Siegmund

Yes, we know threads like this have been made before, but every time someone makes a new thread,it is an opportunity to put in another plug for using LaTeX and/or BML, so we don't mind :) The use of styles and outlines in Word was the popular way to build bidding trees some time ago. Glad to know it can still be done, though I gave up on MS products at the 2003-to-2007 transition.

From the discussion so far, I am assuming "Senior Director of Bridge Operations" is something like being Tournament Chairman for all NABCs, in the sense of shepherding the various subchairmen and local committee members into place (and, perhaps, overseeing the individuals designated as chairmen for individual NABCs.) I thought we did have a position called Chief Tournament Director too -- whatever it was Gary Blaiss was before he was ousted, a while back -- and I seem to remember some subtle change to the position title and job description when his replacement arrived, but I can't remember the details. Maybe that person is now Senior Director of Bridge?

A bad hand for the system, really. At the tables where 1D-1H-1NT DOES deny 4 spades, responder bid 3NT immediately, and the opening lead was probably a spade. Now that you've pinpointed the club lead you are forced to play in diamonds, and all you can do is hope for a few of the others to go down in 3NT to get a few matchpoints back.

I thought it was self-evident, but I will use your example to try to make it clearer. If you play a board where the opponents have an obvious 6H+6, and neither side does anything stupid, you expect to get an average board. 1) You or your partner have the power to guarantee yourself a bad board - by bidding 7C, by underleading an ace at trick 1, or whatever else. 2) Your opponents have the power to give you a good board - by failing to bid slam, or by bidding 7H, or fumbling the laim, or whatever else. 3) Each other pair in the room holding your cards, has the power to give himself a bad board, and give you one extra matchpoint, by misdefending. Collectively, all-the-other-people-holding-your-cards make 1/4 of the decisions that affect what your score on the board will be. 4) Each other pair in the holding the slam cards, has the power to give himself a bad board, and cost you one extra matchpoint, by misdeclaring. Collectively, all-the-other-people-holding-your-opponents-cards make 1/4 of the decisions that affect what your score on the board will be. It so happens, on your example board, that you had an easy decision, and it wasn't particularly hard for you to do your part. In my view, on EVERY board, there is SOME result that would happen if everybody at the table did everything right. When the angels play against each other in Heaven, every board has been a 50% board since Satan was cast out :) In the real world, you can cost yourself your entitlement to an average board by a misjudgment, and so can your opponents, and so can the other people in the room. On the complicated boards where the bidding can go ten different ways, you very often make a mistake that your opponents could capitalize on (if they knew how.) Your table opponents make mistakes that give you chances back. The final outcome is a complicated mess -- determined by which side succeeded in throwing away more. Over the course of the evening, we expect you to face approximately the same number of "interesting" decisions as your table opponents do, as the NS at other tables do, and as the EW at other tables do. The way I choose to approach this statistics problem, we have the same question on every board -- which of the 4 groups of people makes mistakes, with what frequency and severity? The degree of difficulty faced by each side can be different on each board, as you observe. If you played an entire session of bridge able to see through the backs of your opponents' cards, but they couldn't see through yours, you would expect to get a score near 75%. You couldn't guarantee yourself more than that, because you can't force your opponents to make a mistake on every board, nor can you prevent the people at other tables from doing weird stuff so that your good boards won't always be tops. Adapting Helene's model to my philosophy, for each board we would need to draw two difficulty scores, D_NS and D_EW, from some distribution. And for each pair, let's have some quality measurement Q_i that says how often, on a relative scale, that pair makes errors. To get a "table result" on a board, we do something like let M_i, the number of mistakes made by pair i on this board, be Poisson(D_NS * Q_i) or Poisson(D_EW * Q_i), and take M_1-M_2 as the "result" from one table, M_3-M_4 the "result" from the next, and matchpoint them. Or a more complicated model that allows errors of different sizes. The results won't depend much, qualitatively, on exactly how complicated of a model you use. No argument at all that the distribution of scores from the rest of the field will stabilize as the number of comparisons on the board increases. (It stabilizes to a different distribution according to how strong the rest of the field is.)

