[inquiry]

Sorry kenneth, this one is not short.. quick summary, I love bridgebrowser.. so you can skip the rest.

Well, what can you do with Bridgebrowser... I probably have only scratched the surface, but let me highlight a few things.

1) You can look up all the hands you (or anyone else) have played within the set of data you purchase. That is easy.

2) You can look up all the hands you played with one particular partner, or any subset of partners.

3) You can look up all hands you played against a specific oppoent, or a specific subset of opponents.

4) You can find out your average MP and imp results by time range, by partner, by contract, by offense or defense, by all hands played.

5) You can find all hands you open 1NT, or 1C, or 1H... you can find all hands you open any bid and your patner makes a specific response (you can even find all hands where with opener's or responders rebids)... Every wonder how well your multi-2D opening bids are doing, piece of cake.

6) Like a chess opening database, you can forget lookng gor all your hands (or all mine), and you can search for all auctions that start 1H-(1S)-2D-(P)-3D for instance.. and you can put requirements on thiese bids, say opnenr has to have exaclty five hearts to AQJ or a minimum of 5H to what ever card you want, and a specfic number of hcp (say 11 to 15).

7) You can search for hands by shape, hcp, etc. So for insttance you could check to see how opening 1NT with 4441 with a small singleton does... or 4441 with a singleton K or Q.

8) You can also check defensive bidding, when you overcall or use takeout double. i used this to confirm that misho's meta overcalls work very well against opening preempts.

9) You can look at all the other plays on the hands and how the results look. Right now Bridgebroswer online has nealrly 3 million tourment/team game hands and almost 6 million main room hands. This isn't 9 million unique deals, for instance, each main room deal is played exactly 16 times. So it would take 16 million total hands there to have a million unique deals..but you can find hundreds of any example without any trouble... For instance when the cue-bidding issue came up where I like to play disciplined splinters in GF situations, I searched for hands that started 1S-2H- where opener had 3 to 5 card heart support and a minor singleton or void to confirm that the approach I use keeps me confortable. I also use it to examine hand to see which auction is the best approach.....

I can strongly recommend this program to anyone who wants to study bidding in the fashion similar ot chess openings. (Disclaimer, I am a friend of the program's author).

The play issue is a little more complicated. There you have to look at the hands and decide for yourself in most cases... I use it study play, but that is more time consuming.

Also, unless yhou have a VERY FAST internet connection, I recommend the program on CD ROM instead of the online version,... for plain fun, the data can be from okbridge or bridgebase... (I prefer the bridgebase data cause not only are my hands included, but my friends as well).

Here is a little info for you. In tourments and team games, you have played 30 hands with O S H, and 19 with southwind (these are the most).... In the main room you have played 509 hands, the most with pacci (89) and a player named 42, who oddly enough, you have played 41 hands with you. Of interest maybe, to readers here, you have also played with free (9) and mcphee (11).. Oddly, we haven't played together yet.. we really need to remedy that. BTW, of these 589 hands, you specificallly opened 1C (26), 1D (33), 1H (15), 1S (27) and 1NT (16) times. Of the 16 1NT hands, four had 15 hcp, five had 16 hcp, five had 17 hcp, and one had 18 hcp.. the final one, playing with O. S. H. had 12 hcp with 4-4 in majors.

Note hands played in private and public rooms, like BIL Lounge, are NOT included in the database.

Ben

[1eyedjack]

There are some systems that have a combination of 4-handedness and 2-handedness.

Moscito, for example (of which I am no expert, so Hrothgar/Free will probably correct me) has taken the conscious decision to lump all strong openings into a 2-handed 1C opener, in the interests of making the other opening bids more 4-handed.

[the hog]

1eyedjack, on Oct 10 2004, 04:49 PM, said:

There are some systems that have a combination of 4-handedness and 2-handedness.

Moscito, for example (of which I am no expert, so Hrothgar/Free will probably correct me) has taken the conscious decision to lump all strong openings into a 2-handed 1C opener, in the interests of making the other opening bids more 4-handed.

