[y66]

The ideas that appeal most to this intermediate are to play what feels right for you and to play with a partner who understands this. Think mikeh said something like this a few pages ago. Trust a golfer to understand this and to understand that it is easier said than done.

[pclayton]

awm, on Feb 19 2008, 05:37 PM, said:

I'm not really convinced this is the case. When playing without a lot of agreements I find that a lot of times I get into very difficult auctions. I have to try to guess how partner will take some undiscussed bid, whether he will think it means what I want it to mean, whether what I "want it to mean" is really the logical meaning, etc.

Adam, I used to think this but I don't anymore for many reasons:

1. Unless your name is Meckwell, exhaustive systems notes are only really useful if you are playing full-time and agreements come up frequently enough to reinforce memory.

2. Frequently systemic nuts will make 'exceptions' for certain auctions and not for others. Frequently these carve-outs are arbitrary and created to handle a certain situation that came up once at the 2002 Bakersfield Sectional and hasn't come up since. However, every time a similar situation comes up, stress will be created since we may not be 100% confident about our agreement. Even if we remember, we might not be 100% confident that partner understands.

3. I think a lot of people with vast system binders have them not for the purpose of documenting agreements, but rather for settling arguments after the fact. Trust becomes secondary to 'the system'.

4. Large sets of notes tend to remove judgment from decisions.

5. I think pairs that rely on lengthy agreements are afraid to test their partner due to the fear of being on unfamiliar ground. OTOH, pairs that rely on judgment do not have this challenge. Many more bidding decisions are based on things that we might not have specifically talked about before, but pairs that rely more on trust and judgment do not have this stress.

6. Memorizing system notes might make you a better partner, but it won't make you a better player.

7. If you want to play symmetric relay to 'avoid' disagreements, go ahead, but I kibbed you and Josh for a few hands last night and you did have a misunderstanding on one relay sequence. You landed on your feet, but I know that you guys have played for a long time together and that mistakes like that should not ever happen.

8. If you play complicated, but similar systems with several different partners, the error factor is greatly magnified. Instead of keeping one system straight, you must keep several straight, and remember when exceptions apply and when they don't, and what has been modified and what hasn't. I had a previous partner who played three versions of Precision with transfer responses with three partners. While we had some fun auctions, his card play was B level, and I am convinced that he will never win anything important.

9. Many of the sequences one practices playing a complicated system are hands with uninterrupted bidding. In a good event, you'll get these 10-15% of the time which is hardly proportionate to the time you invest with your partner on system. Once competition is introduced, the number of possible auctions becomes almost limitless.

10. If you can't figure out what a bid means inside of five seconds, it's probably too complicated too play.

11. Systemic misunderstandings are what shrinkage is to a business. If I have a store and I make a 15% profit margin on a toaster oven, I need to sell seven ovens if one gets stolen, just to break even. If I think playing the Metallica convention will improve my results by 10% on the boards where it comes up, I better not have a misunderstanding more than 10% of the time.

12. Memorizing 150 pages of notes before a big event is a complete waste of mental resources. If you want to use an event as 'training', then it's different. Go ahead and discuss the hands at the dinner break too. This can make bridge a lot of fun, but don't expect to win.

Even if you can get over the previous points, In my experience it frequently takes a minimum of three years to become completely comfortable with a system. How much of your bridge life do you want to spend optimizing whether or not its superior to have a min/max ask after patterning and before denial Q's?

Don't get me wrong. I think a pair should have a binder of notes especially if the pair plays methods that aren't really standard. I love Reverse Flannery, and it took me a lot of years before I knew all of the continuations on an unconscious level. Having notes to check briefly before a session aided the reinforcement of the understanding of the call.

Sorry for the long rant, but I have seen so many good players ruin their game with way too much focus on system.

[awm]

I'll just mention that Josh Donn and I are kind of a special case. We played regularly for a time a couple of years ago just before Atlanta nationals. At the time, we played a rather complex system, but it was based on notes created and updated by Joon Pahk, which in turn were based loosely on methods played by Josh Donn and Kevin Bathurst when they were a fairly regularly partnership years before.

