pilowsky

Things get worse. The previous day this bidding happened. [hv=d=n&v=0&b=1&a=1c1h2hp2sp3cppp]133|100[/hv] This time, my partner was unhappy because my 2♥ bid was Michaels. The good news was We got a top board because she is an excellent card player and made an overtrick. So I did not want to risk any bid that might be misinterpreted. Bold action was called for. I bid 6♥. Here's the 'de-identified' result

In fact, the situation is much worse. Here is the auction: [hv=d=s&v=b&b=7&a=p1s2d]133|100[/hv] I'm sitting with this hand. Additional information: I have played with my partner every morning for many months but our bidding against interference is not well worked out. What would you bid? What does she have? Here is my Hand: [hv=pc=n&e=s6hakt986532d986c]133|100[/hv] P<0.0001 9310 KR rates this at 18.85 After the game, my partner complained that it took me a full minute to come up with the wrong bid. This link shows how the robots play it.

Pilowsky - Povratnik 43.75% 2/2 https://webutil.brid...b=web&v3v=5.6.6 Pilowsky - Tim_ucin 56.25% 1/2 https://webutil.brid...b=web&v3v=5.6.6

LOL Thanks to you Tu now I know...

Thanks Stephen. I have never competed in anything before except regular Club games. I started playing in Feb 2019. So the ins and outs of competitive Bridge are a complete mystery to me. Here is the screenshot. I 'friended' Gisele first to check that she was a person so I thought she was human, but who can tell? It won't let me start until they 'accept'.

Hi - I have completed a challenge with tim_ucin. Have challenged GIB and povratnik but they have not accepted.

Where is the fun in that? This is a very interesting question. One that I am uniquely qualified to answer since I was raised by a family of psychiatrists and I am also a neuroscientist with a special interest in amines, including dopamine, serotonin and noradrenaline. These chemicals are found in the brain and are also known as the 'fun' neurotransmitters. One of the first things I learned in psychiatry in medical school was that "the more amines you have, the happier you are". This was useful to me later as a pharmacologist. Whenever I wanted to know if a drug might have a positive or negative effect on 'affect' (posh medical word for mood) I would just check to see if that drug would raise or lower brain amines. The Professor that told us that phrase also showed us a graph. The graph shows that the effective dose of antipsychotic drugs correlates with their affinity at the dopamine (D2) receptor). All a bit esoteric I agree. What about fun? What is fun for one person is different from others. Some people derive great solace, pleasure, comfort, perhaps fun, when there is extreme order in the universe. You may be familiar with seeing children that carefully line up objects in order of size and shape. The term for this is 'punding'. In and of itself no big deal, I do it myself sometimes. Everyone likes a bit of order in their universe from time to time. Carried to extremes to the exclusion of everything else, it may be a problem. Another type of 'fun' is extremely common in casinos. It is the reason BBO stays in business. Psychologists call it 'intermittent positive reward' - my poodles just love it. Bridge is an ideal game for this because the element of chance and randomness introduced by the presence of other humans in the game means that even very weak layers (like me) can sometimes get a good score. That is at a tournament-wide level. On a 'micro' level, one can sometimes get a hand where you know from experience that there is an outside chance of hitting the jackpot if bid or played in particular way. It may not appeal to the 'punders' but it certainly appeals to the punters. I'll leave the bar for the lawyers

