[gnasher]

helene_t, on Jul 2 2009, 01:23 PM, said:

But matmat raises a key question, what does "difficult" mean? You can measure the difficulty of a pop quiz question by the percentage of participants who get it wrong. In that sense, I think bidding is the easiest part except maybe for novices: you will soon reach the level where you make no major bidding mistakes on most boards. Edit: this is contrary to what Gnasher says. Have to think about it.

I wasn't thinking about cases where someone makes what is clearly the wrong bid, but judgement problems, where the choice between reasonable alternatives swings significant numbers of IMPs.

For example, I've just looked at the match report in a arbitrarily selected edition of the Bridge World (June 2008). In the first set, 47 IMPs were swung in the bidding, 10 by the opening lead, 10 by card-play, and 5 in the defence.

[matmat]

gnasher, on Jul 2 2009, 04:44 PM, said:

helene_t, on Jul 2 2009, 01:23 PM, said:

But matmat raises a key question, what does "difficult" mean? You can measure the difficulty of a pop quiz question by the percentage of participants who get it wrong. In that sense, I think bidding is the easiest part except maybe for novices: you will soon reach the level where you make no major bidding mistakes on most boards. Edit: this is contrary to what Gnasher says. Have to think about it.

I wasn't thinking about cases where someone makes what is clearly the wrong bid, but judgement problems, where the choice between reasonable alternatives swings significant numbers of IMPs.

For example, I've just looked at the match report in a arbitrarily selected edition of the Bridge World (June 2008). In the first set, 47 IMPs were swung in the bidding, 10 by the opening lead, 10 by card-play, and 5 in the defence.

is that a difference in terms of difficulty or importance?

[aguahombre]

matmat, on Jul 2 2009, 04:58 PM, said:

gnasher, on Jul 2 2009, 04:44 PM, said:

helene_t, on Jul 2 2009, 01:23 PM, said:

But matmat raises a key question, what does "difficult" mean? You can measure the difficulty of a pop quiz question by the percentage of participants who get it wrong. In that sense, I think bidding is the easiest part except maybe for novices: you will soon reach the level where you make no major bidding mistakes on most boards. Edit: this is contrary to what Gnasher says. Have to think about it.

I wasn't thinking about cases where someone makes what is clearly the wrong bid, but judgement problems, where the choice between reasonable alternatives swings significant numbers of IMPs.

For example, I've just looked at the match report in a arbitrarily selected edition of the Bridge World (June 2008). In the first set, 47 IMPs were swung in the bidding, 10 by the opening lead, 10 by card-play, and 5 in the defence.

is that a difference in terms of difficulty or importance?

matmat hits it. Bidding has always been considered the most "important". Way back to Alan sontag's "Bridge Bum", where he hammered home that point. The fact that it has been considered most important all this time, and is not --will not be -- mastered, certainly puts bidding in contention for most difficult. Defense difficulty is often a result of failure to master the opponents' bidding.

[awm]

What does "hard" mean? Seems like...

(1) Swings most IMPs in matches between good teams. This would have to be bidding, and this is easily verified. But a lot of the swings are fairly random in nature -- one table bids slam and the other doesn't and it's guaranteed to swing a lot of IMPs, but if the slam is roughly 50% then neither side has bid substantially "better" than the other.

(2) World-class partnerships are most likely to do something which is not double-dummy best. This would probably be opening lead, which is often pretty random. There are many hands which offer few obvious clues about what to lead, but where one choice is the "killing" lead or the "anti-killing" lead. Of course there is always information from the bidding and your hand, but typically players have less to go on here than when declaring or later in the defense (where you have dummy, and partner's signals, etc). Of course, it's impossible to be very close to 100% on opening lead (barring cheating) simply because of the low information content.

(3) It takes the most time and effort to get to a level comparable to a world-class player. This might actually be declarer play, because many top players have mastered exotic squeeze positions that rarely occur at the table. How many of us can routinely get "level five" bridge-master hands on the first try? How many would get them if they showed up at the table? Probably not many, but I bet some of the best in the world would. Of course, these occur so rarely that the difference in score resulting from the fact that one player has mastered these positions and another has not isn't likely to be big.

(4) Improving in this area will do most to help my scores. This depends on who "me" is of course. But in many cases it is probably defense, an area where many intermediate-advanced players are lamentably bad. Even at the expert level, "boneheaded" defensive errors are more common than botching easy declarer-play hands. It's made more difficult by the fact that defense is a partnership thing, and reading partner's signals (and lead tendencies) can be a big part of success. Keep in mind that we defend roughly twice as many hands as we declare.

[jdonn]

Bidding certainly has the most frequent decisions, but I think declarer play is the most important. What would you rather do on a consistent basis, bid to the best contract but blow the play and go down, or bid too high or to the wrong strain but make your contract with a brilliant swindle or very difficult play?

Btw I have long disagreed with the common point of view that defense is more important than declarer play because you defend twice as often as you declare. True, but when you declare you choose 26 plays, when you defend you choose 13 plays, so I consider it pretty much a wash.

[mikeh]

gnasher, on Jul 2 2009, 04:44 PM, said:

helene_t, on Jul 2 2009, 01:23 PM, said:

But matmat raises a key question, what does "difficult" mean? You can measure the difficulty of a pop quiz question by the percentage of participants who get it wrong. In that sense, I think bidding is the easiest part except maybe for novices: you will soon reach the level where you make no major bidding mistakes on most boards. Edit: this is contrary to what Gnasher says. Have to think about it.

