[Lestat]

Seems to me that whenever the cards are running my way, I invariably win.  And whenever the cards are running the other way, I invariably (oops, I mean tend to) lose.  This effect is certainly not true when playing an IMP match against ONE other team.  Has anyone looked into this to see if it is a bias because of the way scoring is done?  e.g. in this format, when an expert bids and easily makes a slam against you, you are going to get a bad result because there will be plenty of pairs that don't reach slam and of those many may not have the skills to make the slam.  This seems more like matchpoint  scoring than true IMP scoring.

I'm very much looking forward to playing tournaments and IMP matches.  And very appreciative of your efforts.

[JRG]

I hadn't made the correlation you did. Though there may be something to what you say, my experience has been a little different -- but still sometimes momentarily frustrating.

What I have found is that playing against competent, but not necessarily expert, opponents, I sometimes get a poor score when the "cards are running in our direction". An example would be that we bid to 3NT, play it reasonably well (not necessarily expert) and make an overtrick. And we get a poor result when expecting average or average plus (I prefer to play IMPs, so was expecting zero or a small number of IMPs).

Why? Well, someone got doubled in 3NT and just made it (let's assume they played extra conservatively because of the double, or the double made them take an abnormal line of play that lost a trick). Add to that the opponent that "sacrificed" and went for 1100. Oh, and the person in our direction that played in 2 hearts redoubled with an overtrick.

And of course, we have the situation where we are in the perfectly "normal" game contract (along with say 60% of the people who have played the hand), but we run up against an inspired lead followed by good defense and go down one.

I suspect that in general, one gets hurt as much by some of the random results when the cards are running for one, as when against.

What I did find frustrating was to make a contract on a squeeze and then looking at the movie see a couple of other declarers made the same contract because the defense did something, how shall we say, "not particularly bright?". But what the hell, I still felt good -- I don't find that many squeezes and they are fun!