[Codo]

bluecalm, on Dec 14 2009, 08:19 PM, said:

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Funnily your opinion differs completely from the facts.

I think you really should be more open minded and accept that maybe your opinion is not obvious truth. Do you have any way to rate bidding systems ?

Please read your first statement:

You did rate bidding systems, not me. I did not express any opinion about the pros and cons of any system at all.
You claimed that artifical systems are a LOT better then mama papa 5 card majors. If you are right, why are the 50 % you talked about do something so wrong? Most of them are pros, so I guess they will know what is good for them.
Your opinion about bidding systems is not the reality, but just your opinion.

If partnerships really choose the best fitting bidding system, why is there a majority of 2/1 players in America but a majority of WJ2005 players in Poland?
Why do nobody plays mosquito in the ACBL?
(These are rhetorical questions, no need to answer them..)

That all partnerships think/hope that they have the bidding system that fits them best is sure, so what is your point of claiming now that just some really do so? (But we agree here, nice to see your agreement)?

And we agree too about the judgement part in bidding. Bad judgment is a common way to lose at bridge.

[bluecalm]

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I did not express any opinion about the pros and cons of any system at all.

You said that opinion about artificial systems being better is contrary to FACTS which is the sam as saying that those system are not better and that you it's obvious because some facts prove it.

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Your opinion about bidding systems is not the reality, but just your opinion.

Exactly that. It's my opinion based on my experience and thinking about bridge in general. I didn't claim to have any hard evidence in favor of it. I stated my opinion which is that those systems are a lot better and that's my reason to choose them.

Anyway, I hope you agree there are many people who think artificial sysetms are better than natural ? For many of them the choice of the system is matter of what is better and what is worse. Why do you think Meckwell chose precision ? Or Larry Cohen ? Or Greco - Hampson ? They are from ACBL land and they chose artificial systems. FOr sure at least for some of them it's better than standard. I think Larry Cohen expressed his opinion about it quite clearly for example.

[helene_t]

I wouldn't call the system Larry Cohen played (plays?) with David Berkowitz "artificial". Non-standard (in a North-American context), yes, but few top pairs bid as natural as they do.

Anyway, although I would personally think that it doesn't matter much which bidding system one uses as long as one is comfortable with it, I don't think there is strong evidence either way. Most World class writers (who write in a Latin-based script) use the qwerty keyboard layout but that doesn't prove that qwerty is as good as anything.

Bluecalm, how much is "much" better? How many MPs or IMPs do you expect to gain over what you would have got playing some vanilla Standard American? Yeah I know that's impossible to estimate, just wondering of the order of magnitude. If one subscribes to the idea that choice of system doesn't matter much compared to general skills and partnership harmony, then maybe an average gain of 0.02% (or 0.0005 IMP per board) would count as "much". Relatively speaking.

[bluecalm]

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I wouldn't call the system Larry Cohen played (plays?) with David Berkowitz "artificial". Non-standard (in a North-American context), yes, but few top pairs bid as natural as they do.

Yeah, by "artificial" I meant other than standard structure with 5card majors and wide range 11-21(22-23) openings and strong 2C opening.
I agree taht most strong club systems feel more natural an easy once you learn them than most popular 2/1 varietes.

I didn't try to quantify how much better I think strong club systems are. My feeling is that in almost every tournament I would have loss or potential loss if I played sayc or standard 2/1.
One example is strong hands opposite weakish hands. It's about impossible to bid reasonably without conventions like gazilli but when you start using it you start producing long informative auctions on what should be easy bash the game and let them guess hands.
In BBO tournaments every time the sequence 1c (polish) - 1d(negative) 1nt (18-21balanced) comes up I can count on 70+% score just from playing better system.
Same goes for 1D - 1S - 3C and other jump rebids by opener which really doesn't tell much in standard. The habit of standard bidders of not passing any 5hcp to openers is another source of matchpoints but if you pass those hands you risk losing boards without any chance and fight. In "standard" you basically have to open 15-17hands with 5card major with 1NT. I think it's big big loser at matchpoints. Gazilli solves this problem but it introduces a lot of artificiality and complications in subsequent bidding.

In contrary to popular belief I think those are less of a problem at imps. At imps you can play worse partscores if they make anyway. Or you can overbid here and there and still you don't lose much expected value.

[Free]

I played artificial systems because they're more efficient when opponents stay quiet. If they intervene, in many cases we're no worse off than the rest of the field, sometimes we are still better off!

Artificial doesn't necessarily mean more complex to remember. Moscito for example is extremely simple, the relaystructures which are considered difficult are actually very easy. It's just a different mindset: playing natural, you remember calls (3♦ means ...). Playing relays, you use steps (step 1 shows 5422, step 2 shows 5431,... step 2 is represented by 3♦, so that's our call). So while an auction may seem very complicated, it's built up using simple and logical steps, and these steps are used throughout the entire system for simplicity. Some people ask how you can remember all this, how many pages this system is. Well, I never had to study the entire system, and an entire relayscheme can fit on half a page!

These days I don't play purely artificial methods anymore, because I got tired of prealerting an entire system, alerting and explaining every call, people messing up my judgement by intervening just because we play something "strange", all the reactions and TD calls,... Now I play some sort of 2/1, but sometimes with artificial continuations. It's a balance between natural and artificial which I quite like.

[Fluffy]

I am learning viking club nowadays, because I want to try the effectiveness of a strong club system before I get too old.