I wasn't thinking about cases where someone makes what is clearly the wrong bid, but judgement problems, where the choice between reasonable alternatives swings significant numbers of IMPs.

For example, I've just looked at the match report in a arbitrarily selected edition of the Bridge World (June 2008). In the first set, 47 IMPs were swung in the bidding, 10 by the opening lead, 10 by card-play, and 5 in the defence.

As matmat suggests, all this data indicates is which is more important, at least in terms of impact on outcome.

Further, as others have indicated, many of the decisions that swing imps are impossible to assess as being well-made as opposed to lucky. A slam depends on a King being onside.... with no clue from the bidding... am I a better bidder because I gambled it was onside and it was? No, but I won a lot of imps... this time... next time, I may lose an equal amount.

Bidding will inherently swing more imps than either play or defence, if the players are well-matched.

Bidding, at its heart, is based on anticipated play and defence. We construct images of the hands in our heads and consciously or otherwise we assess the lines of play..at least in broad terms. Can we count to 12 tricks? Is a finesse likely to work if needed, etc.

But this is all inferential... with the exception of certain hands with relays... we are usually making assumptions about how dummy will look. Our mental image will be less precise than the sight of dummy, so our analysis of the play or defence can only be approximate in the auction... engendering wider variance than can occur once dummy is known.

Nothing about this makes bidding more or less inherently difficult...it merely maximizes its relative importance.

[matmat]

I think trying to order defence, declarer play and bidding in terms of difficulty is misguided. (especially since I claim "difficulty" is not well defined)... let's try anyway

I would argue that the definition should be based on how much time (or number of hands) one needs to invest in a particular aspect of the game to improve that aspect by some fixed amount.

Namely, suppose you get 75/100 bidding decisions right (i.e. choose the higher percentage action, that being based on a large set of simulations consistent with the information provided in the auction), how much effort and time do you have to put in to bump that up to, say 80/100?
(same for the other two aspects of the game).

I think that each individual would go up each of the three "ladders" at a different rate, and furthermore that this rate would vary depending on how advanced a player is.

All of this, though, I think, is insanely complicated to measure. and, tbh, when someone tells me that they think any of the three is harder than the other two, I don't believe them -- partially because I don't trust them to be a very good judge of their own abilities

I am a little bit torn on the question as to what I find most difficult for me. I can think of arguments for pretty much any of bidding, declaring and defence...

bridge is hard.

[kfay]

All equally easy, imo. wtp?

[kenrexford]

This is an interesting question for people to answer.

When discussing bridge "errors" with people, they seem to fall into different categories of errors. For example, whereas anyone would agree that certain play mistakes are errors, some seem to characterize some play errors as not errors but as simply not being "good enough" to spot the non-sim squeeze or the menace transfer or whatever. Or, they do not even see that the play couild have been made and hence do not even discuss the problem as if any error occurred.

With defense, many discussed errors are not even errors, whereas errors might have occurred that are missed. For example, Johnny might think Billy erred, whereas Billy had an incredibly diverse set of possible layouts to consider whereas Johnny copuld have made a "weird" move to clear everything up for Billy but missed that chance.

With bidding, the correct use of omne's systemic tools throughout an auction, reaching an inferior result, is not seen as any sort of error, because the "error," if any, is systemic, and as the assessment as to whether the "error" is actually an "error" is unclear, maybe controversial, and maybe stylistic. The "error" might even not be so much an "error" as a "weakness," such as an inability to handle "that much complexity" of system. But, is it deemed not an "error" to be unable to handle very complex declarer problems like compound squeezes?

With all of this in mind, I think the "most difficult part of the game" is different for different people, and I think that many underestimate aspects of the difficulty of the game because of a lack of appreciation in the underestimated area as to what could be if one really understood that aspect of the game.

as every couple of years I realize that I missed some amazing concept is any of these three areas and am in awe as to what I just realized, and as I expect that trend to continue, I realize that I do not know enough about this magic game to provide an authoritative statement as to which part of the game actually is hardest to master. From what I have seen on vugraph, with the best of the best, I bet every one of them would actually agree, at least in spirit.

[helene_t]

If I ever were to sue someone for accusing me of making errors, I would know which lawyer to hire

[the hog]

jdonn, on Jul 2 2009, 01:01 PM, said:

Defense is CLEARLY the hardest. Why do you think everyone bids so much?

I don't think there is any argument about this. Clearly defence.

[aguahombre]

The_Hog, on Jul 5 2009, 04:07 AM, said:

jdonn, on Jul 2 2009, 01:01 PM, said:

Defense is CLEARLY the hardest. Why do you think everyone bids so much?

I don't think there is any argument about this. Clearly defence.

yeh, I guess the rest of us wasted 3 pages on the subject just waiting for you to clear it up. sorry, rude. but I have enjoyed the past four days reading the thought processes of MIKEH, MATMAT, AWM, JDON, DELENE, MBODELL, ELIANNA, Etc. Apparently they think it was worthy of argument.

[the hog]

"yeh, I guess the rest of us wasted 3 pages on the subject"

Yes you did.