[mikeh]

hotShot, on Oct 12 2006, 09:56 AM, said:

Right! If you are talking about unforced errors. If you want to analyse your own individual skill level, you should look at the best defence possible. If opps play worse than that, good for your result,  but opps gifts are not part of your skills.

Mistakes and errors are the only things that matter in duplicate bridge. You win because of the imperfection of your opps bidding, play and defence. You loose because of your sides mistakes and idiotic actions. If no side makes mistakes both sides (should) get the average score.
Expert+ players have a very low rate of unforced errors and can keep their "forced error level" low too. This is why they reach the top spots.
The only way to improve is reducing the number of errors you make.

As bridge is a complex team effort it's sometimes hard to pinpoint who has to take the blame. Partners bidding, signals or play may lead us the wrong way.

Of cause if you blame your partner for every bad score and take credit for every good score, there is nothing left for you to improve.

I agree with some of this. However, one of the attributes that an expert player usually develops is the ability to be difficult to play against.

I have both witnessed (as dummy) and read (meckwell v kaplan/kay) of declarer, in 3N, needing to knock out stoppers and having a side suit of xxx opposite Qx, winning the opening lead in dummy and leading immediately to the Qx... the opps never work out, until too late, that this was the setting suit... in the case in which I was dummy, the Q held

Were these unforced errors? No, yet the defenders lost big swings: due to creative play by declarer. As an aside, I think that the ability to make this play is going to be one of the last problems programmers will have to solve to create a WC-level programme.

In addition, is it an error not to spot a truly exotic play? I have long treasured Adventures in Card Play, but I doubt that I will ever recognize some of the plays described in that book. I suspect that they are exceeedingly rare, yet I have played a very large number of hands. Would it be an error to miss these? Or, if I were to lose a swing because my opp at the other table found an immaterial squeeze that I missed, would that be a swing earned by brilliance rather than lost by my mistake?

Also, it is not true that 'if no side makes mistakes, both sides get average.

If I play weak notrump and you play strong, then there is an excellent chance that we will play the same contract from opposite sides, and now the outcome may well depend on the layout of the opponents' cards: maybe I declare with Kx in a suit and RHO with a clear lead of QJ109 into his partner's Axxx: but you declare it the other way around. No error yet a huge swing.

I agree that the MAIN way to improve is to reduce errors, but learning how to be a difficult opponent is also useful. I remember reading a book about 30 years ago: one of a series put out by Reese/Trezel about inducing errors....

[DrTodd13]

bid_em_up, on Oct 12 2006, 05:36 AM, said:

The bottom line is that any "rating" system, should include all results. Who would decide which results were due to your "brilliance", or the opponents or partners? And in the end, over the course of hundreds (even thousands) of boards, the crazy results and the brilliant results will offset each other. The objective is to have fewer crazy results, and more of the brilliant kind, which would increase your rating. The higher caliber a persons level of play is, then you would expect this to have more brilliant/good results, and fewer bad ones (unless of course, its a bunch of the juniors fooling around @ nite!!).

Again, this depends on the purpose of the rating. If the rating is supposed to be visible to others then it must include all boards. If the rating is purely for personal use then let people track their performance however they want to. If they drop boards to prove themselves better than they are then they delude themselves but nobody else is hurt.

[bid_em_up]

DrTodd13, on Oct 12 2006, 12:31 PM, said:

Again, this depends on the purpose of the rating. If the rating is supposed to be visible to others then it must include all boards. If the rating is purely for personal use then let people track their performance however they want to. If they drop boards to prove themselves better than they are then they delude themselves but nobody else is hurt.

Well, I thought we were talking about a rating system for everyone to see.....so that they would have some mechanism of judging a players ability other than the self-rating system we currently have.

[barmar]

hrothgar, on Oct 11 2006, 04:18 PM, said:

Personally, if I were doing any serious work on this problem, I'd focus on getting a good solution for partnerships. After which, I might consider trying to decompose individual ratings from the different partnership ratings.

Partnership ratings are fine if you're trying to handicap or seed an event. But when you're at the partnership desk or facing new a partner in an Indy, you're not playing with a partnership, you just have a single player. If he can only play well when he's playing with his regular partner, that doesn't help you much.

[joshs]

Why are people concerned? My main concern is to insure I have a good, edjucational game, with a stable set of opponents.

Scenario A:
I open a table to play with a partner. I allow open seating. Two oppoenents show up. One is decent and one isn't. The bad one makes a terrible mistake and the good one leaves. After a few iterations of this, I am close to 100% likely to end up with 2 bad opponents which isn't fun to play, and if my partner and I wanted to practice for a real event, not only does it give us bad practice, it actually induces bad habits on our part in order to maximize our results against very bad players.

