[thepossum]

Dear all

I dont expect any support and do not necessarily invite any responses to this. However it really does annoy/upset me when very good players in a matchpoints tourney will pass with a strong NT hand in order to get a top defeating EW. Similarly those ho trick the defence into thinking they are weak so they get a doubled game when they have a clear ga,e. All these forms of gamesmanship/professional gaming of the system/etc ect rather undermines the game and brings those players and the game into disrepute. I often read about people openly condoning gaming the rules, gaming the guidelines in every way they can. Those players will never be deserving of any respect. There are legitimate ways of gaming/misleading/deceiving/clever play that do not cross the line into cheating. Blatant lying about strength of shape or hand is not clever or worthy of any respect

Rant over

P

[mikestar13]

This rant is rather upsetting in its unmerited use of the C-word.

[hrothgar]

thepossum, on 2019-March-31, 01:17, said:

Dear all

I dont expect any support and do not necessarily invite any responses to this. However it really does annoy/upset me when very good players in a matchpoints tourney will pass with a strong NT hand in order to get a top defeating EW. Similarly those ho trick the defence into thinking they are weak so they get a doubled game when they have a clear ga,e. All these forms of gamesmanship/professional gaming of the system/etc ect rather undermines the game and brings those players and the game into disrepute. I often read about people openly condoning gaming the rules, gaming the guidelines in every way they can. Those players will never be deserving of any respect. There are legitimate ways of gaming/misleading/deceiving/clever play that do not cross the line into cheating. Blatant lying about strength of shape or hand is not clever or worthy of any respect

Rant over

P

Sorry, weren't you the one who posted the following defending your aberrant decision to open 2♣ on a hand that no one else considered suitable.

Quote

A large amount of the variance in bridge is chance. Things tend to average out over time. There are things you can do to sway chance your way and picking the right hand when nobody else picks it is part of bridge

Guess its only cheating when other people do it...

It's bad enough that you keep posting the same ignorant screeds over and over again and seem incapable of learning; however, your positions aren't even logically consistent with one another.

[diana_eva]

thepossum, on 2019-March-31, 01:17, said:

Dear all

I dont expect any support and do not necessarily invite any responses to this. However it really does annoy/upset me when very good players in a matchpoints tourney will pass with a strong NT hand in order to get a top defeating EW. Similarly those ho trick the defence into thinking they are weak so they get a doubled game when they have a clear ga,e. All these forms of gamesmanship/professional gaming of the system/etc ect rather undermines the game and brings those players and the game into disrepute. I often read about people openly condoning gaming the rules, gaming the guidelines in every way they can. Those players will never be deserving of any respect. There are legitimate ways of gaming/misleading/deceiving/clever play that do not cross the line into cheating. Blatant lying about strength of shape or hand is not clever or worthy of any respect

Rant over

P

Passing strong hands or underbidding with the hopes that opps do something stupid doesn't work great against better opponents. I had a partner who did that, many years ago. It was very frustrating for me, his partner, because we missed a ton of cold games. It's a really dumb strategy, I don;t think you should consider it's something that good players do to trick the less experienced.

[barmar]

Are you talking about bridge with human players, or is this just another one of your rants about how people fool the robots?

I just played bridge for 9 days straight in Memphis, in both high level and ordinary events. So I played about 600 boards, and I can't recall much of this type of behavior.

[r8864]

Well it's a legitimate strategy and people do so at their own risk. As long as there is no concealed agreement it's not up to opponent to judge them.

[Vampyr]

r8864, on 2019-April-02, 00:27, said:

Well it's a legitimate strategy and people do so at their own risk. As long as there is no concealed agreement it's not up to opponent to judge them.

Yes but of course if it is done frequently it could become an implicit agreement, or at least something partner could be aware of.

If the OP is talking about robots, of course the above does not apply. In that case he must understand that playing successfully with robots requires exploiting their weaknesses. If the OP does not like this, I would suggest playing with humans. There are also much better robots than Gib that he could try.

