Solitaire bridge

[bradsdad1]

Just curious if I am the only player who feels the solitaire bridge game is unfair. It seems as if every hand (almost) has bad splits and very, very few finesses ever work. In addition the "house" can make a wild sacrifice and not lose any points but if we go set we lose a minimum of 40% of our wager

[ArtK78]

I thought this was not the case, but I never played solitare bridge, so I gave it a try.

 

I played 20 hands, and I built up my $100 bankroll up to $130. I could have increased it by more, but on a couple of hands I settled for game contracts rather than try for slams, and the slams were there.

 

I didn't notice anything particularly unusual about the distributions or the odds of a finesse working. Everything seemed to be about the same as with Robot bridge tournaments in general.

 

As far as sacrifices are concerned, why bother? Just try to beat their contract.

[barmar]

I've moved this thread here from General Bridge Forum -- as far as I know, Solitaire Bridge is exclusive to BBO, not something you'll find in other bridge venues.

 

The solitaire games use the same random dealing code as all our other games (minus the "best hand" modification that's used in some of the robot tourneys). So there's no special inclination towards bad splits or failing finesses.

 

As for the payoff table, I'm told that we analyzed the odds of various results to get the basic payoffs, and then adjusted them to be more in favor of the player. Since we're not a casino and not making any money off the game, we don't have any reason to make the game harder for you.

 

The robots are basic robots rather than advanced, so their bidding and declarer play is pretty poor. So it probably pays to be a hand hog.