mugsmate

Remember, I read your article and I spent some time thinking about how to prove your hypotheses. I also attempted to address your comment regarding your uncertainty about why the board distribution was asymmetric. I was very keen to get your thoughts on what I'd written. Instead, a dismissive, rude remark that makes me feel I wasted all that time. That is not a good way to treat people.

If you aren't interested in other people's ideas, don't bother posting in future. I thought there were some interesting ideas here, and would have happily helped. Absolutely no cause for your rudeness. I note no reply to my suggestion for how to tackle proving your hypothesis. Best regards.

OK - but the skewness of your MP/board distribution is still more a function of how the robots play than anything else.

OK, understood, so Robots take over from pairs that drop out? In which case, your asymmetry has to be due to how people perform against Robots versus against people. So "when playing robots" 0-50% is flatter than 50-100% Well, that makes sense. The robots make very few zero inducing errors relative to the human performers, but are calibrated to play at the average level of the field.

"2. To what extent is tournament success “predestined” (determined more by the type of hand that people were dealt rather than how the board was played)" You could probably look to do this from the data set you hold. You calculated the "Board variance" for each hand played. Define a player's: Average_Board_Variance as the average of the board variances for all the boards they happened to play in the tournament. Then for every given tournament, compute the distribution of "Average_Board_Variance" for all participants and the Average_Board_Variance of the winner. For every tournament played, return the percentile position of the winner's Average_Board_Variance on the distribution for all the players. Now, you can plot that, and see how often players win tournaments as a function of how flat their boards were relative to he boards in play. You can plot that for tournaments of different lengths.

I don't understand what I'm looking at. If you have all the players, how can the median not be 50%? Any result, R%, a player gets, their opponents will get (100-R)% so the distribution has to be symmetric unless you haven't got all the data.

I think it will be fun for us all to be facing unusual situations all the time. Practising online has really rekindled my enthusiasm for the game. It's thegarve s concept and it has genuine bridge merit. I hope you all enjoy thinking about how to defend it and await the pl with interest.

I wouldn't worry about preparing. Anyone stupid enough to play a 1D fert is clearly so bad as to not have a chance anyway. Probably best is to forget its a fert, overcall liberally, overbid to game and go for 1100.

Wrong question: 4S on previous round would imply something in hearts and spade shortage (no club fit jump) and partner could would be better placed than me to decide what to do.

5S making? How can that possibly happen? How about 4S one off? South leads the hA looking for a ruff; north discourages and south switch to the c10, surrounding the Jack.

The auction continued: 4D P P P Dummy held AQxxx xx AKJxx x, and was intending to bid blackwood over a 4H cuebid from partner. So the opposition got incredibly lucky, that the overcaller had a hand where he wasn't just rebidding spades at some level and going for an enormous penalty. The Scottish team accepted that 4D was failrly automatic, but asked for a ruling in any case, although they presented no bridge case for why they might get one. There was a hastily arranged "appeal hearing" between the director and the teams in the hotel foyer after the match, where the Scottish captain seemed to be on a "fishing expedition". I think captains should consider a bit more carefully whether and why they have a case before wasting everyone's time on frivolous appeals.