[glen]

Vampyr, on 2019-April-02, 09:55, said:

If the OP does not like this, I would suggest playing with humans

This is OP with humans:

Quote

I dont expect any support and do not necessarily invite any responses to this.

[mikeh]

hrothgar, on 2019-March-31, 03:51, said:

Sorry, weren't you the one who posted the following defending your aberrant decision to open 2♣ on a hand that no one else considered suitable.


Guess its only cheating when other people do it...

It's bad enough that you keep posting the same ignorant screeds over and over again and seem incapable of learning; however, your positions aren't even logically consistent with one another.

There is of course a logical explanation for his behavior. He isn't the least bit genuine. Some of the things about which he complains seem to me to be implausible at best. Remember his post about WC teams, with weird names, behaving in strange ways? Or this one, where apparently he has seen a lot of 'very good players' (which in itself makes me laugh since I have no reason to think he can recognize good players) do idiotic things to get top boards.

Now, if he is playing in an event in which some seats are occupied by GIB robots, then (for all I know) this may be a legitimate way to game the programming used by GIB. I don't know and never will since I prefer to play bridge, not the inept version played by GIB.

In real life, players who feign weakness when they have strength are idiots. One basic rule to remember is to bid one's own hand.

When RHO passes his 15 count, I don't suddenly open a weak hand. When I am in 4th seat and it goes P P P to me, I don't open when I don't have an opening bid. Guess who rates to get the good score? Hint: not the pair that was cold for game or a partscore.

Now, I did once get a terrible board at the club when my LOL RHO passed a 15 count, and I ended up as declarer. RHO showed up with near opening values, and I proceeded to misplace all the remaining honours, and went down in a cold contract, playing to endplay LHO who, as it happened, didn't have the cards she was 'known' to have.

Ok, one bad board against opponents against whom I suspect I have averaged at least 65% overall. I can live with that, and I am sure that this wasn't on purpose...I suspect she missed an Ace.

Anyway, I think that he is getting his jollies simply by having people seem to take him seriously.

If he's a troll, we should all stop feeding him. If he is legitimate, we should feel sorry for him, since he is fiddling around in GIB games, thinking he is playing bridge, and missing out on all the beauty of the game. So much of the game is about understanding how humans think, drawing inferences, cooperating with partner.

Some of my greatest memories at the table are of hands on which my partner and I have pulled off a defence that required that we each picture the hand the same way and, without any improper communication, play exactly the right cards to fool declarer. Doesn't happen often with expert partners: I guarantee it never happens, nor could happen, with GIB. Much the same can be said in the bidding, and of course much of the beauty of the game lies in building bidding methods, and agreements, that work coherently for you and partner. With GIB, all you get is their weird programming imperatives, which gets us back to where we came in. GIB bridge isn't about playing bridge (since GIB actually can't 'play' bridge): it is about learning how to prompt GIB into doing something that works out very badly for it.

[nullve]

mikeh, on 2019-April-02, 12:25, said:

GIB actually can't 'play' bridge

Because?

[mikeh]

nullve, on 2019-April-02, 13:34, said:

Because?

Maybe I am being too idiosyncratic, but to me the essence of bridge is the requirement (if one wants to play it even moderately well) to think...to analyze, and in many cases to use the ability to understand how others think. On a recent BW thread, I wrote about playing against Peter Fredin in a tournament in Barbados. I have forgotten the hand, but I was faced with a contract that had little play..I made the technically right play and went down. Fredin, in the same contract at the other table, found a different play...technically inferior in that it allowed the opps to set the contract immediately but, in real life, it was impossible for the defender who won the trick to get it right, even though he was (and is) a real expert.

We had dinner with Fredin after the event and I asked him how he made the contract...he found a play, in tempo, that literally had never occurred to me but which I think would have worked against the best defenders in the world. I wish I could remember the details.