The problem is, Josh Donn and I have not been playing regularly for a couple years. I haven't really looked at the notes in detail since then (if we were playing in a "serious" event I would spend an hour or two reviewing the notes beforehand, but I'm not going to do that for random hands on BBO). Neither one of us plays precisely these methods in any other partnership. In addition, Joon has updated the notes since we played together, and so our "official agreements" may not even be recorded anywhere. And the auctions we mess up are not symmetric relay auctions (symmetric relay is actually pretty easy to remember) -- they are "other parts" of the system like the jacoby 2NT structure or the sequences after 1♦-2♥ "diamond raise or invitational notrump." These parts of the system were never particularly intuitive to me.

In contrast, Sam Ieong and I have a much weirder system and a substantially longer set of notes. While we'd like to practice more, it never seems to work out (Sam is very busy finishing thesis and applying for jobs at the moment). Nonetheless we seem to play a couple times a year at nationals and we both skim through the notes beforehand, and we virtually never have any misunderstanding in serious play.

[TimG]

pclayton, on Feb 20 2008, 01:16 PM, said:

4. Large sets of notes tend to remove judgment from decisions.

5. I think pairs that rely on lengthy agreements are afraid to test their partner due to the fear of being on unfamiliar ground. OTOH, pairs that rely on judgment do not have this challenge. Many more bidding decisions are based on things that we might not have specifically talked about before, but pairs that rely more on trust and judgment do not have this stress.

I think you are wrong here. Some systemic areas may require no judgment at all (answering a relay ask, for instance), but most agreements, however detailed, require judgment for proper use.

I was recently given this hand, ♠KJx ♥Jxxxx ♦Qxxx ♣A, and told that partner opened 1♥ in 4th position (I've already used my judgment to pass this hand in 2nd seat). Responder's options included Drury, a 4C splinter, a limit raise (3♥), a forcing raise (3NT) or a direct jump to 4♥. This pair had agreements, now they had to apply judgment to select from amongst the options.

Quote

Don't get me wrong. I think a pair should have a binder of notes especially if the pair plays methods that aren't really standard. I love Reverse Flannery, and it took me a lot of years before I knew all of the continuations on an unconscious level. Having notes to check briefly before a session aided the reinforcement of the understanding of the call.

For me, this pre-session cramming is a distraction. I may get things right early in the session (or tournament), but later in the session (or later in the weekend), I may be less sure of myself. I think this tends to be true for just about any method that isn't already ingrained.

Don't get me wrong, I think partnership agreements and system building are a fun part of bridge. But, the tinkering that is often involved, or just getting up to speed in a new partnership, distracts from other parts of the game. At least it does for me.

[Apollo81]

I haven't read even 10% of the posts in this thread, but for what it's worth I think that remembering your system uses a different part of the brain than trying to make "judgment" type decisions in the bidding. If you spend a fixed amount X of mental energy in the bidding then you will have way more mental energy for the play if the X was spent on memory lookup than if it was spent on judgment.

[helene_t]

Interesting theory, Noble. For me it feels like mental resources are very close to being a one-dimensional thing, but I might be completely wrong.

[kenrexford]

I think perhaps some people are confusing issues here.

Some of the objections to complicated agreements seem to be based upon an assumption that complicated agreements are artificial construct agreements, which is not exactly accurate. I, for one, have "agreements" that are systemically agreed and included in system notes that are fairly non-interesting from a standpoint of artificiality.

To contrast, consider two different "complicated" agreements one might have.

On the one hand, the partnership could have a series of suit-determined asking bids after a 2♣ opening showing some 4441 hand, starting with 2♦ and ending with specific Jack asks.

On the other hand, one could have discussed parameters for how nuances change when RHO makes an overcall and Opener elects between Pass, Double, and Raise, depending perhaps on the vulnerability around the table and perhaps the suit overcalled.

The first is something new and artificial that needs to be created and memorized, with anticipation of possible zingers that may crop up and how to handle these.

The latter usually involves a consideration of theory and partnership default to schools or principles, sometimes were two equally plausible theories or schools need to be resolved or one selected.