You reached some different conclusions than I did, when I investigated some similar questions a while back, but we made very different assumptions, too. Some scattered thoughts: This is not at all what I would expect. Whatever scoring method you use on a particular board, your result is determined 1/4 by your partnership, 1/4 by your table opponents, and 1/2 by the people against whom you are compared. Comparing against a large field diminishes the noise added by the second half, the "luck of who you are compared against". Whether you play matchpoints on a T top or are cross-imps against T other tables, the variance of your scores is proportional to 1+1/T. This can be confirmed by live results, too -- I was "blessed" with a club with a lot of 2 1/2 table games in the winter, a while back, so had some data to compare T=1,2,3,4 from real life, plus T=12 from regionals. It is one reason I am surprised by the enduring popularity of head-to-head team matches, which are cursed with all the same extra randomness caused by only a single comparison that 2 1/2 table pairs games are. Non-statisticians seem to equate knowing the name of the source of the randomness and being able to yell at him after the session, with the result not being random. * * * This also reflects a different and imo rather unusual approach to the origin of swings. I've always taken the perspective that if nobody makes any mistakes, the expected score is close to average, and that swings occur only as a result of someone making a mistake -- whether that mistake is guessing the wrong final contract to play because the bidding has been jammed, or failing to double, or failing to defend right, or failing to declare right. Or, to put it another way, there is IMO no such thing as "creating" a swing by playing well -- only taking advantage of the opportunities for positive swings which your opponents create, and minimizing the number of opportunities for adverse swings that you create.

There is less to gain by appealing, but you can appeal on the basis of "the weightings are wrong" and not just on the basis of "you chose the wrong outcome as your 16th-percentile outcome" (if we are still using the "1/3 and 1/6" rule of thumb.) It diminishes the chance of an appeal changing the final outcome of a match - which I suppose cuts down on how many appeals are actually heard, since we just send people away mad when the appeal won't change the outcome. With weightings, everybody can go away mad from every ruling. The ACBL way, one side or the other actually feels like justice was served. I have a personal bias: I freely admit that I learned to direct from the 1987 lawbook in the ACBL, and felt the "old" Law 12C which survives only in the ACBL was a beautiful encapsulation of the spirit of justice. When I first heard about 12C3 -- as it was called in 1997 -- I said to myself "why on earth would I want to vary an assigned score 'to do equity'? 12C2 defines what equity is in this situation!" It's interesting that the rest-of-world's experience has been positive. (Or they've just gotten used to it, and the attitude toward appeals has changed in the past 17 years for other reasons.) I certainly understand why the ACBL's committee is uneasy about the change.

Remember that, just as you are passing your strong balanced hands because you are guaranteed to get a second shot --- when you play a bid like "2C = D or HS" you are giving the opening side a second shot, and removing them from a lot of pressure to immediately describe their hands as best they can. In the ACBL, you would be doing us an extra favor by playing an artificial defense against our 1C and allowing us to use transfer responses (which we cannot, if you pass or make a natural overcall, playing GCC.) In other jurisdictions, that's something we can take advantage of over natural overcalls too. Transfers by responder are realllly helpful, when opener is either balanced or strong. And, as already mentioned -- you are going to be shooting your own side in the foot as often as you're going to be interfering with our auction. By all means, devote X and 1D to showing artificial two-suited hands, because those don't take up any of our space. And make 1NT something artificial because you don't need it as a strong balanced hand. But I think you would do better to make 1H/1S/2C/2D/2H/2S natural. You accomplish something constructive for your side, and you threaten us with having to describe all of our big hands immediately.