That is an interesting comment and I have not thought of it in that way, but "yes", I think this is an accurate assessment.

[helium]

inquiry, on Oct 9 2004, 11:14 PM, said:

Sorry kenneth, this one is not short.. quick summary, I love bridgebrowser.. so you can skip the rest.

Well, what can you do with Bridgebrowser... I probably have only scratched the surface, but let me highlight a few things.

1) You can look up all the hands you (or anyone else) have played within the set of data you purchase. That is easy.

2) You can look up all the hands you played with one particular partner, or any subset of partners.

3) You can look up all hands you played against a specific oppoent, or a specific subset of opponents.

4) You can find out your average MP and imp results by time range, by partner, by contract, by offense or defense, by all hands played.

5) You can find all hands you open 1NT, or 1C, or 1H... you can find all hands you open any bid and your patner makes a specific response (you can even find all hands where with opener's or responders rebids)... Every wonder how well your multi-2D opening bids are doing, piece of cake.

6) Like a chess opening database, you can forget lookng gor all your hands (or all mine), and you can search for all auctions that start 1H-(1S)-2D-(P)-3D for instance.. and you can put requirements on thiese bids, say opnenr has to have exaclty five hearts to AQJ or a minimum of 5H to what ever card you want, and a specfic number of hcp (say 11 to 15).

7) You can search for hands by shape, hcp, etc. So for insttance you could check to see how opening 1NT with 4441 with a small singleton does... or 4441 with a singleton K or Q.

8) You can also check defensive bidding, when you overcall or use takeout double. i used this to confirm that misho's meta overcalls work very well against opening preempts.

9) You can look at all the other plays on the hands and how the results look. Right now Bridgebroswer online has nealrly 3 million tourment/team game hands and almost 6 million main room hands. This isn't 9 million unique deals, for instance, each main room deal is played exactly 16 times. So it would take 16 million total hands there to have a million unique deals..but you can find hundreds of any example without any trouble... For instance when the cue-bidding issue came up where I like to play disciplined splinters in GF situations, I searched for hands that started 1S-2H- where opener had 3 to 5 card heart support and a minor singleton or void to confirm that the approach I use keeps me confortable. I also use it to examine hand to see which auction is the best approach.....

I can strongly recommend this program to anyone who wants to study bidding in the fashion similar ot chess openings. (Disclaimer, I am a friend of the program's author).

The play issue is a little more complicated. There you have to look at the hands and decide for yourself in most cases... I use it study play, but that is more time consuming.

Also, unless yhou have a VERY FAST internet connection, I recommend the program on CD ROM instead of the online version,... for plain fun, the data can be from okbridge or bridgebase... (I prefer the bridgebase data cause not only are my hands included, but my friends as well).

Here is a little info for you. In tourments and team games, you have played 30 hands with O S H, and 19 with southwind (these are the most).... In the main room you have played 509 hands, the most with pacci (89) and a player named 42, who oddly enough, you have played 41 hands with you. Of interest maybe, to readers here, you have also played with free (9) and mcphee (11).. Oddly, we haven't played together yet.. we really need to remedy that. BTW, of these 589 hands, you specificallly opened 1C (26), 1D (33), 1H (15), 1S (27) and 1NT (16) times. Of the 16 1NT hands, four had 15 hcp, five had 16 hcp, five had 17 hcp, and one had 18 hcp.. the final one, playing with O. S. H. had 12 hcp with 4-4 in majors.

Note hands played in private and public rooms, like BIL Lounge, are NOT included in the database.

Ben

Its ok ben i gladly read it all becouse this sounds interresting, its it difficoult to use this system?
And if u have time and are up to it can u please check how many times i open 1 nt on a 14 count hand? my p say i do it so often we should state our nt to be 14-17.
and is my 14 count nt openings sucsessfull?
(I know what u mean uf u think "hey, what am i your bellboy or somting??? bye the programm and do it yourself" ) but if u are up to it i would be glad ben ty:))


kenneth

[luke warm]

maybe i just need my 2nd cup, but i can't see what i'm paying so much money for... i can see how to use lin converter, for example.. but with this, the way the site is worded i'd have to buy the program and then buy databases

what am i missing?

