[Vampyr]

the hog, on 2013-September-20, 19:21, said:

I cannot see how you can possibly draw this conclusion. In fact, I would argue that YOUR conclusion is sexist!

Well, the OP is discussing an action that didn't work. All of the people who took this action were women. So...if gender is a factor, then if a mistake has been made, it has been made because the players were women. What other conclusion can be drawn? How can the OP's line of thought be more obvious?

[fromageGB]

Maybe we should draw a line at this point, as it seems Vampyr writes for Spare Rib.

[gordontd]

fromageGB, on 2013-September-21, 03:47, said:

Maybe we should draw a line at this point, as it seems Vampyr writes for Spare Rib.

Or maybe we could engage with the points she makes, instead of writing dismissive comments like that.

[Cyberyeti]

I seem to remember in one of her books Rixi Markus saying that all bridge players make mistakes, but men and women often make different mistakes. I don't consider this particularly controversial.

[mycroft]

obXKCD: https://xkcd.com/385/

I think everybody's going to hit this, knowing that if they have duelling singletons it'll be -790. +100 is going to be a really embarrassing score if everyone's either +200 or +420; even more so if there are any +140s or +170s out there.

As I said first, making 5 is unlikely unless partner's weak 2s are still Schenken-solid. So, do you think the chance partner's outside card is the ♣Q instead of a diamond, and there are duelling round-suit singletons, is enough given they bid game, at unfavourable, when we pressured them, to take our chances of going -620 for "all" the matchpoints?

[Vampyr]

Cyberyeti, on 2013-September-21, 08:36, said:

I seem to remember in one of her books Rixi Markus saying that all bridge players make mistakes, but men and women often make different mistakes. I don't consider this particularly controversial.

It would be very interesting to know what she thought these different mistakes were.

[Cyberyeti]

Vampyr, on 2013-September-23, 14:28, said:

It would be very interesting to know what she thought these different mistakes were.

All my books are packed away in boxes while I'm being redecorated, but as I recall she gave some archetypes for bridge players who make particular mistakes, and assigned some as mainly male, some as mainly female.

The only one I remember as female was "The tight fist" where you ruff with a low card when you could obviously afford to ruff high and get overruffed in the face of an unexpected break.

The one I remember as male was "The peacock" the guy who can't possibly be wrong and will analyse endlessly to "prove" this after he's done something strange.

[Zelandakh]

Cyberyeti, on 2013-September-23, 14:36, said:

All my books are packed away in boxes while I'm being redecorated, but as I recall she gave some archetypes for bridge players who make particular mistakes, and assigned some as mainly male, some as mainly female.

The only one I remember as female was "The tight fist" where you ruff with a low card when you could obviously afford to ruff high and get overruffed in the face of an unexpected break.

The one I remember as male was "The peacock" the guy who can't possibly be wrong and will analyse endlessly to "prove" this after he's done something strange.

Are your books out of the boxes yet, Cyber? I would also be interested to hear of the other archetypes and hate to leave it at these two because it sounds like women make bridge mistakes and men make social mistakes, which I suspect was not the point.

[Cyberyeti]

Zelandakh, on 2013-December-02, 11:03, said:

Are your books out of the boxes yet, Cyber? I would also be interested to hear of the other archetypes and hate to leave it at these two because it sounds like women make bridge mistakes and men make social mistakes, which I suspect was not the point.

It was 20+ years since I'd read this, but those were the two she assigned to genders, the others (the Sado-Masochist, the Ethical genius and the doorpost) were unisex.

[GreenMan]

It's not the case so much anymore (as far as I can tell), but in the game's heyday women and men were effectively socialized differently; Patricia Sheinwold wrote in her memoir that she and her women friends were discouraged from bidding notrump ahead of their husbands to allow the men to hog the hands more easily. Once when her social bridge group broke up the usual couple-partnerships to put men at one table and women at the other, she expected that the men's typical auction would go

1NT 2NT 3NT 4NT
5NT 6NT 7NT 8NT

Even if this sort of socialization doesn't go on anymore (I can't say so with authority), the effects probably linger to this day.

[Zelandakh]

Cyberyeti, on 2013-December-02, 12:54, said:

It was 20+ years since I'd read this, but those were the two she assigned to genders, the others (the Sado-Masochist, the Ethical genius and the doorpost) were unisex.