Discussion and agreement in the second scenario removes a lot of ambiguities and table guesses, and thus it is easier.

I'm sure everyone has had a sequence develop where partner thinks one thing, you think another, and the post-mortem crowd splits the vote, adding in other ideas as well. If these situations can be predicted, great! If when they come up, they end up as a footnote on page 134 of the system notes, great also!

[finally17]

Apollo81, on Feb 20 2008, 02:24 PM, said:

I haven't read even 10% of the posts in this thread, but for what it's worth I think that remembering your system uses a different part of the brain than trying to make "judgment" type decisions in the bidding. If you spend a fixed amount X of mental energy in the bidding then you will have way more mental energy for the play if the X was spent on memory lookup than if it was spent on judgment.

I generally agree...but as Phil pointed out, being unsure of your memory using a complex system raises stress level, which will not be region specific, and so is going to tax the entire process.

[gwnn]

Apollo81, on Feb 20 2008, 09:24 PM, said:

I haven't read even 10% of the posts in this thread, but for what it's worth I think that remembering your system uses a different part of the brain than trying to make "judgment" type decisions in the bidding. If you spend a fixed amount X of mental energy in the bidding then you will have way more mental energy for the play if the X was spent on memory lookup than if it was spent on judgment.

I think Noble is spot on! Systemic agreements, however obscure they are, are like a poem, like your social security number. It just sinks in if you learn it properly.

[hrothgar]

pclayton, on Feb 20 2008, 09:16 PM, said:

awm, on Feb 19 2008, 05:37 PM, said:

I'm not really convinced this is the case. When playing without a lot of agreements I find that a lot of times I get into very difficult auctions. I have to try to guess how partner will take some undiscussed bid, whether he will think it means what I want it to mean, whether what I "want it to mean" is really the logical meaning, etc.

Adam, I used to think this but I don't anymore for many reasons:

1. Unless your name is Meckwell, exhaustive systems notes are only really useful if you are playing full-time and agreements come up frequently enough to reinforce memory.

2. Frequently systemic nuts will make 'exceptions' for certain auctions and not for others. Frequently these carve-outs are arbitrary and created to handle a certain situation that came up once at the 2002 Bakersfield Sectional and hasn't come up since. However, every time a similar situation comes up, stress will be created since we may not be 100% confident about our agreement. Even if we remember, we might not be 100% confident that partner understands.

...

Don't get me wrong. I think a pair should have a binder of notes especially if the pair plays methods that aren't really standard. I love Reverse Flannery, and it took me a lot of years before I knew all of the continuations on an unconscious level. Having notes to check briefly before a session aided the reinforcement of the understanding of the call.

Sorry for the long rant, but I have seen so many good players ruin their game with way too much focus on system.

I'm not sure that I agree with this: In general, if I'm playing without many agreement I need to invest enormous amounts of time and effort cataloguing all the different hitches, twitches, and fumbles that partner uses

True, I don't need to build a binder documenting different classes of relay breaks. Instead, my binder consists of notes that document that a slow bid by partner in sequence XYZ shows hand A. When partner bids in normal tempo he has hand B. When he looks very confused and then fumbles with the bidding box, he has hand C...

On a more serious note:

What you describe as "judgement", I'd describe as a rules set.

I general prefer to play artificial systems because I believe that these lend themselves to shorter, more consistent rules structures

[pclayton]

hrothgar, on Feb 20 2008, 01:11 PM, said:

On a more serious note:

What you describe as "judgement", I'd describe as a rules set. 

I general prefer to play artificial systems because I believe that these lend themselves to shorter, more consistent rules structures

Judgment isn't a rules set necessarily if I understand you. It's more qualitative than quantitative.

ZAR points are a rules set. If I have 26 Zars (or 25 with spades) I open. If not, I pass.

Why would you think an artificial structure lends itself to shorter, more consistent rules? All you are doing is rearranging definitions for calls.

[hrothgar]

pclayton, on Feb 21 2008, 12:25 AM, said:

Why would you think an artificial structure lends itself to shorter, more consistent rules? All you are doing is rearranging definitions for calls.

