etha

ok so no one seems to think there is any reason to investigate any slam for any reason. Let me ask just one more question where do you want to play the hand if you can see both hands and know west has overcalled 2♦. This is probably a hard question lets see what anyone says.

This might be more interesting for you if west overcalls 3♦. What is happening now?

I didn't include this as my response to 1NT as I assumed more people played your sequence as shortage showing than natural.

Here is partners hand for those people wanting to bid the hand with a partner or playing anything even slightly non standard. [hv=pc=n&s=s83haq43d3caqt853]133|100[/hv]

If you opened 1NT partner bids 2♣ and the next hand overcalls 2♦ partners hand is in the next post in case you play something interesting over 1nt. For example if you play Heeman they wld make another bid , does anyone play this?

If you did not bid 1♠ skip to the next post. If you opened 1♠ partner bids 2♣ unless you are playing something strange in which case feel free to tell me partners hand is two posts down. and west overcalls 2♦.

You are playing in an event where all the opponents players are equivalent to the top 100th player in the world. 30, 16 bd matches using some victory point scale. All systems are allowed even forcing passes pick your favourite and read on. if you have a partner their hand shd appear in a later post. So bd one non vul dealer north. You are north with [hv=pc=n&n=saqj64ht96dkt9ckj]133|100[/hv] Feel free to respond with any interesting points about the hands or bidding as we go on. I'm guessing this is pretty straight forward so far for most systems you just have to decide whether this is in your NT range if you include 5 card spades in them. So my first question is what do you evaluate this hand to be worth for NT, 14, 15 or some other amount? Also let me know if you didn't open 1♠ or 1NT. I'll keep adding to this topic as the hand develops.

We used QP as the first step after shape is known, but on hands where you want to RKCB we used the next 4 steps after that ordering the suits by length. So if shape is resolved at 3♦, 3♥=QP, 3♠=RKCB in longest suit 4♣ = RKCB second longest 4 ♥ 3rd and 4♠ 4th. Sorry if you already knew all this and were specifically asking about the parity stuff.

Will it be illegal to keep them in a dark cupboard?

Yes I was never very convinced by Roger Penrose's arguements about what machines can theorectically ever do. Of course he had a vested interest in them not being able to do some things human brain's can do given he thinks souls exist. Assuming the brain really is only made up of the stuff we can see without inventing something there is obviously no reason to suppose a computer can't do everything a human brain can.

I doubt Jack would win the BB. It is ok but I doubt it would win a JEC match for example but it would be competitive. You can get some idea of current robot strength from Wbridge which runs daily duplicate match point events free with 3 players being robots and one live player. Wbridge plays some insane methods which is a drawback, jack is at least changeable enough to can probably find a cc you can stand to play with it. Might be interesting to see how jack or wbridge does as a robot/human partnership, if anyone wants to try let me know I can run wbridge on bbo reasonably easily as it has a one hand mode unlike jack. Jack's bidding is worse than top players, its declarer play is its best ability which is on a par with pretty much the best I claim.

I think it would do the same. ai already at decent level just can't beat best players now.

So the regulations pretty much force you to Psyche if you think it is a winning action to open with low HCP in 3rd seat. Maybe the regulations are the cause of the problem? The rules as I understand them are pretty stupid you are allowed to do something that is against the rules provided you pretend you never thought of it before. I mean how long do you have to play before you see a light 3rd in hand opener? It is either against the rules or it isn't, having this wishy-washy well its against the regulations but you can do it once or twice with the same partner when it has been recorded is silly.

In the olden days I thought bidding 1NT here showed clubs. Has this practice been stopped, and is it now bid with pretty much any hand without a major? Does it matter if 1♣=2+ or 3+?

I thought of another point. lets say a pair agrees that 3rd in hand bids can be made on anything. Is this a legal agreement or do you have to have a minimum HCP for openers? If a country has a rule where there is a limit on the HCP then does this become a psyche? At the top level it would seem to make sense to just gather the data electronically of what bids are made with what hands and then simply tell the opponents in the system disclosure. So in the example above the cc would simply say 3rd in hand bids can be made on anything which would match the bids made. And if it turned out they were more defined then a matching tool could deal with that too.

