Siegmund

I gravitate toward 3H at equal (the obvious bid if you don't have the two garbage jacks), but have no objection to 1H. I'll never play you for this much if you open 2H at equal.

1>>>5>4>>>32

I would want a better hand to bid immediately - even Kxxxxx and out I would be wary. Pulling seems obvious. Not only is there a chance 1NT will make if partner has just 18 rather than 22-- they are not vulnerable, and down one won't be any good either if we have 110 available in either of our side's suits.

Yes. (And that is much higher than I expected it to be. In many notrump sims, a 5-card suit is not an asset at all, double-dummy -- the risk of having one suit be shorter costs more than the potential for an extra winner in the long suit.) The ±0.11 is the width of a 95% confidence interval for the value of the fifth club, based on the data I had. I had 1000 2434 hands, which produced an average of 8.58 tricks with a standard deviation of 1.00 tricks, and 600 2425 hands, which took 8.72 tricks with a standard deviation of 1.10 tricks: 1.96 * sqrt(1.00^2/1000 + 1.10^2/600) ~ 0.107. Possible? Yes. Worth my time to make? No. (I have a number of reusable programs to do various types of analysis quickly - but that isn't one of them.) It would have to be done a bit differently than that, too, rather than always removing the extra club from west.

A half trick for the scoring difference and 0.2 for quality of defense sounds much more reasonable (when both contracts are making: 2S+2 and 2NT+2 is a win for notrump while 2S-1 and 2NT-1 is a tie) -- I never thought of it that way since in my sims I generally directly count the matchpoint wins and losses rather than just looking at the trick differences at the end.

Your new tighter conditions make the sim much slower (unless you do a bunch of extra programming to generate a list of suitable opening hands, and then a responding hand for each, rather than just dealing random hands and hoping both hands qualify.) I show the 5143-2434 hands averaging 8.58 tricks in spades and 7.98 in notrump, and the 5143-2425 hands averaging 8.72 tricks in spades and 8.16 in notrump. It's a statistically significant difference, but dont put too much faith in the exact size of the spread (0.14±0.11 and 0.18±0.11 tricks), unless you construct a special experiment where you deal two possible responding hands for each opener and see what the difference in numbers of tricks is. rhm wrote: This is quite a surprising claim to me; it's true that defenders make worse opening leads against notrump than against suits -- especially against uninformative auctions like 1NT-3NT -- but my sims have put the cost of a blind lead against 1NT-3NT at most 1/4 of a trick worse than against an informative auction, and I would expect the difference to be a lot smaller than that if we are comparing 1S-2D-2NT and 1S-2D-2S (or two other similar auctions which give almost equally much information about declarer's hand.) Even a tenth of a trick is more of a difference than I would expect.

X would be penalty with all my partners (and that's what I would assume with an unfamiliar partner), and I would do it both MP and IMP. Opener can still correct to 4H, of course, with a spectacular fit for hearts and poor defense against diamonds.

So far so good. People often do it that way. :) Several output formats (i.e., different definitions of the write_deal function) are provided in the 'format' folder. format/default is the standard one. format/ddline and format/none are also frequently used. If you define your own output format you really like, you can save it as a new custom format, and then put "source format/mynewformatfile" in the preamble of your program, rather than having write_deal in every sim script you write. Yes. Andrews provides a command "sdev" to facilitate statistics. It is in his documentation. Your example would look like this: sdev nttricks sdev sptricks main { if { [spades north] + [spades south] == 8 && [hcp north] + [hcp south] >= 20 && [hcp north] + [hcp south] <= 22 } { # You can probably put all this in write_deal instead but I've never tried it that way set nt [tricks south notrump] set sp [tricks south spades] nttricks add $nt sptricks add $sp accept } } #To only call the total once you use deal_finished; deal_finished { puts "Avg. tricks in spades: [sptricks average]" puts "Avg. tricks in notrump: [nttricks average]" } I also frequently build into my simulations a more detailed analysis of each hand than just counting total tricks. For instance, if your question is, specifically, does 2S score better than 2NT at matchpoints, you might put "sdev mpresult" in the preamble, and then, in your processing loop, set nt [tricks south notrump] set sp [tricks south spades] if {$sp>$nt} {mpresult add 100} { if {$sp == $nt && $sp<8} {mpresult add 50} {mpresult add 0} } Now "puts [mpresult average]" in deal_finished will tell you how often a 2S bidder will beat a 2NT bidder at matchpoints. (Or, you can count wins losses and ties individually in three separate variables, etc.) [mpresult count] and [mpresult sdev] give the sample size and the standard deviation of whatever data you've fed into mpresult with the add command too. (Yes, "sdev blah" to define variable blah and "blah sdev" to get back the standard deviation at the end is confusing. But no stranger than "spades south" and "south spades" meaning two different things (one returns a list of cards, one a count.) I can share some examples of deal analysis scripts I have used in the past. Fair warning, my programming style guaranteed to offend anyone who went to a CS department.

If either hand were weaker, 2M rather than notrump would be a no-contest favorite. 23 HCP however is very close to the 50-50 spot for being able to take 8 tricks in notrump which makes this a question worth asking. 1000 deals under the requested conditions: Spades won 8520 tricks. Notrump won 7938 tricks. At matchpoints, spades won 531 times, tied 52 times, lost 417 times. More than enough for spades to be statistically significantly better (scoring 55.7±3% vs. pairs in 2NT.) I confess I forgot to have the sim calculate imp differences, and it takes awhile to re-run, but I can't imagine the result being much different, since the swings are 1, 2, and 4 imps in either direction, according to whether one contract makes an overtrick, avoids an undertrick, or makes when the other fails, no big lopsidedness like in a 3NT vs 3m sim where the size of the game bonus matters. Ultimately, no surprise. It's incredibly hard to construct any set of hands where 2NT isn't a disaster.

