principle and now I find it hard to back out even though the game is clearly worth money. My collection is fairly extensive though I'm missing several good legendaries (Tirion/Jaraxus/Malganis/Thalanos/Van Cleef/Cenarius/Grommash are the playable ones), so it's difficult to justify sinking money into it. I mostly played arena because it looked like there's nothing to gain in ladder. I feel like I'm an infinite arena player (if I need gold I do several arena runs), but ever since I started tracking with Heartharena it stubbornly claims I have a 6.6 win average. This season I decided to try and take ranekd play a bit more seriously. I laddered up to 7 with a combo druid pretty easily, and I'm now at rank 4 with Strifecro's Grinder Mage which is seriously one of the most fun decks I've played. Rank 4 seems to be the cap though, I catch myself losing for subtle mistakes the opponents are now smart enough to exploit, so I think I need to improve as a player to make it to legend. What about you?

12/10 would click at work again. Here's me from a couple of days ago. http://imgur.com/vB9r6Vp

Not to hijack the thread, but looking at spade shortness in your own hand, aren't you afraid partner's double might be based on a huge hand with clubs, making their red-suit support not as good as you might expect?

So what is 1NT-2♦; 3♥ now?

...have you already handled the person who inspired this feature?

This is incorrect. You sometimes want to keep the bidding low because 2♣ already ate a lot of space. In my partnership we only bid major-suit positives (8+ HCP, good 5+ card suits), the minor and NT positives just take up too much room so we let opener tell us what they have first.

On the other hand, you have to be a good player to know what the worst bid would be, and once people figure that out you can actually learn from his posts.

Justin, you're now being trolled on BW for smoking: http://bridgewinners.com/article/view/justin-lall-interview/

You guys ruined the mental images I had of you two :(

Of course we do, to allow us to play four transfers.

We play one of those half-clever ideas my partner likes so much. Opener redoubles with good clubs, ignores the double with a club stopper and passes without a stopper. Responder may pass but never will, redoubles to re-stayman with no stopper and bids "naturally" when we want to have a disaster (without peeking at the notes I don't remember if 2M is inv or shows garbage stayman). The idea is to rightside the contract against a club lead.

For the record, poker-playing software heavily relies on your #3 above.

I suspect it's because it's difficult for people who aren't computer experts to understand just how difficult some problems are, to a computer. If forced to guess I'd wager you're right, but I can play devil's advocate here. For instance, let's talk system. On one hand, if you let the computer play whatever, it can probably play some information-theoretic perfect system that a human would have no hope of understanding or remembering , which would give it an edge. But, such a system would come from a human, probably using a different algorithm to create that system. If the task were instead that the computer learn existing systems and augment them, as human experts do to taylor it to their style and close gaps, that would be one hell of a more complex computer program. Another issue is something like table feel. if everyone plays online then the computer has the edge since it's all compute. However, put a computer on a human team and seat it at a table, and you might find out the +EV perfect play was wrong due to a tell picked up by the human declarer at the other table, lose 12. Finally, this is the most tenuous but deep inferences, like "why did he return a club when a diamond seems auto oh he's trying to give me a losing option so he has the trump queen" - good luck teaching a computer those. these are all small things so in reality probably computers will dominate bridge at some point, but it's not as automatic or obvious as may seem at first.

Yeah, once W supports clubs E is in 3NT-hunting mode so the 3♦ bid description is identical to the 2♦ bid (5/4, 18+) but with an added "stop in ♦". My guess is the psyche is relevant since without it W can pull a Soloway JS with 2♥ and the auction may proceed differently. I'm guessing the reason GIB leaps to slam here is that it ran out of forcing bids, though I have no idea what's wrong with 4NT, that's also pretty forcing.

[hv=pc=n&s=st652h9864d9742c7&w=sqhakq75dqtca6432&n=sa9874ht32dj63ct9&e=skj3hjdak85ckqj85&d=e&v=e&b=6&a=1cd1h1s2d(Reverse%2C%2018%2B)p3c(%22Forcing%20to%203N%22)p3d(Stop%20in%20!D)p7c(Bugger%20this)ppp]399|300[/hv] Anonymous iPad play, so basic GIB. South's psyche makes W leap to the grand missing an ace. It's the book bid (7♣ says 18+ TP) but the book makes no sense as 18+18 can just barely miss an ace, especially when it's TP and not HCP.

Well yes, you know that's true. That's the shortcoming of double-dummy simulations, they assume all four players play double-dummy.

Two problems with that: a) No two GUI toolkits look alike. Judging by how upset people were when they changed the card graphics, people will refuse to use the new GUI. b) There's also all the software part, beyond the GUI. If it's written Windows-specific, it's not impossible but it's something of a pain to convert and test it for other OSes.

Our second seat 7-level preempts tend to be sound, so I X for penalty.

Barmar indeed works for BBO. "BBOskill" is the usual string to search for when looking for the rating discussions. Here's one sample thread: http://www.bridgebase.com/forums/topic/54526-bboskill/