[straube]

Is anyone interested in a research project to compare various systems? We have proponents of Moscito, Imprecision, Scream here as well as Zelandakh's, RobF's, Benlessard's, etc. I'm particularly interested in strong club auctions and would like to see how various systems bid a strong club, with or without competition.

I'm thinking in terms of 100 or more deals. Hopefully the deals would be something of interest...something likely to generate a difference in outcome. One idea would be to start a new deal each day. So that would be over 100 threads. We could offer how our system would handle the situation, what alternate bids we might have made, and what the likely outcome would be.

It's hard to avoid competitiveness, but I'm after the truth and would want to be as objective as possible. This isn't about trashing anyone's system, but it's also possible that anyone who participates might wind up having their system come up on the short end of the stick. I know mine is wanting in certain situations.

Any interest in this?

[hrothgar]

straube, on 2013-January-11, 10:55, said:

Is anyone interested in a research project to compare various systems? We have proponents of Moscito, Imprecision, Scream here as well as Zelandakh's, RobF's, Benlessard's, etc. I'm particularly interested in strong club auctions and would like to see how various systems bid a strong club, with or without competition.

I'm thinking in terms of 100 or more deals. Hopefully the deals would be something of interest...something likely to generate a difference in outcome. One idea would be to start a new deal each day. So that would be over 100 threads. We could offer how our system would handle the situation, what alternate bids we might have made, and what the likely outcome would be.

It's hard to avoid competitiveness, but I'm after the truth and would want to be as objective as possible. This isn't about trashing anyone's system, but it's also possible that anyone who participates might wind up having their system come up on the short end of the stick. I know mine is wanting in certain situations.

Any interest in this?

I'd be willing to bid MOSCITO

[straube]

hrothgar, on 2013-January-11, 13:39, said:

I'd be willing to bid MOSCITO

Cool. I posted deal #1. It's a rather boring deal to get started, but there may be differences. Welcome to post on that thread. I'm trying to balance 1) avoiding really routine stuff and 2) making sure that I get random deals that won't benefit one system over another.

[antonylee]

I'll try to contribute my (mis)understanding of Polish club.

[PhilKing]

I'm in! I have my (complicated but allegedly "natural") system pretty much entered on bidedit now, so I can show workings ...

[straube]

I should have titled this "comparing strong club systems" or better yet "comparing strong club 1C continuations". I don't know how others feel, but I think it's very hard to compare strong club to multi-club like Polish or Swedish or to natural clubs. The hands I'm planning to post will all be 16+ and this ought to be disadvantageous to Polish (for example) although it might be interesting to see how Polish bids them. Even Zelandakh with his 15+ club would run a slight disadvantage because he can't enter a GF as easily; if you take my meaning, this is no criticism of his system whatsoever. Now Benlessard's system might have an advantage over a standard Precision (for 1C) since his club promises a strong hand but it has narrower meanings.

[Free]

I'm willing to correct Richard's MOSCITO auctions.

I'm in for testing my home grown MW Precision system.

[rbforster]

Thanks for the suggestion David! I will try to bid my system and see what areas for improvement come up .

[straube]

rbforster, on 2013-January-11, 18:18, said:

Thanks for the suggestion David! I will try to bid my system and see what areas for improvement come up .

Thanks Rob and thanks for participating. I hoped you would.

I'd like to see posts for Imprecision and Moscito as well as Zelandakh's system. I'm also hoping that someone familiar with TOSR or Meckwell will post for those systems.

There aren't many opportunities to compare one's system to others for the same hands and it will take a large number of deals to feel confident about anything. Hopefully we'll have the energy to keep this up until we reach that point.

[rbforster]

When you're all done lots of deals, you might see if you can get someone good to score the outcomes ala Challenge the Champs, and then the participants could compute their scores too. But there's no need to do this anytime soon.