The 1948 laws say "same breath." The 1963 laws change to "without pause." The 1975(duplicate)/1981(rubber) laws change further to "without pause for thought." I think you could make a reasonable argument that the change to having thought matter, vs. purely timing, happened in mycroft's lifetime. I think you could further argue -- based on the flap with the 1999 Vancouver appeal -- that at least some people believed the 1975/1981 change was to allow a correction even after a pause, in some cases, if no thought was going on, as opposed to disallow an immediate correction even if it was a change of mind. It would be nice if next time around they could be clearer about their intentions and make sure the choice of words in the book conveys those intentions.

Could anyone comment on what the "third" way is? The only Kokish I knew was 2-way (HSGT+SSGT).

Put me down for X and Pass. First one highly style-dependent. Second one, 3NT might be a reasonable gamble with an unpassed partner, but I think we need way too much good fortune for it to work. Even if 4th hand doesn't have 3 spades, there's no reason why opener can't have a red-suit entry. I think there's very little chance of 3NT making unless a perfect dummy comes down (CK and DA, for instance, with the diamond finesse likely to work.)

I choose 1C, I understand pass. Thou shalt not preempt with two aces.

I guess I felt like the drafting and publishing of the 2007 Laws was a 'test' that ended with the ACBL continuing to have its own version of the book, with that version in effect here: in some sense they 'won' a battle that some people wanted to end with the WBF being the only issuer of the next book.

I did suggest to partner that the proper remedy was for her to protest at the end of the hand that the opponents played their cards in an irregular fashion. (If it's an irregularity at all -- the law doesn't quite say a card has to be played so that all 4 people at the table can see it.) My view is that, whatever her rights about watching for irregularities are, she doesn't have any rights to compel anyone else to help her do so. I am curious which regional+ director told her it was OK, and on what basis. (Well, I kind of know what basis - he ruled her right to watch for irregularities was sufficiently powerful to compel others to show her their cards.) Yes, I could have titled the thread better - but it's hard to find the right phrase to describe a trick that the actively participating players have quitted but dummy hasn't, before the next trick is led.

As a practical matter, asking declarer what he was thinking usually works: he says he called without looking at LHO's card, director says the ten stands, pay more attention next time, or he says he saw it, was surprised by it, and got tonguetied, and director lets him change it. Not many lie fast on their feet. It's not a perfect solution, of course. Apologies for straying off topic -- but I thought that assertion had been tested and proven true, i.e., they took great care to make it clear that they, not the WBF, are the promulgating body for the Laws here, and reminded people that they were around before the WBF and had not ceded control as the Portland Club and whoever else did. They still really shouldn't rewrite the laws. But the WBFLC has issued interpretations that turn laws on their heads before too, so it's not like ACBLLC does anything unique in issuing new interpretations of the law and declaring them binding.

One of my partners is in the habit of doing this periodically. I told her it wasn't allowed, and she had an interesting counter-argument: "I know I can't just ask for curiosity; I'm trying to follow the play to carry out my duty of watching for irregularities, trying to stop you from revoking and calling attention after the hand if the opponents do. I only ask when an opponent holds his card so only you can see it, then turns it over quickly. Doesn't he have to put his card on the table for us all to see when he plays it?" She indicated she had previously asked a director at a regional, and the director had agreed that she had a legitimate need to see all the cards once, and allowed her to ask, only if cards were played so she couldn't see them. Opinions? (Edited to add: ACBL territory -- not that I think it matters; there aren't any special ACBL-only powers for dummy, like there are about defenders asking each other about revokes.)

With a pickup partner I'd think it was obvious he intended it as michaels rather than a stopper, and put him back in 4S now.

On some two-monitor setups, it's possible to have one window that goes all the way across one screen and spills onto the other... if so, you can just use a standard window and make it wide enough that the table is on the plasma and the results are on the secondary. (That's a question of how your computer talks to the two monitors, not anything on the BBO side.)

As already said - Crash over any conventional opening is allowed; over a natural 1NT, the 2D bid is not legal because it has no known suit, but the double and 2C meanings are allowed. The obvious fix is to use 2D=majors 2NT=minors, along with an ambiguous X and 2C -- "Chasm" if double is red-or-black, "Scum" if double is pointed-or-round.

I use the original TCL version of the Andrews dealer, for simulations. To harvest my own BBO hand records I use the downloader built in to Bridge Captain, then feed the resulting huge PBN file to my own scripts, to go through bid-by-bid and card-by-card to see how much each error costs.

Yes, if the sim had said that going was obvious opposite 10-12HCP, I'd have gone on to worry about removing the good and shapely 12s and adding shapely 9s, etc. Since the sim was already telling me not to go I didn't bother with the refinement. Though, for those of us who open a lot of 11s -- our partners DO only make limit raises with 4432 and 12HCP.

Well, I thought the lead I chose was obvious, then saw the answers to the poll are a 4-way tie so far, so apparently not. :)

I have sympathy for 3D and have done it against unsound opponents at times. 2D would not even cross my mind unless I was a full trick better. Now, if the rules allowed me to make a weak jump to 2D over 1S, that would be perfect. :)

I've seen one 31-HCP hand in my life. It was in a matchpoint game, and 2210 was a bottom and 2220 was a top. I admire the inventiveness of the jump to 7C, but I think "everybody" is just bidding 7S.