[hrothgar]

The_Hog, on Oct 10 2004, 10:36 AM, said:

1eyedjack, on Oct 10 2004, 04:49 PM, said:

There are some systems that have a combination of 4-handedness and 2-handedness.

Moscito, for example (of which I am no expert, so Hrothgar/Free will probably correct me) has taken the conscious decision to lump all strong openings into a 2-handed 1C opener, in the interests of making the other opening bids more 4-handed.

That is an interesting comment and I have not thought of it in that way, but "yes", I think this is an accurate assessment.

While I had never considered things quite this way before, I think that your comment is dead on...

MOSCITO's relay structures, following both strong club and limited openings are clearly an attempt to play 2 handed bridge. The rest of the system is optimized for a 4 handed game.

Personally, I had always compartmentalized these in to the "good" parts of the system, where I expect big pluses and the "weak" parts of the system where I hope to break even relative to the field.

Really interesting post which did a lot of expose some personal biases...

[Free]

1eyedjack, on Oct 10 2004, 07:49 AM, said:

There are some systems that have a combination of 4-handedness and 2-handedness.

Moscito, for example (of which I am no expert, so Hrothgar/Free will probably correct me) has taken the conscious decision to lump all strong openings into a 2-handed 1C opener, in the interests of making the other opening bids more 4-handed.

Strong 1♣ openings are pure 2-handed, and hope to be able to cope with intervention. All other bids of such system however become more accurate, so it makes 4-handed bridge a lot easier. If you take a look at the frequency of these openings, the system is most of the time able to play 4-handed bridge. However, ALL openings have the possibility to play very accurate 2-handed bridge as well, so there's the big + of the system imo.

Remark 1: most strong ♣ systems have this advantage, so it's not a pure MOSCITO-advantage. They make competitive bidding easier after limited openings, and hope to handle intervention over their strong opening (and nebulous 1♦ perhaps).

Remark 2: same goes for strong ♦ systems...

[luke warm]

well i got that simplified club book (thanks mike)... it looks interesting to me, and it's definitely 2 handed, with 2 suited one bids (canape style) and 1 suited two bids, and strong club with weak (12-15) nt...

there appears to be very little chance for 4 handed bridge in this system, which shows me how the italians thought 'back in the day'

[EricK]

An interesting measure of a system is the mean opneing.

If you assign 0 to pass, 1 to 1♣, 2 to 1♦, 3 to 1♥ etc, and work out the expected value of the opening bid then it is generally the case that 4-handed systems will have a higher value than 2-handed systems.

Eric

[luke warm]

hmmm... i'm not exactly sure what that means... if, as i think most opinions show in this thread, most strong club systems are, or are largely, 2 handed systems, why do these systems seem to have a greater frequency of international success? and why do a large percentage of the world's best play them? especially if a 4 handed system of bidding is, according to some 'mean' analysis, superior?

of course i could have misunderstood eric's post, or the opinions of others re: strong club openings

[hrothgar]

One quick comment

While this thread is interesting, I think that some of the posters are losing track of precisely what 4-handed versus 2-handed actually means.

The differentiating factor has to do with a styl;e of bidding rather than a bidding system.
Some bidding systems may be more conducive to 4-handed bridge, however, I think that folks are really getting carried away here...

[inquiry]

helium, on Oct 10 2004, 10:00 AM, said:

Its ok ben i gladly read it all becouse this sounds interresting, its it difficoult to use this system? 
And if u have time and are up to it can u please check how many times i open 1 nt on a 14 count hand? my p say i do it so often we should state our nt to be 14-17.
and is my 14 count nt openings sucsessfull?
(I know what u mean uf u think "hey, what am i your bellboy or somting??? bye the programm and do it yourself" ) but if u are up to it i would be glad ben ty:))


kenneth

Hey, what am I, your bellboy or something?