Anyway, GIB could never think of that play because it could 'never' work, while the play I found would, I think, be the play GIB would choose (unless I missed a better technical line and I am sure I did not). That play by Fredin was beautiful...it's the sort of play for which I play bridge, even though that particular play was beyond me.

GIB doesn't 'think'. It runs multiple simulations (as I understand it) to take the mathematically correct line of play, and cannot, in doing so, model how a human defender will think. It cannot falsecard. It cannot make misdirecting bids, it cannot choose to make a double for tactical effect.

I played a few times with Barry Harper, a Canadian who played some pro bridge. He liked to operate and I tend to prefer to play it straight. He played it my way for the 1st session of a Regional Pairs, and we were 1 mp out of first at the half. As we sat down to start the second session he told me 'I can't do that anymore'.

Two rounds in, he opened a 10-12 1N. It went P P 2S, and he doubled! For penalty!

The contract was cold, but declarer went down 1 so our 200 was a cold top, and we won the event by less than half a board. GIB could never do that: Barry knew that his RHO was intimidated by him, and when he doubled, she basically assumed that she was going down.

GIB would never double, and GIB, as declarer, would never go down. We were playing bridge (I am not advocating for the actions of any of the players), and GIB literally cannot do that.

I could go on (and on and on) but my point is that bridge is a game 'played' by humans, using human cognition. GIB operates on an entirely different, mechanical basis. It is as incapable of thinking as it is of experiencing the joy of the game or, for that matter, the heartbreak of losing an important long match by 1 imp.

Making matters worse is that the programming is imperfect, leading to the countless GIB stories we see here, and I am sure we only read about a tiny fraction of them.

[barmar]

mikeh, on 2019-April-02, 14:54, said:

Maybe I am being too idiosyncratic, but to me the essence of bridge is the requirement (if one wants to play it even moderately well) to think...to analyze, and in many cases to use the ability to understand how others think.

They used to say that about chess, too. Then chess computers got better, and started beating humans regularly.

With enough computer horsepower, bridge computers could analyze much better, including figuring out whether an opponent's bid/play is consistent with an assumed holding. The algorithm is relatively straightforward (and I think it's possible to enable such recursive analysis in the GIB code), but the exponential explosion of complexity makes it infeasible to use for the number of robot games we run.

GIB is also not the most modern code. We're essentially using the same algorithms Ginsberg designed about 20 years ago, most of our improvements have just been to the bidding rules. I expect the commercial bridge programs like Jack and Wbridge5 have had much more development done on their engines.

[mikeh]

barmar, on 2019-April-03, 09:09, said:

They used to say that about chess, too. Then chess computers got better, and started beating humans regularly.

With enough computer horsepower, bridge computers could analyze much better, including figuring out whether an opponent's bid/play is consistent with an assumed holding. The algorithm is relatively straightforward (and I think it's possible to enable such recursive analysis in the GIB code), but the exponential explosion of complexity makes it infeasible to use for the number of robot games we run.

GIB is also not the most modern code. We're essentially using the same algorithms Ginsberg designed about 20 years ago, most of our improvements have just been to the bidding rules. I expect the commercial bridge programs like Jack and Wbridge5 have had much more development done on their engines.

My comments were not about computer bridge as a concept: your point about chess is well-taken.

I suppose we're getting into the metaphysical when I suggest that the best computer software in the world does not 'play' chess. There would as yet seem to be no consciousness involved: no awareness and no model of the self. The program chooses the mathematically best play, but it isn't really 'choosing' anything.

As far as I know, which isn't very far, a really good bridge program will analyze various lines of play and always, always choose the one that affords the highest percentage line.

Compare this to the story I told about Fredin (not sure if I told it here or only on BW). He and I were playing the same contract on the same auction and with the same lead. I took the mathematically, but poor, line. I forget the hand, but I needed a minor miracle lay to make it, and that didn't come home. Fredin, instead, quickly saw a line that, looked at single dummy, gave zero chance of making...provided that the defender on the spot realized what was going on. It was a virtual impossibility, especially as Fredin made his play in perfect tempo at trick 2.