Stephen Tu Pilowsky 40.63% 2/2 https://webutil.bridgebase.com/v2/tview.php?t=ARDCHALLENGE:7872bcd4.db2d.11ea.b96d.0cc47a39aeb4-1597079892&u=pilowsky&v3b=web&v3v=5.6.6 Heart76 Pilowsky 50% tied https://webutil.bridgebase.com/v2/tview.php?t=ARDCHALLENGE:4b839bec.d7ef.11ea.b96d.0cc47a39aeb4-1596723335&u=pilowsky&v3b=web&v3v=5.6.6 Ant590 Pilowsky 34.38% 2/2 https://webutil.bridgebase.com/v2/tview.php?t=ARDCHALLENGE:8302c738.d404.11ea.b96d.0cc47a39aeb4-1596292643&u=pilowsky&v3b=web&v3v=5.6.6 Nige1 Pilowsky 50% tied https://webutil.bridgebase.com/v2/tview.php?t=ARDCHALLENGE:e23fae50.d5a6.11ea.b96d.0cc47a39aeb4-1596472332&u=pilowsky&v3b=web&v3v=5.6.6 zupey Pilowsky 40.63% 2/2 https://webutil.bridgebase.com/v2/tview.php?t=ARDCHALLENGE:05c85ec2.d248.11ea.b96d.0cc47a39aeb4-1596101736&u=pilowsky&v3b=web&v3v=5.6.6 Smerriman Pilowsky 53.13 1/2 https://webutil.bridgebase.com/v2/tview.php?t=ARDCHALLENGE:74e6b015.d2ac.11ea.b96d.0cc47a39aeb4-1596144872&u=pilowsky&v3b=web&v3v=5.6.6

He won't need to do that. By October it will have completely disappeared and all of America will be fit, healthy, six feet tall, blonde, and ready to vote in person. Carrying an exposed handgun. No problem. The corn will be as high as an elephants eye. Just in time for COVID20.

It's interesting, the reason for all the ruffing was to keep the ♥J in dummy and squeeze the ♣'s. I wanted to avoid having to take a finesse. In the end the plan worked. Even if the ♣Q was off-side the contract was safe. As it happens, the finesse works but I think that by keeping the trumps in that order the contract was secure.

Again in a cheap duplicate IMP's tournament, I get this hand [hv=pc=n&s=shq93dajtcakq9872]133|100[/hv] Well, a solid 16 HCP - I have to bid 1NT! My colleague the North robot of course transfers me to Spades. I was ready for this and bid 3NT. North had other ideas. 6NT. West leads the ♥4 Here's dummy [hv=pc=n&n=skqj984hajdq52ct4]133|100[/hv] Here's what happened - I was a bit surprised the robots don't often return their partners leads! http://www.bridgebas...9381-1597136761 This was the high point - I managed a well-deserved 2nd last after this.

I take it that you are talking about the $0.29 duplicate challenge format IMP tournaments and the $0.45 MP tournaments. For all the reasons that you mention, I think they are great. There are usually a variety of players, the outcome is stratified and they are generally well-paced. The challenge format means that if you complete your boards early you can kib other players and watch your standing change. I prefer the IMPS format because even up to the end there is a chance of a swing to compensate for errors at the start. Plus they are a few cents cheaper . Either way, great value and a lot of fun. I hope they continue.

Thanks for that

That's exactly what I said. Good job.

It's the same source. "Our World in Data" - I constructed the original link to show how badly the USA performed vis a vis a collection of other comparable and not comparable countries. It's a great resource. You can tailor-make all kinds of graphics. I really recommend exploring it. Your illustration is also excellent - there are many ways of showing how uselessly corrupt this administration is. The availability of great data in the modern era compared with previous disasters is astonishing. Appalling advice and behaviour has occurred for decades but without the current ability to see it so easily. To me, the remarkable thing is that he may yet get away with murder.

North opens 1♥ and I have [hv=pc=n&s=saq64haj97datct76]133|100[/hv] Big money is on the line. $0.29. There's a Novice competing who has a rank of 22. I'm suspicious. The bidding winds it way up - I've learned control bidding from the robots. I'm still a bit concerned when I get placed in 7♥ and find myself with two potential losers. I'm playing as North, here are the two hands after East leads ♦Q. [hv=pc=n&s=saq64haj97datct76&n=s9hkqt8542d3cakj3&d=n&v=n&b=5&a=1hp2np3dp3sp4cp4sp4np5cp5np6hp7hppp]266|200[/hv] Most of the others were in 6H+1 - You'll see why when you look at the full hand. But there is a way to make it safely. Here's my movie Naturally - it is not the best contract - but I was pretty happy having stuffed up a nice 6NT a few minutes earlier. Here's the 'Novice's' movie.

