For matchpoints experts

[mike777]

For matchpoints experts.

 

As I come back to bridge I remember that plus scores are very important.

I do notice that opponents bidding and making normal games results in very poor MP scores. Last night 6 out of 12 hands were normal games making normal tricks and we got poor scores.

 

On the other hand bidding normal and playing normal can result in above average hands when it is our hand.

 

Does this suggest taking aggressive and sometimes very silly bidding risks when one is weak?

[awm]

For the most part this is a problem with weak fields. If you happen to play against the opponents who are half-decent when they have the cards, they will bid the normal game and make the normal number of tricks, and you get average-minus. I don't think this necessarily justifies taking wild actions though -- the half-decent opponents are more likely to turn your average-minus into a zero, and the bad opponents might've missed the cold game anyway.

[Fluffy]

Get your chances on defence, and the best experts have also to guess 50-50 plays.

[hrothgar]

The quick and dirty answer is "It depends"

 

You need to decide whether your primary goal is to increase the number of times that you place in the money or, alternatively, whether you are primarily interested in improving your expected score.

 

The dynamic that you are discussing can be treated as an applied statistics problem. Ideally, you should want to characterize individual bids based on both their variance as well as their expected value. Futhermore, you need to have a good feeling regarding your own skill level compared to the rest of the field. Finally, the length of the match is an important consideration.

 

Its easily possible to demonstrate situations in which a "high variance" strategy will yield superior results... The most obvious is when your only goal is to increase the number of times that you score in the money. (It can be argument that the Master Point system rewards such behavior). There are some more interesting examples involving weak pairs in a strong field.

[pclayton]

Its not supposed to happen this way, but......

 

Even when I play in unlimited National events, I find that my best games have no more than ten (out of 26) minus scores on my cards. Call it mildly correlated.

 

In any event less than a National, I think there is definitely a strong positive correlation between my % and my # of positive scores.