...which was not, until recently, a Zero Tolerance club: All of the other reindeer used to laugh and call him names They never let poor Rudolph join in any reindeer games. http://taigabridge.net/temp/reindeer/3802_25.JPG My girlfriend makes the stuffed animals and sells them at local craft fairs. My contribution was organizing the sleigh team into two tables of bridge. The table in the background is playing in 4S after a transfer auction. I didn't hear the auction at the table at right, so I'm not sure if it's 1NT or a partscore in clubs. Not the same board, of course. They don't have a dealing machine. Don't want to spam the forum. But if anyone wants a PDF of it to print out and hang as a ZT poster at your local bridge club, or wants to know what other stuffed animals are available, links available from my website at http://taigabridge.n...reindeer/zt.htm

Too easy to get passed out in 3D on hands that are going to make any of three games. I have to do something forcing and make partner tell me more. Lacking any toys, that looks like 2H. Now somebody is going to come along and tell me 2H isnt forcing in Acol.

I voted 3H, but I am much closer to a forcing 3S or 4C call than I am to anything weaker.

That is a good point. A few of them were subs -- a single board at board 7 or 10, not continuing to 12 -- but about half started at board 1 then withdrew. Yes, displaying completion rate belongs in software suggestions. I wanted to post here in case someone official cared to comment on what they wanted us to do when we see this type of abuse going on.

I notice the same names over and over again at the Partnership Desk for the hourly ACBL games. No surprise there. The days I am bored and broke I have been known to put my name on the list every hour in hopes of scoring the occasional free game. Today I got curious how good the people asking their partners to pay their entry fees were, and looked up their recent activity in myhands. Imagine my surprise to see that one of these folks had played 10 ACBL games in the past two days. ONE game played to completion, and NINE games withdrawn after between 1 and 3 boards. Yes, I know some people will abandon a tournament if they start with a few bad boards... but this seems like a pretty serious abuse of others' generosity, to dump the people who "hire" you after a single board. Perhaps you could display Tourney Completion Rate statistic for people on the partnership desk? Only allow people with a certain completion rate to use the partnership desk?

It's an easily avoidable problem, by just not playing on 6-person teams. (I am only slightly facetious ... at sectionals and regionals, almost nobody plays 5- or 6-handed unless someone has to leave early or arrive late -- in which case the sitout arrangements are obvious.) I like awm's advice, as a generality. mikeh's last paragraph is properly prefaced with caveats, but it is still very dangerous advice from a team-spirit standpoint. It makes sense if you're trying to win the bermuda bowl. In most other events, it's rather unkind to the weak pair to never give them a chance to play against good opposition. My only experience on that front was a partnership-desk failure which resulted in me being on a 5-person team instead of driving home. I was at least as good, individually, as any of the others on the team, but none of them was a regular partner of mine. The captain decided to only play me-and-somebody-new against the weak opponents, and put in the original foursome against the good teams. If I had known he was going to do that I would have just gone home. It was a complete waste of a day, alternately playing against idiots and sitting out while the others lost to good teams and drew idiots again for the next match. I can see why he thought it was a good strategy to maximize his chance of winning (though the table results suggested it didn't turn out real well in practice) but I think it cost everybody more in stress that it could have gained anyone in matchpoints.

Yes, Simon's books are the obvious classic choice. One other recent book, besides the Pottage which you already found, is Dan Romm's Things Your Bridge Teacher Won't Tell You. A lot of his emphasis is on getting the best out of an unknown partner and surviving in a cut-for-partners money game. (From a duplicate perspective, I don't, to be honest, agree with many of his suggestions -- so comparing what he recommends for rubber vs. what everyone else recommends for duplicate is informative.) Almost all declarer play books spend almost all their time on rubber and IMP style play, with only one chapter or so devoted to matchpoint tactics. And, of course, if you just want to read about things in a rubber setting, many of the collections of hands (Kauder's Bridge Philosopher) and storybooks feature deals played at rubber. Of course most of those stories concentrate on the wild and crazy happenings, not on bread-and-butter rubber bridge.