Artificial bidding systems are capable of much more than "just" rearranging the definition of different calls. There is always the option to impose an over arching structure: Consistent apply simple set of rules throughout the entire bidding system...

Let's choose an obvious example: Symmetric relay

I can describe the rule's set for symmetric relay very concisely... None-the-less, this simple rules set allows me to describe an enormous number of hands.

In theory, one could define a ratio that measured

(The number of bidding sequences explictly covered by the rules set) divided by (The length of the rules set)

Care to wager how symetric relay will stack up to a "natural" system...

[mikeh]

pclayton, on Feb 20 2008, 01:16 PM, said:

awm, on Feb 19 2008, 05:37 PM, said:

I'm not really convinced this is the case. When playing without a lot of agreements I find that a lot of times I get into very difficult auctions. I have to try to guess how partner will take some undiscussed bid, whether he will think it means what I want it to mean, whether what I "want it to mean" is really the logical meaning, etc.

Adam, I used to think this but I don't anymore for many reasons:

1. Unless your name is Meckwell, exhaustive systems notes are only really useful if you are playing full-time and agreements come up frequently enough to reinforce memory.

2. Frequently systemic nuts will make 'exceptions' for certain auctions and not for others. Frequently these carve-outs are arbitrary and created to handle a certain situation that came up once at the 2002 Bakersfield Sectional and hasn't come up since. However, every time a similar situation comes up, stress will be created since we may not be 100% confident about our agreement. Even if we remember, we might not be 100% confident that partner understands.

3. I think a lot of people with vast system binders have them not for the purpose of documenting agreements, but rather for settling arguments after the fact. Trust becomes secondary to 'the system'.

4. Large sets of notes tend to remove judgment from decisions.

5. I think pairs that rely on lengthy agreements are afraid to test their partner due to the fear of being on unfamiliar ground. OTOH, pairs that rely on judgment do not have this challenge. Many more bidding decisions are based on things that we might not have specifically talked about before, but pairs that rely more on trust and judgment do not have this stress.

6. Memorizing system notes might make you a better partner, but it won't make you a better player.

7. If you want to play symmetric relay to 'avoid' disagreements, go ahead, but I kibbed you and Josh for a few hands last night and you did have a misunderstanding on one relay sequence. You landed on your feet, but I know that you guys have played for a long time together and that mistakes like that should not ever happen.

8. If you play complicated, but similar systems with several different partners, the error factor is greatly magnified. Instead of keeping one system straight, you must keep several straight, and remember when exceptions apply and when they don't, and what has been modified and what hasn't. I had a previous partner who played three versions of Precision with transfer responses with three partners. While we had some fun auctions, his card play was B level, and I am convinced that he will never win anything important.

9. Many of the sequences one practices playing a complicated system are hands with uninterrupted bidding. In a good event, you'll get these 10-15% of the time which is hardly proportionate to the time you invest with your partner on system. Once competition is introduced, the number of possible auctions becomes almost limitless.

10. If you can't figure out what a bid means inside of five seconds, it's probably too complicated too play.

11. Systemic misunderstandings are what shrinkage is to a business. If I have a store and I make a 15% profit margin on a toaster oven, I need to sell seven ovens if one gets stolen, just to break even. If I think playing the Metallica convention will improve my results by 10% on the boards where it comes up, I better not have a misunderstanding more than 10% of the time.

12. Memorizing 150 pages of notes before a big event is a complete waste of mental resources. If you want to use an event as 'training', then it's different. Go ahead and discuss the hands at the dinner break too. This can make bridge a lot of fun, but don't expect to win.

Even if you can get over the previous points, In my experience it frequently takes a minimum of three years to become completely comfortable with a system. How much of your bridge life do you want to spend optimizing whether or not its superior to have a min/max ask after patterning and before denial Q's?

Don't get me wrong. I think a pair should have a binder of notes especially if the pair plays methods that aren't really standard. I love Reverse Flannery, and it took me a lot of years before I knew all of the continuations on an unconscious level. Having notes to check briefly before a session aided the reinforcement of the understanding of the call.

