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The most common card played to the 13th trick


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My own frequency table for 32 deals played online:

 

A: 1

K: 4

Q: 5

J: 5

T: 5*

9: 4*

8: 4

7: 1

6: 0

5: 1

4: 1

3: 0

2: 1

 

Total: 32 cards on 8 unclaimed deals

 

My own theory: Honor cards will be most frequent. There may be some self-selection in my deals because frequent claims on deals may impact results, but discarding by defenders make their cards most frequently honor cards, since those are rarely discarded, but aces will be relatively infrequent in general, since those control cards are frequently used early in the play.

 

 

 

 

*2 in same hand

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I should qualify it to exclude claims, otherwise you'd have to make arbitrary rules about the order of remaining tricks.

 

I'm surprised to see middle honors in the samples. I would have expected the 9 or 10.

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The guys at the 1st Youth Congress gave me the file with all the hands played during the swiss tournament, all the cards were as likely to be led to the first trick. No last trick there though. I'd think it'd be more or less the same...
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Surely it will be a middle spade. 7,8,9 of spades would be my guess. Feels like you are always winning the last trick with a middle trump, the small ones go ruffing and under the spade honours, the higher ones are used drawing trumps. Spades is the most common denomination for trumps.
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Short test grabbing hands from bridgebrowser... this was a small sample, i have a spreadsheet for pulling this information out, so I can make it a very large set of data if it is really important.

 

Cards played to the last trick.... the winner is the jack...... so far, i can look at 10,000 hands or more if better statistical numbers are needed.

 

A: 116

K: 318

Q: 405

J: 424

10: 388

9: 274

8: 279

7: 163

6: 103

5: 73

4: 61

3: 33

2: 31

 

667 hands (many duplicates, since looked at all hands played, not just one persons).... the small size was to develop excel spreadsheet to pull out last trick and count the cards played.

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Perfect, thanks Ben.

 

WELL, here is data from 10,000 hands (only 6243 played all the way to trick 13,,, now the Q is the "winner")

 

 

A: 1337

K: 2602

Q: 3256

J: 3156

10: 3045

9: 2473

8: 1962

7: 1358

6: 1003

5: 658

4: 490

3: 307

2: 177

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Does excluding claims bias the results? Maybe bad players never claim so it doesn't matter. I'm not sure if it's relevant, but when you have aces to win the last trick with or high trumps a claim is more likely to be made.

 

FWIW I also thought it would be the ten of spades or something liek that.

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Even without claims, I wouldn't expect aces and kings to be played frequently on the last trick. If you're running a suit, you usually start from the top, so the ace will be played early. And defense, honor sequences are common leads early in the play.

 

The low occurrence of low spot cards is also unsurprising. These are frequent early leads, played when you can't try to win, or easy discards.

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Does excluding claims bias the results? Maybe bad players never claim so it doesn't matter. I'm not sure if it's relevant, but when you have aces to win the last trick with or high trumps a claim is more likely to be made.

 

FWIW I also thought it would be the ten of spades or something liek that.

 

I thought the original post request played to the "last trick" meant trick 13. What i do is output 1000's of hands from bridgebrowser in a format such as below, paste into excel, create filter and count rows that begin with pc|, and if the one before it began with pc, add one... so 13 plays in order would give the last row with 13... if no pc| at the start of row, then gets a "0"... then select only rows where the count was 13....

 

Doing this you could find most common lead, for example. Not sure either is useful.

 

To do the which card, by suit, I guess we will have to count a lot more hands... maybe 100,000 or 200,000. I will give it a try tomorrow.

 

 

mn|IMP-90 - 2009.04.01|pn|South,West,North,East|qx|o1,BOARD 1|rh||ah|Board 1|md|3S86HJ92DQ4CAT7632,SQJ743H64DT9CQJ95,SKTHKQ8DAKJ65CK84|sv|b|

em|NS 9.13|

sa|0|mb|2N|mb|p|mb|3N|mb|p|mb|p|mb|p|pg||

pc|H5|pc|H2|pc|H6|pc|HK|pg||

pc|D5|pc|D2|pc|DQ|pc|DT|pg||

pc|C2|pc|C5|pc|C8|pc|S2|pg||

pc|DA|pc|D3|pc|D4|pc|D9|pg||

pc|DK|pc|D7|pc|S6|pc|S3|pg||

pc|DJ|pc|D8|pc|S8|pc|S4|pg||

pc|D6|pc|S5|pc|C3|pc|S7|pg||

pc|H8|pc|HA|pc|H9|pc|H4|pg||

pc|HT|pc|HJ|pc|SQ|pc|HQ|pg||

pc|CK|pc|S9|pc|C6|pc|CJ|pg||

pc|C4|pc|H3|pc|CA|pc|C9|pg||

mc|10|pg||

pn|South,West,North,East|qx|o2,BOARD 2|rh||ah|Board 2|md|3S86HJ92DQ4CAT7632,SQJ743H64DT9CQJ95,SKTHKQ8DAKJ65CK84|sv|b|

em|NS 8.60|

sa|0|mb|1D|mb|1H|mb|1N|mb|p|mb|3N|mb|p|mb|p|mb|p|pg|

 

 

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Sure, you answered the question and the answer has no use, I guess I was trying to ask if it would be much different if people never claimed(which, as you imply, was not asked). I really had no point to my question, just was curious what people thought heh.

 

I would be curious as to the most common lead also. I would guess it's the CA (because people lead a lot of aces! and clubs is the least likely trump suit), or the CK (because many lead K from both AK and KQ). I find these thinkgs interesting just for the sake of them lol

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Sure, you answered the question and the answer has no use, I guess I was trying to ask if it would be much different if people never claimed(which, as you imply, was not asked). I really had no point to my question, just was curious what people thought heh.

 

I would be curious as to the most common lead also. I would guess it's the CA (because people lead a lot of aces! and clubs is the least likely trump suit), or the CK (because many lead K from both AK and KQ). I find these thinkgs interesting just for the sake of them lol

I was guessing maybe the 2 for a commonest lead. I have heard a number of people say, against NT, "If in doubt leads ", and I have heard a number of people say "If in doubt lead trumps." [i am not advocating for or against either of these rules of thumb]. You are most likely to be in doubt against NT if you have a choice of 4 card suits to lead (I reckon), and is the most likely trump suit.

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