Frank C

Tysen, Great post! I find it very interesting. On your latest post I have a suggestion. Do a search and cull out only the boards where the best contract in a suit scores within + or - 20 pts if played in notrump. i.e. best contract is 3d +110 but notrump makes +90 or best contract is 3D +130 but notrump makes +120. This is the way to select those hands that are reasonably suitable for notrump play. Then if you do the same calculation that you just did (how many points for inititial lengths) we would have a good working number for the value of distribution in Goren for notrump purposes. I believe this would be good data, as zar or 531 +bum rap already covers the suit hands. So having proper values for distribution points on notrump hands would be a good idea.

Tysen, You checked the Zar point system against other hand evaluators and I have a few questions about your approach. 1) Some of the hands you were looking at belonged in notrump, right? 2) Some of the hands you were looking at make less than 9 tricks in their best contract, yes? The reason for these two questions is that Zar doesn't claim to be accurate in notrump evaluation and Zar doesn't claim to work (without adjustment) for low partscore hands. The notrump problem is obvious. Adding all the control points makes aces and kings too valuable compared to queens jacks for notrump purposes. Also Zar distribution points are too heavily weighted on notrump hands. The partscore problem is a little more subtle. Zar sets a 5 zar pt range between each trick level. This is only accurate at the top of the scale. So if 52 zars equals 10 tricks and 57 zars equals 11 tricks, it doesn't follow that 42 zars equals 8 tricks. This result shouldn't surprise you. In Goren land it takes 26pts to take 10 tricks, +3 more (29) to take 11 tricks, but +4 more (33) to make a small slam and +4 more to make a grand slam. So you see that the scale is not evenly spaced all the way across. If you want to convince me that Zar points are less accurate than other evaluators (except Binky-- which is basically impossible to use at the table anyway) then restrict your data set to hands which #1 belong in a suit as opposed to NT and #2 are rated by double dummy analysis to take at least 9 tricks. Maybe you have already done that, I don't know. But I get the feeling that you are looking at a random sample of hands for which some belong in NT and some are low partscore deals.