Sorry for the long rant, but I have seen so many good players ruin their game with way too much focus on system.

Phil:

The validity of your points depends upon how good and how serious the players are.

We all know 'system nuts', whose energies are almost entirely devoted to devising complex, and usually flawed, methods. They lose the forest for the trees... indeed, for the branches and leaves!

The design and internalization of a coherent, playable method is not for the casual partnership, and I agree with your estimate of a 3 year timeline.

When I played a truly complex method, we tinkered with it every event... we only played about 7 or 8 times a year (altho this included at least one week-long event as 'one' time) but we spent hundreds of hours discussing our method and our style... it is important to discuss style as well as method because method does not eliminate judgment: it just changes the areas where it is most important/useful.

As of last week, that partnership has reformed, after 8 years, but neither of us has the time or desire to relearn the method. We had done so only because, back then, we had consciously decided to make a long-term commitment with a view to winning the CNTC's, which neither of had done to that point.

Now, we are playing because we are friends and because we have other good friends who want to form a team with us. If we win, great, but it is no longer a burning goal.

So for us to try to use a really complex method would be detrimental. We wouldn't work hard enough. But when we were hungry, it made great sense, and I am morally certain that our use of our system made us a MUCH tougher pair than we would have been had we used a simpler method.

Give me two great players (I don't mean to suggest that I am or ever was 'great' )who are willing to put in the truly enormous work learning a complex method and they will, I am sure, beat two equally skilled players playing straight up.

Give me two great players who really aren't willing/able to internalize the method, and they will, I am sure, lose to the 'straight-up' pair.

Give me two non-expert players, and I would tell them not to bother with the complex method, but to spend the time learning the game, not the method.

[mikeh]

double post

[pclayton]

hrothgar, on Feb 20 2008, 01:55 PM, said:

pclayton, on Feb 21 2008, 12:25 AM, said:

Why would you think an artificial structure lends itself to shorter, more consistent rules? All you are doing is rearranging definitions for calls.

Artificial bidding systems are capable of much more than "just" rearranging the definition of different calls. There is always the option to impose an over arching structure: Consistent apply simple set of rules throughout the entire bidding system...

Let's choose an obvious example: Symmetric relay

I can describe the rule's set for symmetric relay very concisely... None-the-less, this simple rules set allows me to describe an enormous number of hands.

In theory, one could define a ratio that measured

(The number of bidding sequences explictly covered by the rules set) divided by (The length of the rules set)

Care to wager how symetric relay will stack up to a "natural" system...

Can we add in competition?

[hrothgar]

pclayton, on Feb 21 2008, 01:14 AM, said:

hrothgar, on Feb 20 2008, 01:55 PM, said:

pclayton, on Feb 21 2008, 12:25 AM, said:

Why would you think an artificial structure lends itself to shorter, more consistent rules? All you are doing is rearranging definitions for calls.

Artificial bidding systems are capable of much more than "just" rearranging the definition of different calls. There is always the option to impose an over arching structure: Consistent apply simple set of rules throughout the entire bidding system...

Let's choose an obvious example: Symmetric relay

I can describe the rule's set for symmetric relay very concisely... None-the-less, this simple rules set allows me to describe an enormous number of hands.

In theory, one could define a ratio that measured

(The number of bidding sequences explictly covered by the rules set) divided by (The length of the rules set)

Care to wager how symetric relay will stack up to a "natural" system...

Can we add in competition?

No sweat...

I readily admit that I don't expect to see any significant benefits during "real" competitive bidding sequences. (When I say "real" I'm talking about sequences that are actually able to break our relay chains) We might even suffer some losses.

But it won't be nearly enough to make up for the uncontested sequences

[fred]

hrothgar, on Feb 20 2008, 10:23 PM, said:

pclayton, on Feb 21 2008, 01:14 AM, said:

hrothgar, on Feb 20 2008, 01:55 PM, said:

pclayton, on Feb 21 2008, 12:25 AM, said:

Why would you think an artificial structure lends itself to shorter, more consistent rules? All you are doing is rearranging definitions for calls.