Anyway, in the main room, from may 4 to sept 30, you played 714 hands,of these you (not your parnter) opened 1NT 28 times, of these the total with exactly 14 hcp was 4 times . Your average result for these hands opened 1NT was minus 0.55 imps. In the tournment and team game area, you played many more hands. Of these, you opened 1NT a total of 1894 hands. You (not your partner), opened 1NT a total of 104 times, of these once you had 11 hcp (playing with carlpsp), once 12 hcp (playing with triper), and 14 hcp at total of 20 times. 11 of these were Imp boards, and you averaged -0.97 imps per board on those, and 9 were matchpoints, and you averaged 84.09% score on those.

IMP Hands (first four in bold from main room)
DATE      Partner      Cntr      Score      IMPS
31-Aug         olej       5C      400      -1.47
1-Sep         Paal1       4N      630      1.87
21-Sep         boe47       1N      120      1.73
7-Jul         bkool       3N      -200      -4.33
11-Aug         bourbon      3N      490      1.05
17-Aug         miyav      1N      -200      -6.2
18-Sep         carlosp      3N      600      0
18-Sep         carlosp      4H      -50      12
14-Sep         roy_en      3N      -200      -8
19-Sep         carlosp      1N      -100      0
19-Sep         carlosp      5H      650      1
26-Aug         roy_en      2S      -200      3
18-Sep         okba      3N      -100      -11
8-Sep         carlosp      3N      -50      -2.57
31-Aug         roy_en      6H      1430      0
net average is minus 0.86 imps



Matchpoint hands, all from tournment/team game rooms
DATE      Partner      Cntr      Score       MP
29-Aug         kolosi      4HXX      880      100
29-Aug         kolosi      5H      0      50
20-Aug         shampo1      3N      430      88.54
20-Aug         JAPIE2      3S      200      95.83
24-Aug         Geysir      3N      630      89.81
1-Sep         roy_en      3N      460      85.29
29-Aug         tenn      1N      120      79.55
12-Sep         olerfald      1N      210      90.91
29-Aug         ivarst      1N      90      76.92

Btw, that 50 percent score for 5H was from a 48 table matchpoint event, where you failed to finishi the hand and the score was not adjusted. They were going to make, and you were going to get a ZERO....

[mikestar]

hrothgar, on Oct 10 2004, 11:02 PM, said:

One quick comment

While this thread is interesting, I think that some of the posters are losing track of precisely what 4-handed versus 2-handed actually means.

The differentiating factor has to do with a styl;e of bidding rather than a bidding system.
Some bidding systems may be more conducive to 4-handed bridge, however, I think that folks are really getting carried away here...

Correct, but to play a certain style, you need to play a system that facilites 4-handed bidding rather than thwarting it. Now 2/1 as Ben plays it is more 4-handed than Goren-Wei Precision--but on average, Precison or Moscito (even more so) are better adapted for 4-handed bidding than 2/1. Not the 1C opener, of course, but the far more frequent limited openings. In 2/1, you need so much space to resolve the constructive bidding ambiguities that it is hard to cope well with intervention or cause problems for the enemy.

[EricK]

luke warm, on Oct 10 2004, 10:20 PM, said:

hmmm... i'm not exactly sure what that means... if, as i think most opinions show in this thread, most strong club systems are, or are largely, 2 handed systems, why do these systems seem to have a greater frequency of international success? and why do a large percentage of the world's best play them? especially if a 4 handed system of bidding is, according to some 'mean' analysis, superior?

of course i could have misunderstood eric's post, or the opinions of others re: strong club openings

Precision doesn't open 1♣ as frequently as 2/1 does, and it cetainly doesn't open Pass as often, so its mean opening would, I think, be higher than 2/1.

Anyway, 1♣ systems aren't necessarily 2-handed (although they have a lot of 2 handed sequences ready to use if opps don't intervene).

My point about the mean opening wasn't that higher mean openings make better systems, but that given two systems which work approximately equally well in purely constructive auctions, the one with the higher mean opening may be more suited to the 4-handed game.

