hotShot

I haven't tried it but http://www.rpbridge.net/rpdw.htm seems useful.

If you think it's stupid, why do your read it? :P Most of us are here in the forum because we want to get better and we miss a measure that can tell us, if we are successfully improving ourselves. And the big question is what to improve first and how to do it. And to many in this thread, the question: 'What is more important to improve b or p? ', is vital.

Let's say there are ~1% top bridge players, ~18% advanced player and lets hope we have at least ~1% player new to bridge. This would mean that 80% of the bridge player are at the beginner or intermediate level. At these level card play is the key problem, they don't notice that because if they miss a trick each board declaring and each opp misses a trick each board defending, they play 1 trick over par. There are lots of intermediate player that play all the gadgets that the advanced player use, but usually they lose big to advanced opps.Good card player lose about 1 trick in 4-5 boards against DD-play and this includes those cases where the DD-solver drops a single K and makes perfect leads on uninformative bidding. A beginner will lose about 1 trick/board. So the average over 4 boards is that the 2 advanced pair will declare 2 times winning an average of 4 tricks and defend 2 times winning 2 tricks and perhaps lose 1 of these 6. This is a lot, because some of these tricks will be make the difference between win vs. lose, game vs. partscore, or even game vs. slam. I would say that card play is the key difference between intermediate and advanced.

For those with a deeper interest on how GIB works: http://www.jair.org/media/820/live-820-1957-jair.pdf

Has anybody read this? http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=4749256

Thank you for trying to answer my question, I agree that this is not a textbook lead, but this no textbook hand either. I just dispute that it is "strange", when underleading a red Q obviously has disadvantages on this hand and there is a reasonable chance that leading ♠ and by that finessing partners possible ♠ honors might not be good. So no suit is really appealing.

On my old computer, the DD-Solver of Bo Haglunds DD-Solver with a script of Deal 3.1 of Thomas Andrews could determine all 20 results (4directions*5 denominations) of about 1000 Deals in an hour. It reuses the generated tree, for different declarers playing the same denomination. There are save ways to speed up the problem.

If you go to someones profile, you can award him/her stars, by clicking on the star that represents your desired number. I assume the displayed number of stars is an average.

I'm really impressed Al, how you manage to avoid the point and create a diversion. If the world is getting warmer, from the large surfaces of the oceans more water will evaporate. So there is more water in the air that can rain down. This and the temperature will change the locations where the rain will occur. So you expect regions where there will be more rain and others where there is less rain.

First of all you should be aware (and I'm sure you are) that the deviation, gets generally smaller, the higher the contract is. This is caused by the fact that the opening lead will be better, the more information is available at the time of the lead. Since the DD-Solver has perfect information and the human player does not know much (e.g. 1NT p p p). The function you are looking for does not only depend on the population size. A key factor is the question you want to answer. If you want do generate informations about something equally likely, than a small sample will be enough. If you want to analyze 2 possible lines of play and one has 68% and the other has 70%, you will need big sample size to be sure that there is a significant difference between the 2.

Years ago I read a little of the thesis Ginsberg wrote about developing GIB and I remember that he implemented an algorithm to determine which cards are equivalent. The easiest example is: If you hold AKQ in a suit it is irrelevant which card you play, so instead of 3 subtrees you only have to investigate 1. Another example is that if you hold 97 and the 8 was played in an earlier trick than they are equivalent. Once you found equivalence you can use it, in all nodes to come.

Are you seriously suggesting that when I'm told that declarer has a single in ♦, that I should waste my time and energy to consider what I would have done when declarer has in fact at least 3 ♦ cards? The moment declarer pulls his 2nd ♦ card, I know that I was damaged, but I have no idea (yet) what I would have done. No it's not your job to analyze the board for him, but you should accept that a player might need a few minutes before he can tell you what different course his bidding/play would have taken. But it seems our positions are not that much apart as my first impression was.

I think this is an important point and I would like to add, that since we pretty well know of at least 21 HCP in our and openers hand, it is almost sure that partner will face a difficult decision once LHO bids 1♠ or 1NT. If we bid with this hand and don't bit with "Qx AJxxx Qxx xxx" partner is in a much better position to make his decision.

I don't think that is a wise course to follow. While the bidding and play of a hand develops step by step, a player has a time to think about the given situation, when the TD is called he does not have the time to rethink everything step by step given the new different situation and of cause now that he knows about the cards he is no longer unbiased. You put a lot of pressure on the NOS. They notice something that might be irregular, call the TD and when the TD arrives they have to have worked out how exactly they were damaged. Hope for them you are always busy at the other end of the room ......