Scenario B:
I open a table and screen oppoents and require permission to join. This isn't that much better than A, since the self described ratings are so inadequite.

Another problem:
The other day I wanted some good oppoents to practice against, and an intermediate asked permission to join, which I declined. Immediately that player sent me the following message: "Asshole." ON BBO, as oppossed to okb, everyone seems to think they have a right to join any game, and anything that prevents it is bad. While there were downsides to having a 52+ or 55+ requirement for oppoents like on okb, at least once you do this they usually stick around and play with each other for a while. And I never got called an asshole...

Anyway, thats my two bits. Its helpful to be able to judge players who you don't know's approximate level, for many reasons, including the ability to have interesting games against players of a similar level.

[mike777]

"Anyway, thats my two bits. Its helpful to be able to judge players who you don't know's approximate level, for many reasons, including the ability to have interesting games against players of a similar level."

Joshs, is not most of your f2f bridge over the course of a year against partnerships of random ability, many below you as well as some at your level and a few above?

[pigpenz]

ratings are in the eye of the beholder!!!
would you rather have a partner who won 2000 acbl points before 1970 and hasn played a tournament since or one who started in 1990 and has won 3000 since then both same say 60???

I think i would take the one from 1970

[joshs]

mike777, on Oct 12 2006, 04:56 PM, said:

"Anyway, thats my two bits. Its helpful to be able to judge players who you don't know's approximate level, for many reasons, including the ability to have interesting games against players of a similar level."

Joshs, is not most of your f2f bridge over the course of a year against partnerships of random ability, many below you as well as some at your level and a few above?

Actually here is a bet I would take:

Take 2 pairs that I have played against in face to face bridge in the last year (in non-arranged games), chosen randomly, with weighting propotional to the number of boards I have played against them. So If I played 8 boards against one pair, and 2 boards against another, the first pair would have 4 times the chance of being chosen than the second.

Also Chose 2 pairs that I played on BBO in non-arragned games (players coming to the table on a first come first sit basis, instead of my choosing my opponents), chosen in the same manner.

Have them play a 30 board team match. Give the BBO team a 45 IMP handicap. I will bet on the live bridge team, thats how extreme the difference is. I would actually estimate the quality difference at about 2 imps/bd.

If I took 2 pairs only from club games I have played in (which is not something I do very often since I moved to LA since the quality of the opposition is too bad) and I would still give the live opponents a slight edge of maybe 15 imps over a 30 bd match.

[joshs]

pigpenz, on Oct 12 2006, 05:38 PM, said:

ratings are in the eye of the beholder!!!
would you rather have a partner who won 2000 acbl points before 1970 and hasn played a tournament since or one who started in 1990 and has won 3000 since then both same say 60???

I think i would take the one from 1970

yeah thats because master points are not ratings....

[mike777]

joshs, on Oct 12 2006, 05:50 PM, said:

mike777, on Oct 12 2006, 04:56 PM, said:

"Anyway, thats my two bits. Its helpful to be able to judge players who you don't know's approximate level, for many reasons, including the ability to have interesting games against players of a similar level."

Joshs, is not most of your f2f bridge over the course of a year against partnerships of random ability, many below you as well as some at your level and a few above?

Actually here is a bet I would take:

Take 2 pairs that I have played against in face to face bridge in the last year (in non-arranged games), chosen randomly, with weighting propotional to the number of boards I have played against them. So If I played 8 boards against one pair, and 2 boards against another, the first pair would have 4 times the chance of being chosen than the second.

Also Chose 2 pairs that I played on BBO in non-arragned games (players coming to the table on a first come first sit basis, instead of my choosing my opponents), chosen in the same manner.

Have them play a 30 board team match. Give the BBO team a 45 IMP handicap. I will bet on the live bridge team, thats how extreme the difference is. I would actually estimate the quality difference at about 2 imps/bd.

If I took 2 pairs only from club games I have played in (which is not something I do very often since I moved to LA since the quality of the opposition is too bad) and I would still give the live opponents a slight edge of maybe 15 imps over a 30 bd match.

So if I get your drift you are saying "your" weighted random f2f club players are about .5 imps per board better than your actual random bbo opp and "your" f2f weighted random tourney players are about 2 imps/bd better?

[awm]

The point is something like this:

(1) Partnerships faced in real life are usually real partnerships. Even if they've never played together before, they have spent more time discussing agreements than most online pairs. They're also likely from the same part of the world, so agreeing "standard" is more meaningful.

(2) People playing face to face bridge are usually more focused. It's not 3AM for them. They're not doing five other things at once.