I am guessing the S-M is a player that gives their partner unnecessary problems - strange and undiscussed bids, pseudo squeezes, a signal rather than cashing and crossing, etc. And the doorpost is surely a player that does not bid enough. But what is the Ethical genius?

GreenMan, on 2013-December-02, 13:39, said:

Even if this sort of socialization doesn't go on anymore (I can't say so with authority), the effects probably linger to this day.

I think it is worse in some ways now. Back then it was common for men and women to play together as partners. Nowadays it seems like nearly all pairs, even at club level, are 2 men or 2 women. This makes sense at international level due to the segregating effect of Ladies events running in parallel to Opens but why this might also be the case in clubs I have no idea.

[Vampyr]

GreenMan, on 2013-December-02, 13:39, said:

It's not the case so much anymore (as far as I can tell), but in the game's heyday women and men were effectively socialized differently;

Quite. I recently read a book called Bridge for Women, which contained chapters by many of the top female players at the time of publication. One of the points Helen Sobel made was that women often fail to return their partner's suit when they are cross with the partner. I found this shocking.

[helene_t]

It is really hard to see how double can be wrong. Even if p has ♠x ♥KQxxxx, ♦xxx ♣Qxx, opps bidding make a bad split in hearts or clubs likely so slam isn't that great. Granted, if both hearts and clubs split 4-1, they may make 4♠.

[Cyberyeti]

Zelandakh, on 2013-December-02, 17:52, said:

I am guessing the S-M is a player that gives their partner unnecessary problems - strange and undiscussed bids, pseudo squeezes, a signal rather than cashing and crossing, etc. And the doorpost is surely a player that does not bid enough. But what is the Ethical genius?

The S-M is the player that makes an ambiguous bid then redoubles when partner gets it wrong.

There is a phrase "Deaf as a doorpost", the doorpost tends not to hear partner bidding suits so leads something else.

The ethical genius is essentially the secretary bird with attitude, believing he's the only ethical player in the world.

[CamHenry]

When I first read this thread, I'd wondered if the report was going to be "all men with the E hand chose to bid 5♥ here, where all the women doubled". That would at least have shown some gender correlation.

The only conclusion we can reach from "all the players with the E hand (all female) chose to double" is something like "None of the women holding that hand was in a coma at the time."

[Vampyr]

CamHenry, on 2013-December-03, 05:39, said:

When I first read this thread, I'd wondered if the report was going to be "all men with the E hand chose to bid 5♥ here, where all the women doubled". That would at least have shown some gender correlation.

Yes, I was expecting something like this too.

[Zelandakh]

Cyberyeti, on 2013-December-03, 05:17, said:

...
The ethical genius is essentially the secretary bird with attitude, believing he's the only ethical player in the world.

Interesting, although I think she needs more archetypes. Mollo's characters seem to be showing a better range of mistakes and surely the HH would be a male archetype (although Rixi could probably have been described this way by some); probablt the UE too. Sadly, I fear that I might be an EG myself. I see so much cheating unintentional UI in low level f2f bridge that it is hard to take it seriously sometimes.

[helene_t]

It always annoyed me (although it is probably easy to explain) that male is the default gender, i.e. if a person happens to be a woman her gender is much more likely to be commented on than if he had been a man. Partly this is because women invade male territory more often than v/v (a female nurse is just a nurse while a male police officer is just a police officer. However, there are more female police officers than male nurses).

But even in neutral territory (such as for example club-level bridge) it still holds. Would anybody have thought of asking if gender is the issue if all the players in question had been male? Maybe (because this was a mixed teams event so in a way gender is an issue for everybody) but in general I would expect not.

[Vampyr]

helene_t, on 2013-December-03, 06:26, said:

Would anybody have thought of asking if gender is the issue if all the players in question had been male?

I can just see it -- was this bid unlucky to have worked poorly or was it a mistake the players all made because they were men?

Some earlier posters in this thread disagreed that the OP was very insulting to women; this seems to indicate that sexism is so endemic that, for some, it doesn't register even when it is blatant.

[mycroft]

ObXKCD. And yes, I've seen this in lots of places, including bridge. I will admit the dynamics of married-or-equivalent partnerships are very interesting, however. I find they fall into about 3 categories, and I'm really trying to avoid all of them in mine.