BBO Discussion Forums: Bidding is 80% of bridge - BBO Discussion Forums

matmat, on 2011-July-05, 11:28, said:

Yes, try playing pickup. Good bidding doesn't help.

jogs, on 2011-July-05, 12:39, said:

Well, good bidding is impossible if you have no clue what agreements partner assumes.

jogs, on 2011-July-05, 12:39, said:

ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
so this whole thread is about pickup bridge? I get it now. In that case I propose 10% bidding, 10% cardplay, 10% defence, 20% lecturing, 20% profanity, 15% 'zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz', and 15% '?????????????'
---edit---
I got the percentages wrong a little bit... so i adjusted.

This post has been edited by matmat: 2011-July-05, 14:34

Nowadays 60% of all auctions are contested. Most partners want to devote a large percentage of the time discussing uncontested sequences. Many of those sequences don't occur more often than once in a blue moon.

Studying defense is always useful. Doesn't matter who your partner is.

jogs, on 2011-July-05, 14:09, said:

60%. are you sure it's not 55%? maybe 65%? hey, maybe it's 80%... on the other hand, maybe it's 20%. Isn't tossing out random unsubstantiated figures fun?!

83.3 % of the time it is best to stay out of threads when Matmat is involved.

aguahombre, on 2011-July-05, 15:08, said:

The number has got to be higher than that.

Did y'all know that 75.6% of the time, if you give out a random statistic while saying it with a straight face and mention a reputable company (such as Reuters), that people will believe it (this goes up to 97.3% when a person is unable to do an internet search)? If you believe that, I have a bridge I would like to sell you...

Getting back to the point, in the 2nd Edition of Precision Today, on Page 5, bottom sentence, it says "Just about everyone [everyone being the USA's top bridge players] said they think bidding is approximately 80% of the game." I disagree about that immediately, because I would say that Luck alone is worth 20%. A simple case in point would be at a Regional a year ago, I was a fill-in for a morning two-day Swiss when one of the member was sick. Our team of roughly 5500 masterpoints (I had 30) came up against a team having almost 100,000 masterpoints (Mark Lair was on the team). In a 7-board match against them, they bid a good 6♣ that went down with me having ♣JTxx while my team stayed in 3NT making 5. I bid an aggressive 4♥ game Vul, making while they stayed in 3 making 4. I gave back some of that misdefending a 4♠ contract, allowing it to make when I could have set it.

matmat, on 2011-July-05, 14:36, said:

On the very limited evidence of boards 17-32 of the EC open teams final, it's 75%
At my local club it's about 20%

chasetb, on 2011-July-05, 15:27, said:

If luck is 20% of the variance in a 16-board match then it is 11% in a 32-board match, 6% in a 64 board match, 3% in a 128 board match etc. So you can't quantify luck without specifying the length of the event.

FrancesHinden, on 2011-July-05, 15:29, said:

Interesting that you did that. The segments I chose (just because I ran into them first in the archive) were the first and the third. I got bored after calculating approximately 100 IMPs attributed to bidding and 16 to play or defense. My methods were quite sophomoric, but I doubt the margin for error was more than 10%. Some of the hands I used awm's ideas rather than just looking at whether the contracts were different.

On others, like the five IMPS for a doubled game at one table making, while just making at the other table ---since the contract could have been defeated with a different lead and the double might have swayed the lead (but didn't), I decided that failure to assess the double was a bidding thing.

Then I realized that calls like pass and double were not bids at all, got a headache, and quit.

helene_t, on 2011-July-05, 15:44, said:

I was actually going to specify that, but I was promptly kicked off the internet because my dad was expecting an important phone call so I had to cut my post short (we can only get dial-up where we live). Luck unfortunately isn't something you can completely quantify, but I think we can all agree that the longer the event, the less luck plays a role. Not only that, but the quality/ of the competition, the closeness in the ability, and the set of boards play a big role in how much luck can affect the outcome. In the span of two free Express races a few days ago, I had a 25% game and a 71% game. The reason most people seem to discount luck is that in the end, it all balances out, or at least I'd like to think.

I feel not counting luck, that bidding CANNOT be 80% of the game simply because of the number of bidding systems that have had success. Back a few decades, Fred Schenken used his Strong Club, Alvin Roth had a really conservative 2/1, and Barry Crane had an aggressive 2/1, and all three had major success in the US. In the modern day, Meckwell play a Transfer Precision, De Wijs-Muller play a Relay, Levin-Weinstein play 2/1, Versace-Lauria play a different 2/1, and Balicki-Zmudzinski play Polish Club, and all of them have had success internationally; Doub-Wildavsky play K-S and have had success with it as well, they were on USA 1 for the 2009 Bermuda Bowl. What they all have in common is they know the systems extremely well and are very disciplined (Meckwell's real discipline is in always bidding and wearing down opponents, and they do that very well).

Now when gaining or losing points are concerned, I can easily believe that Bidding causes 80% of the differences at the top-most competitions. If I had to break down what makes the difference of Bridge at the top level (say the Bermuda Bowl), here's how I assign might things:
11% = Luck
9-11% = Stamina/Focus/Experience
22% = Defense
11% = Declarer play
15% = Bidding in non-competitive auctions
30% = Bidding in competitive auctions
0-2% = Brilliance/Creativity

USBC finals.

114 of 120 finals board auction histories were readable.
41 boards uncontested at both tables.
40 boards contested on only one table.
64% of boards were contested on at least one table.
51% of auctions were contested.

matmat, on 2011-July-05, 11:28, said:

+1

It is a well-known fact that 98.3% of statistics are made up on the spur of the moment.

jogs said:

jogs, on 2011-July-05, 16:54, said:

so in this sample, out of 228 (114*2) total auctions:
122 (about 53%) were uncontested (41*2+40)
106 (about 47%) were contested (228-121)

in other words, less than half of the auctions sampled were contested? as opposed to the initial authoritative statement of 60% being so?

matmat, on 2011-July-06, 12:09, said:

So memory is faulty. Still read the literature. The vast majority of all the pages on bidding are devoted to uncontested auction.

jogs, on 2011-July-06, 12:51, said:

I really take no issue with a memory lapse, it's the absolute self-assured statement that I find inappropriate in this sort of discussion.

dickiegera, on 2011-February-21, 12:23, said:

No matter how good you declare a hand, if you are in the wrong contract (overbid versus underbid, suit versus NT, wrong suit or whatever) you score poorly. First get to the right contract and then worry about the rest. The bigger clubs and all tournaments distribute hand records afterwards to tell you where you should have been. Its easy to track your progress against those.

My observation is that interesting card play/defense hands at IMPs are a much smaller subset of total hands played and probably even smaller compared to hands that cause swings in bidding. Two years ago for example we were seed#57 in Spingold and played seed#8, needless to say we were to going to be seriously out-played and out-defended.

There couldn't have been more than six hands in the whole set that were interesting play/defense and the stronger team probably got 4 of them right against us getting 2 of them right. But it was swings in bidding that decided the match. A 28 IMP swing hand was definitely a big one. At our table we judged well to get to 4M judging that 6M was against odds given the lead of an obvious unbid suit. The bidding at the other table got messy with issues of UI being raised and when opponents got to 6M, our counterpart made a poor choice in lead and the slam came home.