Artificial bidding systems are capable of much more than "just" rearranging the definition of different calls. There is always the option to impose an over arching structure: Consistent apply simple set of rules throughout the entire bidding system...

Let's choose an obvious example: Symmetric relay

I can describe the rule's set for symmetric relay very concisely... None-the-less, this simple rules set allows me to describe an enormous number of hands.

In theory, one could define a ratio that measured

(The number of bidding sequences explictly covered by the rules set) divided by (The length of the rules set)

Care to wager how symetric relay will stack up to a "natural" system...

Can we add in competition?

No sweat...

I readily admit that I don't expect to see any significant benefits during "real" competitive bidding sequences. (When I say "real" I'm talking about sequences that are actually able to break our relay chains) We might even suffer some losses.

But it won't be nearly enough to make up for the uncontested sequences

To me at least it sounds like you are saying this:

Because your system is expressive (in terms of # of hands that can be described) and concise (in terms of # of pages of system notes), that it is necessarily more effective (in terms of non-competitive bidding) than "natural".

If that is what you are saying, I disagree. If that is not what you saying, what are you saying?

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[pclayton]

Mike:

I understand what you are saying. I think players at the very top can't get much utility out of re-reading Kelsey for the 100th time, but they can get some mileage out of discussing and documenting sequences that seldom happen. I'm not referring to those players, but for someone from the US it would include primarily national champions and those that would be expected to be competitive in the US Team Trials.

For the rest of players, while there's an optimum amount of partnership bidding they should spend the majority of their work in other areas.

I'm not trying to leave the central theme of what I was saying before, but to me their are diminishing returns with having 300 pages of notes versus 50. The time is better spent elsewhere.

I would be willing to bet that most players could benefit more from 'less system'.

[helene_t]

mikeh, on Feb 20 2008, 11:07 PM, said:

We all know 'system nuts', whose energies are almost entirely devoted to devising complex, and usually flawed, methods. They lose the forest for the trees... indeed, for the branches and leaves!

As one of those system nuts I'd like to say that although I have no illusion that my memorization of (mainly useless and/or homegrown) conventions is of much direct value to my performance, I don't think that the time I spend on learning all those things was completely wasted. Of course in terms of bridge results the time would have been better spend on developing judgement, visualization, knowledge of suit play figures etc. But:

- The option of learning more useful things was not readily available, at least I would not know how. I read books like Kelsey's "winning card play" and were facinated, but somehow it just didn't stick. I could train with Jack (the software) but I easily get bored doing that. As for gaining experience from playing, as a statistician I cannot believe that I can learn much from the ridicolously small samplesizes coming from a weekly 24-board club evening. I had to studdy the game theoretically.

- It was fun for some time to invent crazy gadgets and discuss with p. Maybe not "useful", but for an amateur like me bridge has to be fun, "usefulness" is mood.

- I recently moved to England and had to get used to playing Acol, one of the few standard systems that I never played on BBO or elsewhere. I think my experience with developing and studying crazy and less crazy methods made it much easier for me to adapt. I had been few this process of evaluating the playability of a convention or treatment so many times, spotting week points, spotting ambiguous points, etc. The process of thinking "now I play week NT and 4-card majors, that means that this and that situation is different. That situation has an obvious solution but this one is unclear and needs to be discussed with partner and/or BBF" is similar to what I have been through so many times with my own homegrown stuff. Phil says that it takes three years to learn a new system. Of course he is talking about an entirely different level than mine, but still I think it's quite good that after 3 months in this country I feel almost as comfortable with Acol as I do with SA.

[hrothgar]

fred, on Feb 21 2008, 01:43 AM, said:

To me at least it sounds like you are saying this:

Because your system is expressive (in terms of # of hands that can be described) and concise (in terms of # of pages of system notes), that it is necessarily more effective (in terms of non-competitive bidding) than "natural".

If that is what you are saying, I disagree. If that is not what you saying, what are you saying?

Hi Fred

I am firmly convinced that one could design a system that is

1. Expressive
2. Concise
3. Absolutely dreadful

I also believe that being expressive and concise are both hallmarks of well designed systems