I expect 1D-1S-2NT-6NT (or 6D) was a very common auction. With one partner, however, I could have had a nice cuebidding auction after agreeing diamonds at the 3-level. I would think most pairs that could agree diamonds and have room for West to ask for keys would be able to bid it. Easy for West to count to 13 after he knows that East's controls include the ♠K. Edited to add: most regular/good pairs, I mean. With an unknown partner in an individual I would be leaping to six too rather than investigating.

However good or bad doubling 1C on the first round might have been, coming in now, after the opps have pinpointed their strength and established that it's a misfit, seems suicidal.

How customizable is the BML-to-HTML-or-LaTeX post-processing? Suppose, for instance, I didn't want 4-color suit symbols, or I wanted the rebids only indented half as far, etc. I suppose what I really mean is "how much Python would a person have to learn to do this" -- instead of doing search and replace on the output or something.

The problem with "easing in" is that your intended victim needs to be able to see something that is either better, or more fun, or both, than the methods he is using. Switching from a solid standard system to 1960s precision is a sufficiently big step backward that it might frighten your friends away from the system for life. The best way to recruit anyone to any new toy is to examine a hand that their current system doesn't handle, and show them how your new toy solves a problem for them. Admittedly this is easier when it comes to adding individual conventions late in the auction than when choosing an opening bid structure.

Against known strong opponents I would run. My opinion of the average BBO random is low enough that I would take my chances.

Assuming 4H now is natural, it would show something like a 3H or 4H opening. I would be looking for KJxxxxx or AKJTxx or similar. You'd need to add about a king of generic strength to this hand to force me to make a least-of-evils bid, probably 4S. I guess that means xx QJxxx AKJx xx is my answer to your second question.

"Too strong" for 2 and too weak for 1? No, there isn't. But there are hands which have their values in the wrong place for a preempt, which are too weak for 1. I am willing to open a weak two with two aces, but not a 3- or 4-bid. I pass Jxxxxx xx Kxx KQx, but it's not because it is "too strong" for 2S.

Mine vary by a full trick for each vulnerability change (KQJTxx xx xxx xx is a pass at unfav, 2S at equal, and 3S at fav for me). Of the posted hands, the first I always open at favorable. The second I feel is very borderline, but I could talk myself into it.

Remember too that playing the same range as the field is not the only way to get to the same contract from the same side as the rest of the field frequently. For instance, weak notrump without transfers means your auction will be 1NT-2H and the strong notrumpers' auctions will be 1m-1H-1NT-2H. Similarly you could, if you wanted, open 1C on the hands the rest of the room opens a strong notrump, and play transfer responses to 1C (if your local regulations allow it.) But really, I do not think it is much of a factor. You are playing your system because you believe it is better that what those other idiots are playing. If your system gets you to a different spot than the field, you are expecting to profit from that.

Your treatment is a reasonable though far from universal one. As for names... Please don't call it that. The terms "positive double" and "negative double" have an ancient though now mostly forgotten history. Once upon a time, "positive double" was a generic term for doubles that showed values in the suit doubled -- that is, penalty and lead-directing doubles -- and "negative double" a generic term for bids that didn't -- that is, various flavors of takeout and artificial doubles. They survive in their original meaning today only in the "negative slam double" (doubling a slam to deny a defensive trick and demand that partner sacrifice unless he has two tricks) and the "positive slam double" (doubling a slam to promise one defensive trick, telling partner to sacrifice with no tricks and leave the double in with one more.) I think it would be perfectly clear to simply call your double in the present auction a negative double by opener. The term has been used (or abused, according to your taste) that way by people who play artificial club openings and double to show hearts in your auction, or after 1c-(p)-1s-(2d), etc.

Every possible lead is considered, but D7 and D6 are equals, as are C654 and SJT. There are no signals to give partner in double-dummy analysis. The program will run under DOS on an ancient machine. The learning curve can be steep, however.