If you want to see how Trump and his cavalcade of crooked criminal cronies have comprehensively corruscated a country,Click the arrow at the bottom left to start. You can change the scale from log to linear at the top left. It looks more impressive linear. https://tinyurl.com/y3hvkves Watch how the USA comprehensively stuffs it up with a combination of incompetence, and generally poor governance and a worthless health insurance system along with an obesity and diabetes epidemic. This is what a 3rd world country truly looks like.<br style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">

So they do. https://tinyurl.com/y3ursenj. But they draw the line at 9 https://tinyurl.com/y6qsymn6

What is an opening hand for GIB? Bridge players are opening on lower and lower hand strengths, but the hand strength that GIB opens with can still be a bit mystifying. The BBO convention card does not stipulate an opening HCP range for an opening hand in for suits; only expected minimum lengths. It does stipulate a range for two-level openings. 5-11 for D,H,S and 22+ or 9+ tricks for C's. By inference then, one might expect that GIB would regard 12+ as an opening hand. It turns out that the method that GIB uses to assess the quality of an opening hand is a bit more subtle than A=4, K=3 etc. I suspect that something akin to the KR calculator was incorporated into the GIB simulator. I think this is because GIB does not always open on 12 at the 1 level, It sometimes opens with 11 at the 1 level, and I have also seen it pass hands that some of us would open at the two-level. To test this idea a little more rigorously, I generated two sets of hands where the North robot was the dealer and either had 11 or 12 HCP. The shape and the rest of the HCP were distributed randomly. I acknowledge in advance that the sample size is small (16 in each set). On the other hand, it is not so small that some interesting results did not emerge. Each set of hands was given to four robots to play at a teaching table while I watched and recorded (hands were generated by Playbridge. The only stipulation was that North must have 12 and only 12 or 11 and only 11 HCP. In the first set, North opened every hand it was dealt (16/16). NS ended up as Declarer in 8/16 contracts. I will not comment on whether or not they were the 'best contracts' or the quality of the play, since nobody else played them, and who am I to judge the play. Still, it is interesting to note that in this group, the Declarer made or exceeded their contract 13/16 times. In the second set of Hands, North always has 11HCP. This time, North still opened the bidding 6/16 times. The reason; shapely hands: 6331;3NTS+1, 5521 ; 4CE+1, 5431; 6CW=, 8221; 4CN+2 5440;5CE. Finally, I generated 16 hands where North had 10HCP. North passed all of them. Given that there were only 16 hands, and 79.5% of hands do not have a 6 card suit - and the 6 card suit must not be Clubs - this does not seem unusual. From all of this, I would conclude that GIB never opens with less than 11. It will frequently open with a shapely 11, and will almost invariably open with 12. As with Stayman, GIB seems to be using something more than is revealed in the system notes or on the card to calculate the value of its hand.

Don't worry - it will all go away in the heat...

So do the advanced robots in Prime. This is the OP's hand. North not vul. was Dealer, and passed. https://tinyurl.com/y4ejrv3e

It may be 'dumb' but if you don't know, you don't know.

There are many ways that you can calibrate yourself. This is one way that I quite like. I use it as a continuous quality improvement tool. Remember, in the end, it's just a game. Compete in the BBO MP1 daylong number 1 at least 5- 10 times and compute an average score. This tournament attracts over 1000 players a day some are very good some are not. This means that you can take your result at the end and see where you stand. If you score as follows you can consider yourself: up to 30% Novice/Beginner 30-40% Intermediate 40-50% Advanced 50-60% Expert 60-70% World Expert More than 70% Elite. I developed this using a spreadsheet that someone published. It's based on the Elo system that is used for rating players in Chess. Once players get above 60% they can start to make a living out of the game. World Champions are in the 'Elite' category. NB I'm not talking about on-off performances.

How many moves ahead can you see? Capablanca was asked - Only one - he replied. "But it's always the right one" :)

That's right. It's right here next to me :)