The "Java" Version is not Java, but a FLASH application. Perhaps that kept you from finding something.

Your completed tourneys "age" away. So if you complete 3 tourneys today, at some point in time all 3 will fall out of the time frame. If you play fewer tourneys at the end of the time frame, you lose old completed tourney faster than you play new ones. If you go on a long holiday, you can completely lose your completion rate. To slow again ....

What is so strange about this lead? All bids where artificial, so nothing is known about the suits, but partner could have doubled ♦ and ♠, he's probably strong enough for a dbl. RHO has shown 19+ and LHO made a 2nd negative. All of partners values are in front of declarer and declarer might be cut of from dummy, as dummy is to weak to have an entry. Any suit I touch, I play a finesse though partners hand that could help the declarer. The only "save" card is the A♣ and if partner signals positiv, the problem is solved. Even if partners signal is negative, it probably won't cost a trick.

Just to get the Syntax clear: A DD-Solver looks at all 4 hands and searches for the optimal play for each player knowing the layout of the cards. I would guess that every current Bridge program also has a SD-Solver. This Single-Dummy solver, only knows one players hand and when available dummys hand. GIB's SD-Solver, guesses several deals where the holding of the 2(3 at the lead) unknown hands fit the bidding and the previous played cards. For each of these deals GIB uses the DD-Solver to find the optimal play on that simulated deal. You can set the time how long GIB is allowed to do this and by that determinate how many different deals GIB can analyze. The SD-Solver then picks an action from the established set of good moves on other deals. The fewer cards are left to play, the more information about the hands is available and the less time the DD-solver needs to analyze a deal. During the first tricks GIB bases its decisions on a small number of simulations, near the end of a deal GIB can analyze almost all possible holdings. Analyzing the same deal with the SD-Solver could get you e.g. different leads, because the decision is based on a different set of simulations.

As phil_20686 pointed out, it is also a matter of level. I really doubt that a player of FrancesHinden's team playing in Poznan, has less than good card play skills. Although at that level excellent card play can still make a difference, bidding gets more important. A typical declarer at beginner level, will often capture his high card tricks before he developed his long suit, losing unnecessary tricks since he's out of stopper now. Imagine a NT contract and you hold 3 cards in 3 different suits. You have an Ace, a Jack (in a suit where K and Q are still out) and a 6 (the last card of that suit). Most of you would have the informations added, because you can count, to those I suggest to play an individual tournament with average BBO player an be prepared to see them throw away the 6 most of the time.

In theory the DD-Solver can not go wrong, but software is programmed by humans and humans can implement software bugs and software runs on hardware created by humans and sometimes they have engineered a bug into the hardware. So if 2 GIB's produce different results, and there is no input error, than I hope one of them is the version that is corrected. If you ever see such a hand again it would be great to post it.

Bidding is the most overrated part of bridge. I think that is a consequence from the fact that most books and teachers lessons are about bidding. I think that is because it is incredibly hard to teach declarer play and defense. A good card player, playing on BBO will usually make1 trick more declaring, than the average player on BBO. If his partner is a good card player too, than they will also average 1 trick more defending. (Mostly because a large number of players, declare and defend really bad.) Even if their bidding would be below average, they would score at the partscores, they will punish overly optimistic game bids and even sub-standard bidder won't miss every game. Such a pair should usually rank in the upper third of a BBO tourney result and the same is true for many club games. Additionally you should think about this, if someone is bad at card play, how can he judge the full potential of his hand and that of the combined hands? If someones judgment is bad, how can he be a good bidder, if he bases his decisions on his lower trick taking ability? Finally is it possible to be a good bidder, if you are a bad card player? Based on this I am pretty sure that card play outranks bidding.

If you look down at the end of every page, you will discover a link to the company that develops this forum software.

Haven't I just read that downvoting is disabled?

It doesn't matter how often I check my post or if I use the preview the Moment the post was sent, I encounter an error..... This would result in nearly all of my posts having an edit line. People would waste time to reread my post unless they carefully compare the posting time with the edit time. So I am against a forced edit tag. People will realize that if they want that a change to a post is noticed they have to add a remark or a new post. If you answer to a post that might be changed, quote it, the quote does not change. But I it is enforced , that won't stop me posting.

edit