I already found one area for improvement. In my two suited relays, for example it goes:

1♣... transfers showing two suits
... - 2N relays; equal shortness, i.e. either 5422 or 7411
3♣ : relay

3♦ 5422. (now 3♥ asks for strength in steps)
3♥ 7411 min strength
3♠ 7411 strength +1, etc

The point is just that the more common 5422 shape has to waste a step where opener asks for strength on his bid, while the much rarer 7411 shape zooms directly into showing values. Better would be to swap these shapes, which resolves the 5422 shape one step lower assuming you were going to ask anyway, and 4♣, the first step past 3N, would correspond to 9 QPs in strength which is generally safe enough to show extra values anyway even if opener tried to sign off.

Now this is just an application of the general principle that in relays were you zoom, the top two steps should be in reverse probability order (highest is more common than 2nd highest), even though the usual rule is to bid hand types from lowest/common to higher/rare.

[dake50]

Are you thinking of 100 hands for a system advocate to bid to
a final contract and compare the final contracts?
Thus each advocate to argue his own why his system excels?
Or bid these 100 and you will decide which score best - like CTChamps?
In addition, what defensive bidding will you allow?
Anything goes against 1C-force, but constrained against 1C: 2+Clubs?
1. Produce the 100 E-W bid these hands. Let each advocate show his reasons
for his systems bidding. That would induce a heated discussion: MINE
is best vs. NO IT AIN"T - mine is better. I would love to see that reasoning.
2. Or produce the 100 double-dummy hands(all 4 hands shown). Let advocates
defend their reasons for good final contracts AND why their lesser contracts
are systemically accepted. I would love to see those justifacations also.

[mgoetze]

Seems pretty pointless to me. Uncontested strong 1♣ auctions are not a major part of what makes a system good or bad, and it's always easier to pick the right option when you see both hands.

[straube]

dake50, on 2013-January-12, 07:23, said:

Are you thinking of 100 hands for a system advocate to bid to
a final contract and compare the final contracts?
Thus each advocate to argue his own why his system excels?
Or bid these 100 and you will decide which score best - like CTChamps?
In addition, what defensive bidding will you allow?
Anything goes against 1C-force, but constrained against 1C: 2+Clubs?
1. Produce the 100 E-W bid these hands. Let each advocate show his reasons
for his systems bidding. That would induce a heated discussion: MINE
is best vs. NO IT AIN"T - mine is better. I would love to see that reasoning.
2. Or produce the 100 double-dummy hands(all 4 hands shown). Let advocates
defend their reasons for good final contracts AND why their lesser contracts
are systemically accepted. I would love to see those justifacations also.

Well, I think we're going to get out of this what we put into it. In other words, it really pays to try to bid one's system faithfully and not try to reach the par result if not warranted. I mean, I'm doing this because I'm interested in a possible system switch to one or another system although I think my own system is good. I think we can help each other in that department, too. Like if someone bids in a way not justified by their system, it's ok to kindly question that. The poster can reconsider and revise their auction if they feel this feedback is correct. We've already seen folks question their own choices and give alternate lines of bidding and we need both that and their best educated guess.

I'd like to avoid any competitiveness here. Let's all put on the scientist hat to the degree possible. Now if we want to have a few people award points at the end (not me), we think about that later, but lets not think of this as any sort of contest. At the end of the day each one of us is going to be looking at these hands and making independent decisions about whether they like how their own system is doing and whether they want to move to a different system.

[straube]

So I have a question about interference auctions. If you notice on the second deal both opponents have the opportunity to throw in a bid and if either one of them did so, the resulting 2 or 3 spade advance would kill relay auctions. For example LHO could make a Mathe dbl or RHO could make a spade overcall. For all the talk about aggressive interference, I have the sense that most experts would be quiet on both hands, but maybe I'm wrong.
I decided unilaterally to have both pass and then decided to number this deal as NV vs V. I'd been thinking to cycle all white, fav, all vul, unfav, but anyhow.

So I can make these defensive decisions by myself or another thought is that I can generate deals in advance and get input from others and then take a (hopefully) consensus view of how the opponents might bid. We could also consider a variety of defenses. Like we could have the opponents play certain defenses on certain numbered deals and other defenses on other deals. Any thoughts?

A second issue is whether to eliminate any deals for their lack of being interesting enough. Fortunately so far the first two random deals were game and slam auctions, but there will be lots of hands where the bidding goes
1C-1D (0-7), 1N-P. I think for the present I won't screen, but if we all start crying "boring" on too many hands, I'll consider feedback I get on the matter and throw out occasional deals.