But as others have pointed out, there is much more to it than this simplistic analysis.

Eric

[jtfanclub]

The_Hog, on Oct 7 2004, 09:11 PM, said:

On a number of occassions in the past I have made mention of the 4 handed vs the 2 handed game. Some people have asked me to clarify this statement.

I've been practicing with my mentor the negative fourhanded game, as I call it.
It's where you count on your opponents getting you out of bad contracts.

For example:

Your partner opens 1D, promising 4+ and 11-15 hcp.

You have:
S: J8765
H: A65
D: J2
C: J765

If you bid, your partner's going to get excited. If you pass, 1D can't be a good board. Well, it can't be in 2 handed. In four handed, odds are the opponents aren't going to let you play there, and you'll get a chance to describe this hand exactly. Another example is having 2m over 1M be non-forcing. You can often pass this even with a misfit, counting on the opponents to pull you out.

With:
S: AK876
H: --
D: AT87
C: A654

If your partner opens 2♥ and you pass, that IMO is a negative four-hand.

If you've ever passed 1NT hoping the opponents would double so you could scramble, you might be playing negative four-hand.

[EricK]

jtfanclub, on Oct 11 2004, 08:15 AM, said:

The_Hog, on Oct 7 2004, 09:11 PM, said:

On a number of occassions in the past I have made mention of the 4 handed vs the 2 handed game. Some people have asked me to clarify this statement.

I've been practicing with my mentor the negative fourhanded game, as I call it.
It's where you count on your opponents getting you out of bad contracts.

For example:

Your partner opens 1D, promising 4+ and 11-15 hcp.

You have:
S: J8765
H: A65
D: J2
C: J765

If you bid, your partner's going to get excited. If you pass, 1D can't be a good board. Well, it can't be in 2 handed. In four handed, odds are the opponents aren't going to let you play there, and you'll get a chance to describe this hand exactly. Another example is having 2m over 1M be non-forcing. You can often pass this even with a misfit, counting on the opponents to pull you out.

With:
S: AK876
H: --
D: AT87
C: A654

If your partner opens 2♥ and you pass, that IMO is a negative four-hand.

If you've ever passed 1NT hoping the opponents would double so you could scramble, you might be playing negative four-hand.

If you play this sort of thing by agreement, you ought to let the opps know that you do. That may make it less effective.

Eric

[luke warm]

EricK, on Oct 11 2004, 09:47 AM, said:

My point about the mean opening wasn't that higher mean openings make better systems, but that given two systems which work approximately equally well in purely constructive auctions, the one with the higher mean opening may be more suited to the 4-handed game.

ahhh i see... thx for clarifying

[Rebound]

My problem with 4-handed methods is their apparent one-sided nature with respect to the partnership. Conversely, I enjoy having a partner defending against them with me, so I ain't complainin'. ;-)

[mikestar]

Rebound, on Oct 12 2004, 12:31 AM, said:

My problem with 4-handed methods is their apparent one-sided nature with respect to the partnership. Conversely, I enjoy having a partner defending against them with me, so I ain't complainin'. ;-)

It must be stongly emphasized that four handed bridge involves a mutually agreed on (and properly explained to the enemy) set of partnership agreements, both as to method and style.

Four handed bridge can be winning bridge; so can two handed bridge--but three handed bridge (focusing all your efforts on messing with the enemy and forgetting you have a partner) is losing bridge just as much as one handed bridge would be.

[jtfanclub]

EricK, on Oct 11 2004, 06:23 AM, said:

If you play this sort of thing by agreement, you ought to let the opps know that you do. That may make it less effective.

It's a philosophy, more than anything. Not sure how I would describe it.

But at any rate, that would likely make it more effective. For every time you hope for the opponents to 'rescue' you, there's two or more cases where the opponents leaving you at two level or less misses a good fit for them. You know the fit. They don't. The same goes for raising to the two level with three with 1D-1S-2S. You just take that to the logical extention.