[pclayton]

whereagles, on Mar 2 2006, 05:48 AM, said:

Jlall, on Mar 2 2006, 05:09 AM, said:

Bob, I agree with (almost) everything you said. Gotta learn the rules before you learn the exceptions.

There are, I believe, two schools of thought about this.

School 1 says you should learn things are they are. That is, include exceptions from the beginning.

School 2 says you should make things easy on people before indulging into more complicated matters. This means teaching rules and only afterwards deal with exceptions.

I don't know much more about it, though. Personally I prefer the ways of school 1, but can understand other people fare better learning through school 2 methods.

I think the masses benefit from Method 2. Most bridge players don't spend 2-3 hours a day playing, reading, and studying. They merely want to learn to play a little better in their local duplicate and someday get their gold card. Bridge doesn't play a huge role in their lives, it is simply a pastime.

For a non-serious student, I can't imagine having an intelligent discussion about a 1345 23 count (You shouldn't open it 2C because of yada yada, 1C is better. OTOH, perhaps a 2C opening followed by 2N is perhaps best, ).

Once a player learns to think in a non-linear mode, then method 2 doesn't work.

[Blofeld]

bobh2, on Mar 1 2006, 10:10 PM, said:

We both know you can concoct "magic hands" that the hands that start an auction of 1s-2s can make a slam. That is true, no problem at all with that. The problem I have is the math, and your use of it to take potshots. So, like luke said, let logic prevail. In my not real humble opinion, you either are being a s***-disturber or you just haven't thought about this at all. Consider: A 1s bid is not a 2c bid. Therefore, it is limited, by your defination of the strength/loser count of 2c. My concept of standard bidding is, after a few years of playing, that 2c is not a game force, but with a one-suiter, being within one trick of game, and as the hand gets better, in terms of losers and high cards, it's more and more likely to be opened 2c. So, for arguments' sake, let's assume a 1s bid is limited to...er....21 points...say maybe even 22 if mostly soft values. Let's say that a 2s raise is limited to 9 high cards, that's about standard, I think. Do the math. 30-31 highs, total. Did you notice that, without extraordinary distribution, along with both partners having all they can have, the very most, you don't have a slam. It takes something rare and special for this to occur over 1s-2s. I think, so far, this is hard to argue with, after all, it is sorta a basic of the "approach-forcing" concept of bidding, a very old term dealing with how we bid standard and 2/1, today.

Why is that? Because very, very good bidders, with today's modern tools, probably won't be able to bid more than 1 of 20 of those hands. Don't like that estimate? Go to a Regional, and read the score sheets. Add up the 480's and 680's where that score is consistant and see how many times the obviously making slam got bid. So, 1 of 20, 1 of 10, who cares? 1 of 20 might be high, I donno. Now, take all the other times the bidding got started 1s-2s. How many times is this auction going to produce 12 tricks? My experience says about 1 in a thousand, maybe worse. Let's get real frisky, and say 1 of 500. So, being very conservative with my argument, 1 of 500 hands work and of those 500, one of ten has any shot at getting bid......my math says that 1 of 5000 occurrances, what does yours say? So...I tell beginners/intermediates/advanced players to forget the slam over 1Major-2Major? Why, it's got a shot, once in 5000 hands...how remiss of me. And that's assuming players who can play the shine off a ceramic plate. Hmmmmm...and you think I ought to retract what I said? Not on your life.

I disagree with your estimates of the likelihood of slam by orders of magnitude.

First, the point count approach. Laying aside the fact that there certainly exist hands where I would open 1♠ on more than 22 points (for fear of being unable to describe them properly after a 2♣ opening), we reach the maximum of 30-31 HCP. This is, I agree, unlikely to be enough for slam unless one player or other has a shortage somewhere. But singletons (even doubletons on the right hands will suffice) are hardly "extraordinary distribution".

My instinctive guess is that the proportion of hands starting 1♠ : 2♠ where one would like to be in slam is much higher than your suggested one in a thousand. I generated a few dozen hands which would start with this auction, and a cursory inspection suggested that around 6 made slam odds-on: around one in 10. Quite probably my method was biased towards slams, but I don't think it could be tremendously so. Could anyone with the means run a proper simulation here?

Then I would think that proper bidding can find a decent proportion of these: is half too optimistic? (incidentally your measurement technique of looking at the travellers is flawed; everyone may be making 12 tricks because two finesses are both on: this doesn't make the slam a good one).

Possibly my intuition is out on this. I'd like to hear others' opinions.

[Sigi_BC84]

Blofeld, on Mar 2 2006, 06:13 PM, said:

My instinctive guess is that the proportion of hands starting 1♠ : 2♠ where one would like to be in slam is much higher than your suggested one in a thousand.  I generated a few dozen hands which would start with this auction, and a cursory inspection suggested that around 6 made slam odds-on: around one in 10. Quite probably my method was biased towards slams, but I don't think it could be tremendously so. Could anyone with the means run a proper simulation here?