I don't remember the layout, but I do recall my astonishment when, over dinner, he explained his play and thinking. His line literally never occurred to me, but it was one of the best plays I have seen in my life. It relied, however, on the ability to imagine being in the position of the defender confronted with the problem: my teammate was a real expert player, and was playing very well, and he didn't come close to realizing what was going on.

Now, maybe Deep Blue, or its successors, can model the mind and thoughts of its opponents, but that is not my understanding.

When computers can do this...when computers can create beauty at the table, then I will concede that they 'play' bridge, even if they lack consciousness or awareness of what they are doing.

[barmar]

Your post reminds me of that early Star Trek episode where Kirk and Spock are playing 3-D chess, and Kirk wins by playing illogically, which Spock never foresaw because of his devotion to pure logic. This is actually unlikely in a game of full information like chess, but psychological tactics are indeed possible in games of hidden information, like most card games. Poker has bluffing, and bridge has psychic bidding and Grosvenor coups.

[TheoKole]

barmar, on 2019-April-04, 09:19, said:

Your post reminds me of that early Star Trek episode where Kirk and Spock are playing 3-D chess, and Kirk wins by playing illogically, which Spock never foresaw because of his devotion to pure logic. This is actually unlikely in a game of full information like chess, but psychological tactics are indeed possible in games of hidden information, like most card games. Poker has bluffing, and bridge has psychic bidding and Grosvenor coups.

This reminds me of many hands when you "have to" play for a mistake by the defenders. For example, how do you play A10xx in dummy opposite Qx in hand for no losers? You have to play the suit and ruff the diamonds, there simply aren't enough tricks and you cannot endplay someone in a 7 ♣ contract. You cannot draw trumps yet because and play for a singleton King because you simply need the trumps in your hand to ruff the diamonds high. If there is a singleton K after drawing trumps you will be able to ruff ♦ ONCE with the extra trump and you need to ruff the ♦ twice on a 3-2 trump split.

You can play against LHO and lead the Queen hoping he doesn't cover if he has the King. However this will only work (perhaps, but it shouldn't) if they are an intermediate defender. A beginner will "cover an honor with an honor", an expert will cover when they see 2 honors in dummy (whether or not they have the J). However there is another way IF RHO is an expert defender. Play the Ace and a low ♦ from dummy (look I have a singleton ♦ ), if they have Kxxxx of ♦ it is the correct play to duck the King (99% of the time ) Actually I think it is correct play to duck even if they have Kxxx, I might be able to set up a squeeze against their partner with the 10 ♦ menace against them.

Think of it this way, if I DO have a singleton diamond (which I should on this line of play) then their partner has QJx ♦ so if they put up the King it crashes with their partners J while I ruff, the next ruff the Q comes down and the 10 ♦ is good. They are an expert defender and can tell I don't have extra trump, since I did not draw any rounds of trump, I need the trump entries to dummy to ruff high in my hand. Don't try this type of play against me please, I will hate you for it


Regards T

[steve2005]

thepossum, on 2019-March-31, 01:17, said:

very good players in a matchpoints tourney will pass with a strong NT hand in order to get a top defeating EW.

It's called getting the best score. It is what all strive for.
Where is the ignore button!?

[johnu]

thepossum, on 2019-March-31, 01:17, said:

However it really does annoy/upset me when very good players in a matchpoints tourney will pass with a strong NT hand in order to get a top defeating EW.

Basic bridge math says that this is a clearly losing play.

Support you have a strong NT which has 15-17 HCP, leaving 23-25 HCP for the other 3 players, so about 7-8 HCP. Much of the time, nobody else has enough points to open so the hand is passed out. Your side rates to have the majority of points, maybe enough for game, yet the hand is passed out. The other fallacy is that just because you have a strong NT, you can beat a contract that the opponents have voluntarily bid. If you had opened 1NT, maybe the opponents will get to the wrong contract. If you pass, the opponents get in the opening bid, and maybe the response at the one level, with no interference. If you compete for a partscore, you are starting a round late compared to the other tables.