[awm]

I'd bid on Deal #2 as E/W if non-vul, but would pass throughout if vul. My suggestion is that if you're mostly interested in strong club sequences, the auctions after opener's LHO interferes tend to be a sort of unrelated issue... but auctions where 4th hand interferes are potentially interesting, especially since we have a lot of methods where responder bids 1♦ on good hands. It might be good to include some of those.

Another point is that some of your favorite structures appear to have a lot of issues with double-negative hands. For this reason we may need to include some seemingly "boring auctions" to get a feel for how often this issue arises and how serious it may be. One possibility may be to collect a bunch of "boring hands" into one thread and just ask whether anyone would have trouble reaching the best partial on any of these.

[straube]

awm, on 2013-January-12, 10:57, said:

I'd bid on Deal #2 as E/W if non-vul, but would pass throughout if vul. My suggestion is that if you're mostly interested in strong club sequences, the auctions after opener's LHO interferes tend to be a sort of unrelated issue... but auctions where 4th hand interferes are potentially interesting, especially since we have a lot of methods where responder bids 1♦ on good hands. It might be good to include some of those.

Another point is that some of your favorite structures appear to have a lot of issues with double-negative hands. For this reason we may need to include some seemingly "boring auctions" to get a feel for how often this issue arises and how serious it may be. One possibility may be to collect a bunch of "boring hands" into one thread and just ask whether anyone would have trouble reaching the best partial on any of these.

Yes, we have trouble with part scores in general and personally I'd like to include the "boring hands" specifically because I want to see how often we're at a disadvantage. I think IMPrecision will do very well with those btw. So might 1C-1D as 0-7. So might our 3rd/4th hand structure that I plan on using.

How do others feel about excluding hands where LHO is likely to interfere but include those where RHO may or may not interfere? I think I like that. We would be limiting the problem to..."What's the best way to respond to a strong club" and not "What's the best way to continue after pd's strong club has been overcalled 1S which may be natural or...."

I think what I'm inclined to do is to post the deals as I've been doing and I think I'll make a judgment as to whether LHO would interfere and exclude those. If I have a question about RHO interference, I'll save the deal for later and ask for other people's opinions about it...then post it as a later problem with hopefully a consensus action.

[Zelandakh]

I have posted auctions for my system on the first 4 deals. As you noted, some are not really comparable with more traditional club systems since most 16-17 hands are not opened 1♣. Whether that is a disadvantage or not we shall see. Most likely there will be at least a few deals of 18 opposite 9 too where the ranges work well for me. As you know the mentality of my system is game bidding first. So there are certain hand types where I may not be finding a slam that is easy for a rival method. On the other hand, if you include some hands with xx opposite xx and no major fit, this might catch out some of the shape relay methods which do not include relay breaks to check for stops. That is a common hand type and much easier to deal with double dummy than in reality for symmetric systems with relay breaks aimed at slam bidding rather than games. As always, it is difficult to know what might be a problem hand for unknown systems. I am confident that every system posted will have such hands hidden away though.

[straube]

So I need opinions please. Your partner is a passed hand. The bidding goes P 1C P ? (1S) ? and your hand is 654 Q62 AJ2 J762. Unfavorable vulnerability. Do you raise (2S) or go quietly? I have my opinion but I'm trying to remove bias here.

[awm]

straube, on 2013-January-15, 01:50, said:

So I need opinions please. Your partner is a passed hand. The bidding goes P 1C P ? (1S) ? and your hand is 654 Q62 AJ2 J762. Unfavorable vulnerability. Do you raise (2S) or go quietly? I have my opinion but I'm trying to remove bias here.

I'd raise. I try not to overthink these things; I would raise in a normal (not strong club) auction so I raise here too.

[JLOGIC]

It depends what the ? are. If RHO made a takeout X I would raise. If LHO made a negative bid and RHO made a NF suit bid I would raise (lest it get passed out). Otherwise I would pass, especially if RHO passed which would seem like a big warning sign.

Edit: Also, I would definitely pass 1N from RHO.