StevenG

How do you guarantee that for the player who is persuaded to direct for the session with limited directing experience? That is the reality is a typical English bridge club - no qualified directors, but somebody has to do it.

You need partners. If you're going to walk into a bridge club without a partner and play with a pickup, you have to play the local standard system. It doesn't matter what you think is theoretically best, if your partner doesn't know it.

Partner gave no useful information at trick one.

[hv=pc=n&w=sk54haq9432dacaq7&n=sat76hkjt7dt65ct2&d=e&v=b&b=10&a=pp1hpp2c2hpp3cdppp]266|200[/hv] Club game, MPs, everyone playing some form of Acol. I led my singleton A♦. Dummy was a bit dispiriting. What next?

1♦ is great until they overcall a major (usually with a weak jump).

Do you play club bridge?

English club game? 2NT is 11-12 balanced, doesn't deny a 4-card suit anywhere. 4♦ is game invite.

My experience is different. When I play in non-affiliated clubs, I find that the majority of the weaker players have no carding, and, when playing low, just play the lowest card, whatever. This includes people I've known for almost 20 years.

I asked three (appropriate) players this morning how they learned the game. All had taken classes and been taught traditional Acol with strong 2s. After that they had just played amongst themselves. They had converted to Benji at some stage, but mainly by learning from their peers. Ordinary players, in general, do not play socially with strong players, and never get the improvement in their game that would result. Most players aren't interested in "system" (despite what the maths-geek types who inhabit this forum might think), nor do they read books. They just play, and they're happy.

Has anybody researched how often the DD line equates to the best line? (I know everyone knows about dropping singleton kings and only taking finesses that work - but how often does this affect things?)

Thanks Campboy. I've now voted, inaccurately, for 2♦ in both sections. I would never trust partner to understand 1NT if undiscussed, and the pass virtually reveals that he didn't. Even if he did, my tricks are far too slow for 1NT.

Trying to vote - forum crashes, and vote not registered.

So both I and my partner could open 1 with as many 15-counts as we like as long as we don't discuss it? Or, even better, as long as each remembers to say "You shouldn't do that partner, that's not our agreement" after each instance?

RAs are allowed to regulate much of what is played. There is, presumably, a purpose to this, in that by restricting what may be played, the powers that be think it makes the game fairer and therefore more enjoyable to the membership. Allowing psychs is completely against the spirit of this. I assume they are allowed for historical reasons only, also that it is mainly the players at the top of the game who have the most influence who are most vociferous about the retention of psyching. Virtually all the bridge I see is psych-free. People hate them. I have never seen an intermediate club player complain that the opponents were playing a complicated system they couldn't defend against. I have frequently seen extreme anger about opponents psyching. Of course the bridge I see is full of misbids and misunderstandings, due only to lack of understanding and ability - yet the top players (the pro-psychs) often see red when when they are the victim of a weak player's inaccuracy. If a vote was held across all bridge players (at all levels), I would imagine that there would be a huge majority in favour of abolishing legal psyching. I appreciate that the Laws are worded in such a way that make psychs illegal is outside an RA's powers. Yet to me it seems perverse that, in the EBU, were I to play Precision, I could not upgrade an excellent 15-count and open 1♣, whereas I can open 1♠ on nothing and call it a psych.

For me, the probable explanation of the hesitation is lack of support for either major. Does that still make it safer to bid on?

How do you translate your result into an MP score? Isn't your score almost entirely dependent on what happens at other tables?

The graph would look very normal if the 2 grade was subdivided as the Ace grade is. However, that is probably the result of adding a lot of variables together. Given that distribution of match points on a typical club night looks vaguely normal, adding together lots of these distributions is going to tend to something much more like a normal distribution. Imagine that every adult in the country was forced to play club bridge for a year. I would expect the EBU gradings distribution would still look normal, but if you extracted the grades for the current club players, i.e. those who have an aptitude and/or interest in the game, their data would now not be normal at all, but a subset of the high ability tail.

You're talking about scientists. The rest of the contributors to this thread are talking about American scientists. There is a difference.

I can't actually find any layouts consistent with the opening lead (which I assume shows 1 card or 3) where West's discards make a difference - either the contract makes by force or goes down by force. If West has led small from xx, giving South AK, then West has to keep ♦Qxx for the contract to go off (on the layouts where it matters). However, West can see dummy, and surely will do that anyway. I assume I'm missing something, but I've been playing around with layouts in a DD analyser and can't see what.

Is this just a club game? What standard is declarer? I've seen countless hands played like this by life novices. 1) They pull trumps without attempting to calculate what happens next. 2) They don't see that the 10 is an entry. If they draw trumps in three rounds, and by chance end up in dummy, they'll take the finesse and make the contract, but they won't even have realised they need the finesse until that stage. I have to assume that declarer is a very poor player, otherwise the play of the hand is incomprehensible. Therefore I'm very reluctant to say it's a serious error, without knowing a lot more.

I find this one extremely difficult. (The play 7♠ questions are all well within my comfort zone.) I'll admit that I don't really know how to defend my hand in isolation. In practice, I've never had a partnership where my partner would both be good enough at defence to know how to defend (assuming he needs to know what I've got, so it's not routine) AND interested enough in carding for us to have detailed agreements about how to show what is needed. Maybe if I'd ever been in a partnership that was capable of defending this sort of hand, I would have developed the skills to visualize what I need my partner to have. But, in my world, that sort of partnership isn't a realistic proposition. (And I should say that I've had partnerships with players who can win county competitions, or have played in the Corwen (EBU people will know what I mean), so I'm not talking about playing with beginners.)

Going back to the original hand, a question just struck me. The poll, as it stands, shows 23 in favour of bidding and 6 in favour of pass. Assuming all the pollees would be considered peers, that would, in itself, make pass an LA. But, what if all or most of the 6 who passed do not play Asptro (or similar) as their defence to a weak no-trump and have no practical experience of what actually works? Is the poll still valid?

I bashed out the general case many years age, working out the probability functions. It's not difficult, just tedious (lots of factorials and summations), but the result is true.

Indeed it should. That radically changes the answer to 12.2 seconds :)

You cannot have three per hour at random intervals, for any unspecified hour. If you have three per hour for any unspecified hour, then the fourth must be exactly one hour after the first, the fifth exactly one hour after the second, etc.. If you divide the day into 24 hours and only consider those 24 hours, that is a different question. Edit: If you have just missed one, you know there will only be two in the next 60 minutes, so the question is equivalent to "what is the expected value of the lowest of two random numbers in the range [0,60)." This is 20 minutes. If you have not missed one you are now looking at three numbers in the range [0,60]. This gives 15 minutes. (The expected value of the mth lowest number out of n in the range [0,1] is m/(n+1))