[dustinst22]

Does anyone have any information regarding the paramaters of the deals in this format? Other than the fact that you're dealt the most HCP, it seems to me that a fairly large % of the deals always have some sort of "theme" present -- much higher than random deals (similar to say a level 3 bridgemaster deal -- for example, the trumps seem to split poorly much more often, or you're punished much more often for taking an inferior line than you normally would be, etc). I personally like this as I think it improves my declarer skills, would just be nice to know if it is intentionally programmed this way.

Has anyone else noticed this?

[cloa513]

Wrong subforum- you want tournament subforum.

[barmar]

I'm pretty sure they don't do any cooking other than giving the human the hand with the most HCP.

[hrothgar]

dustinst22, on 2011-September-14, 16:00, said:

Does anyone have any information regarding the paramaters of the deals in this format? Other than the fact that you're dealt the most HCP, it seems to me that a fairly large % of the deals always have some sort of "theme" present -- much higher than random deals (similar to say a level 3 bridgemaster deal -- for example, the trumps seem to split poorly much more often, or you're punished much more often for taking an inferior line than you normally would be, etc). I personally like this as I think it improves my declarer skills, would just be nice to know if it is intentionally programmed this way.

Has anyone else noticed this?

Deals that are shuffled by hand are often biased as to be artificially flat.

[barmar]

I thought about pointing that out, but I was giving the OP the benefit of the doubt and assumed he was comparing hands in robot tourneys to other BBO hands, not to hand shuffling in f2f bridge.

[dustinst22]

barmar, on 2011-September-15, 10:34, said:

I thought about pointing that out, but I was giving the OP the benefit of the doubt and assumed he was comparing hands in robot tourneys to other BBO hands, not to hand shuffling in f2f bridge.

Yes I'm aware that live shuffling produces flatter hands, but that wasn't what I was referring to.

I guess it's just me, but particularly in the ACBL individual tournaments, there seems to be a high frequency of "theme"-oriented hands and very few "boring" flat hands. Maybe i'm insane.

[barmar]

Not insane, just human. Unless you've actually gathered statistics to show this, I think what you're experiencing is selective memory. These hands are more memorable, so you think they happen more.

The only way I think you'll convince anyone that there's really a problem is if you go through a few dozen tournaments and show that the distributions are skewed differently based on the tournament type.

[mgoetze]

dustinst22, on 2011-September-14, 16:00, said:

or you're punished much more often for taking an inferior line

Sounds like I should be playing these tournaments ... in the robot rebate tournaments I always feel like you're often punished for bidding correctly.