(3) When Josh plays in real life, he tries to find strong games. He's not just going to the club on a random night. It's pretty clear that the field in open pairs in a regional tournament will be better than a random night at the club, because people tend to self-select (and because US regionals offer many concurrent limited events).

When you combine these things together, it's fairly evident why the real life opposition will be stronger than the online opposition.

[barmar]

I agree with Josh and Adam about the difference between online and f2f bridge. I've been playing bridge online for at least 15 years, and the impression I have always had is that players don't take it as seriously. When you play at a club or live tourney, you have to make a special commitment of the time. And you're less likely to bother if you don't have a regular (or at least familiar) partner. Online bridge is often something you do on the spur of the moment, in your spare time. Notice that online tourneys are generally short -- when OKbridge used to run 26-board tourneys, they found that attendance was really poor because few people wanted to commit 3 hours to online bridge (they replaced these full tourneys with pairs of consecutive 12-board mini-tourneys whose results are combined, with rankings posted for all the pairs that play both halves of the "combo" -- about 25% of the attendance of each mini).

The casualness with which people regard online bridge also explains some of the behavior you see, like leaving the table the instant your partner does something you consider stupid.

Of course, this doesn't mean that all online bridge players are not serious about the game. I have a regular partner who I've been playing in the Sat night OKbridge tourney every week for several years (but we started as f2f partners after being introduced at an NABC), and we see many of the same partnerships every week as well. But we also see lots of pick-up partnerships who are still deciding what they're playing as they move to the 2nd round! Many serious (and champion-level) players consider it a great way to practice, but what they're practicing FOR is f2f tourneys.

[mycroft]

A problem I have had (and I'm sure we all have had) is that when I play with my regular partners, I want to play against partners - mostly for the reasons mentioned above (droppers, two randoms being poorer than either one with a practiced partnership, rudeness), but also because I play non-standard systems (Precision, EHAA, weak NTs in North America) and I don't like beating people with no countermeasures up. Plus we're going to get more droppers when they realize what they have got into.

I wish I could set up a system where I could say "seats are closed individually, come with a partner and I will set you up."

It would be nice also to be able to register a partner so that one could come to a table and say "we are requesting *both* of E-W".

Michael.

[pigpenz]

joshs, on Oct 12 2006, 05:53 PM, said:

pigpenz, on Oct 12 2006, 05:38 PM, said:

ratings are in the eye of the beholder!!!
would you rather have a partner who won 2000 acbl points before 1970 and hasn played a tournament since or  one who started in 1990 and has won 3000 since then both same say 60???

I think i would take the one from 1970

yeah thats because master points are not ratings....

ah but in the olden days masterpoints were a good form of rating until they started selling them...that was my point

[DrTodd13]

mycroft, on Oct 13 2006, 08:43 AM, said:

A problem I have had (and I'm sure we all have had) is that when I play with my regular partners, I want to play against partners - mostly for the reasons mentioned above (droppers, two randoms being poorer than either one with a practiced partnership, rudeness), but also because I play non-standard systems (Precision, EHAA, weak NTs in North America) and I don't like beating people with no countermeasures up. Plus we're going to get more droppers when they realize what they have got into.

I wish I could set up a system where I could say "seats are closed individually, come with a partner and I will set you up."

It would be nice also to be able to register a partner so that one could come to a table and say "we are requesting *both* of E-W".

Michael.

In the tinker toy system I implemented, this is how I did it. There is no such concept of an individual sitting down at a table. The first thing you do is find a partner and once you have a partnership you can find a list of other partnerships to play against. In my system, you could disband the partnership at a MBC table anytime you wanted but the system would stop you from leaving in the middle of a hand. This is a little bit of an improvement but what you really want is an established partnership and it is difficult to implement something with that kind of requirement.

[zasanya]

mycroft, on Oct 13 2006, 11:43 AM, said:

A problem I have had (and I'm sure we all have had) is that when I play with my regular partners, I want to play against partners - mostly for the reasons mentioned above (droppers, two randoms being poorer than either one with a practiced partnership, rudeness), but also because I play non-standard systems (Precision, EHAA, weak NTs in North America) and I don't like beating people with no countermeasures up.  Plus we're going to get more droppers when they realize what they have got into.

I wish I could set up a system where I could say "seats are closed individually, come with a partner and I will set you up."

It would be nice also to be able to register a partner so that one could come to a table and say "we are requesting *both* of E-W".

Michael.

When I wanted to play seriously I arranged team matches and canvassed in the lobby that I would include only pairs.I usually got 3 in quick time.
I kept track of the regular pairs included them in my Friends list and now when I want to play seriously I can usually get the serious pairs.
BTW you may contact me if you want to play seriously.And where can I find a link for EHAA?