I'd be happy to run a simulation, but please tell me what contraints you want for the hand and for the raises. This is not as easy to specify as you might think (the opener is not the problem as long as you assume everything above x HCP will be opened somehow differently, but if you start to talk about borderline 2♣/1M openers things get quite nasty -- you have to be able to quantify every important aspect you want to consider).

What contraints did you use for your quick survey?

--Sigi

[mikeh]

I would think, without running a simulation, that the frequency of there being a decent slam available after the start of 1♠ 2♠ would be quite a bit more than 1 in 1000, and quite a bit less than 1 in 10: maybe 1 in 40-80 would be my subjective guess.

Of course, much depends on methods. My experience over the past 10 years or so has been largely in partnerships using the single raise as 'semi-constructive'; defined as a raise on values that would accept at least one help-suit game try.

if we played standard, as we would in a BIL lesson, then the chances of slam become less significant but still, I would guess, somewhere in the range of 1 in 100.

I think that Bob's attitude that he should not trouble BIL students with such low probability hands is reasonable, but I think that his (apparent) insistence that the students be told that the sequence 1♠ 2♠ rules out slam is very, very wrong.

There will be students who are so ill-suited to the game that their only hope to become even bad players is to memorize certain overly-simplistic rules. My belief (my hope) is that these are few in number, and that one should frame one's teaching methods so as to cater to the larger group with greater potential.

Is there anything wrong in telling students that we are focussing upon the basics, while alerting them to the reality that there are low-frequency hands that would warrant a different approach? Tell them that the context of the lesson limits how far we can go in exploring these topics.

As has been observed before, far too many students memorize rules, fed to them in rigid, absolutist dogma. Then, as they become more experienced, they encounter hands where faithful application of the rules yields a horrible outcome, while seeing other players apparently flouting those rules with varying degrees of success.

Why not tell people that the game is beautiful, subtle and complex. that most players find that the more they learn, the more there is to learn, but that the best way to begin their exploration is to make some simplifying rules. Tell them that these rules will be enough to allow them to begin playing the game with some success, but that as they become more experienced, they will learn that more subtle approaches can be even more effective. Add a caution that the more sublte approaches depend upon a mastery of the basic rules.

Maybe, when discussing the 1♠ 2♠ auction, tell them that there can be hands on which the 1♠ bidder may be interested in slam, but that these hands are rare: far less common, and so far less important, than the game try hands, so we are not going to look at that rare class: that that would be a subject for an advanced course.

[Sigi_BC84]

mikeh, on Mar 2 2006, 07:28 PM, said:

Maybe, when discussing the 1♠ 2♠ auction, tell them that there can be hands on which the 1♠ bidder may be interested in slam, but that these hands are rare: far less common, and so far less important, than the game try hands, so we are not going to look at that rare class: that that would be a subject for an advanced course.

Curiously enough, I think that these two issues are related, since often the 1♠ hand with slam interest opposite a 2♠ raise will make some kind of game-try first in order to see if the hands fit well enough for slam.

--Sigi

[han]

Mikeh said:

I think that Bob's attitude that he should not trouble BIL students with such low probability hands is reasonable

Just to clear up a misconception, this was not a BIL lesson. This was a lesson for the intermediate-advanced club, intended for players who think that they have outgrown the BIL, and players that never qualified for the BIL to begin with. In the audience were people like blofeld, mickyb, luke warm, echognome, hrothgar and myself. As this was an open lesson, there were also many beginners present, but that was not the focus of the club lessons.

So all this talking about what to teach beginners is completely besides the point imo.

[luke warm]

han is right as to the makeup of the audience... most of the ones he mentioned by name have in reality or in their own minds (that would be me) reached the point where they can recognize slam potential after a 1s : 2s start... as sigi said, most would make some game try first, just to see if the hands fit (if even slightly unbalanced).. if not, they'd then just bid game

otoh, i do understand where bob is coming from... i used to teach on the operation of refinery process systems... using a bridge analogy, the ones being taught ranged from intermediate to expert, with one or two world class tossed in.. it can be disconcerting (i use a mild term) to have a stuctured class, one sometimes weeks in the making, be interrupted by folks who don't know that the points they're dying to make will in fact be made on day two (or three)... the hard part for some of them to recognize was that not everyone attending had attained whatever level to which they had risen... it can sometimes make the instructor defensive, whether it should or not

in bob's lessons, whether he says/admits this or not, he is asking the students (implicitly or explicitly) to accept him as their authority, at least until such time as he or they feel they have 'graduated'... it isn't always easy for the advanced to expert player to accept this authority (the true world class player wouldn't accept it either, but this fact would not usually be made public - at least not to the people who *might* accept such authority)... but there must be an authority else what's the point?

i don't have anywhere near the experience of mikeh or bob or any number of other posters here... but i can't imagine the odds of a slam after a 1s : 2s start being anywhere near 1 in 100... so i personally would welcome a simulation, just to see... heck, make responder's hand 7-9 (as most 2/1 players would) with exactly 3 card support