Sure you may occasionally get a great score by passing a strong NT. You will normally get an awful score and I would expect you to average in the 30% range or less by bidding this way.

Very good players??? If they are playing seriously, they would just grind their opponents into the ground with solid bidding and expert play. Why make a very anti percentage bid? If they are just goofing around, they aren't playing to win so they are probably making random psychs all over the place.

[sfi]

steve2005, on 2019-April-07, 10:05, said:

It's called getting the best score. It is what all strive for.
Where is the ignore button!?

In the top right corner of the page, there is a drop-down box next to your name and picture. Click on that and choose the 'Manage Ignored Users' option.

[steve2005]

sfi, on 2019-April-07, 19:03, said:

In the top right corner of the page, there is a drop-down box next to your name and picture. Click on that and choose the 'Manage Ignored Users' option.

Wow thanks I needed that!

[phoenixmj]

mikeh, on 2019-April-02, 12:25, said:

There is of course a logical explanation for his behavior. He isn't the least bit genuine. Some of the things about which he complains seem to me to be implausible at best. Remember his post about WC teams, with weird names, behaving in strange ways? Or this one, where apparently he has seen a lot of 'very good players' (which in itself makes me laugh since I have no reason to think he can recognize good players) do idiotic things to get top boards.

Now, if he is playing in an event in which some seats are occupied by GIB robots, then (for all I know) this may be a legitimate way to game the programming used by GIB. I don't know and never will since I prefer to play bridge, not the inept version played by GIB.

In real life, players who feign weakness when they have strength are idiots. One basic rule to remember is to bid one's own hand.

When RHO passes his 15 count, I don't suddenly open a weak hand. When I am in 4th seat and it goes P P P to me, I don't open when I don't have an opening bid. Guess who rates to get the good score? Hint: not the pair that was cold for game or a partscore.

Now, I did once get a terrible board at the club when my LOL RHO passed a 15 count, and I ended up as declarer. RHO showed up with near opening values, and I proceeded to misplace all the remaining honours, and went down in a cold contract, playing to endplay LHO who, as it happened, didn't have the cards she was 'known' to have.

Ok, one bad board against opponents against whom I suspect I have averaged at least 65% overall. I can live with that, and I am sure that this wasn't on purpose...I suspect she missed an Ace.

Anyway, I think that he is getting his jollies simply by having people seem to take him seriously.

If he's a troll, we should all stop feeding him. If he is legitimate, we should feel sorry for him, since he is fiddling around in GIB games, thinking he is playing bridge, and missing out on all the beauty of the game. So much of the game is about understanding how humans think, drawing inferences, cooperating with partner.

Some of my greatest memories at the table are of hands on which my partner and I have pulled off a defence that required that we each picture the hand the same way and, without any improper communication, play exactly the right cards to fool declarer. Doesn't happen often with expert partners: I guarantee it never happens, nor could happen, with GIB. Much the same can be said in the bidding, and of course much of the beauty of the game lies in building bidding methods, and agreements, that work coherently for you and partner. With GIB, all you get is their weird programming imperatives, which gets us back to where we came in. GIB bridge isn't about playing bridge (since GIB actually can't 'play' bridge): it is about learning how to prompt GIB into doing something that works out very badly for it.

We actually had this happen to us in a tournament. One of our opponents had 15 hcp and chose to pass. The hand was passed out. We looked later and at other tables, our would be opponents (aka other tables in our opps seat) opened the hand and went down. They could not make anything. No idea what triggered our actual opponent to pass - but we were stuck with zero on that board. I suppose he could have miscounted or just had a feeling. Who knows. I think he was in 2nd seat.

Never seen it happen like that before or since.