They used to have events in England for the opponents of the op to play in they were called No Fear events and I think the idea was to allow beginners to play in a no psyches or weird conventions environment and experience a tournament. I've no idea if they still exist though, and certainly for anyone who has played more than a Cpl of tournaments not allowing psyches is clearly not bridge. When I was young I played at a local club and opened 1nt every single hand when it was passed to me. I got to the last table and there was a 93 and a 87 year old and I thought hmm its a bit unfair to bid 1nt here so I passed my 16 count and it went pass 1 heart pass so I bid 3nt making 11 for a top, the field played 6nt -1 oddly. This was more and experiment to show 1nt is always the right bid than anything else and it was of course almost certainly illegal though pard was a pretty straight as a die person and I didn't actually notice any odd bidding. Anyway to sum up psyching is part of bridge but clubs have the right to hold events or normal club nights and say please don't do it against people who might be offended. But at anything like a competitive level it is a ridiculous proposition.

One way to study this problem which is getting better all the time is to use a decent computer bridge program and set the options you want to compare and let it play 1000 hands or so with the methods you are looking at. The best for this now is Jack which is almost good enough for this to be worthwhile. You can either have it play the hands out or dbl dummy them if you think that's valid for faster results. with your given hand you can make it use Bergen or drury for example but I suspect you wont ever be able to tell it to bid 1 spade. Another way is to use the deal program to generate the hands and bid them yourself and dbl dummy solve them again. A final way would be to interrogate a database of expert level hands and look at the ones that fit, but finding out what methods were used might be hard.

You might want to consider not opening 2c whenever possible. You can for example open that hand 1d maybe if you play short enough 1d. Now you have a lot more room and you should be fine. There are of course some hands where you can't raise diamonds which you might have wanted to do playing this way.

Thomas Andrews has done some work on various evaluation methods here is a link to one of his articles. http://bridge.thomasoandrews.com/valuations/misunderstandings.html

I think the first place to start is hand evaluation. just try comparing the standard point count and A=6 K=4 q=2 j=1 t=0.5 9= 0.25 normalised to 40 for example. If this makes a massive difference then you should use it for future sims.

Reese suggested you can jump into the second suit provided this is a nonsense response to the ask. This tends to be ok when partner bids 1NT control ask for example because you can now bid 3!d which isn't a number of controls that it is possible for you to hold. It is ok over 1!s in this case too as I doubt your artificial responses go as far as 3!d. Sometimes though with different suits you are more stuck. If you have the time and a decent memory learning a symmetric relay method over 1!c is worthwhile in my opinion.

could pard have bid 1nt with a min balanced hand without a spade stop and only 4 hearts? if he could then it seems we pretty much never want to play in NT now.

You can save the deals as a PBN and review them later or how you want if that helps. I suspect you wouldn't have liked the others much if you think Jack is "Spartan". Glad to have been of some help.

There are only 8 this year. http://www.allevybridge.com/allevy/computerbridge/results2015.html

If you want free the best is Wbridge. It is French but it is pretty much translated. Its only drawback is no fancy systems such as precision if you play one of those. Wbridge has won the world computer champs at least 3 times and is very nearly as good as jack. It isn't as nice or user friendly as jack. It also has a bridge club associated with it where you can play match points with 3 computer opps scored against the other humans doing the same. It does have a few annoying things like it insists on French stayman and it didn't understand RKCB for queens last time I tried it. getting 60% regularly in this event makes you a good player. The Computer World championship is in August 2015. Jack isn't currently the world champion but it didn't play in the last one. I expect it will probably win however. Jack plays most things you will want it to and is more user friendly than the other top programs. I quite like qplus which tends to come approximately 4th and has a more human style and you can set up simulations more easily than the others. It will play most systems and conventions too. It also has enter what your bid means feature which tells the opps what your bid means. This is less good than it sounds in that the opps often ignore this knowledge or have no way to bid differently as a result of knowing it anyway, but if you play something complicated it will at least tend to avoid playing in your suit with this. I think the current world champion is Shark which I had a bit of a look at and it didn't have many options for systems and things.