[helene_t]

awm, on 2025-March-03, 16:13, said:

I feel like there's something weird about the way you're evaluating this, such that opening lighter is virtually always better (to the degree that a one point difference in 1NT opening massively moves the needle and EHAA looks like by far the best of the systems).

I think it is OK that EHAA works well on these metrics. It does get a lot of information across in the first bid, and if playing with a partner who always makes insufficient bids and bars me from the rest of the auction, I think I would rather play EHAA than a more reasonable system.

EHAA may be a bad system overall because the 2-openings leave too little space to sort out anything, but the metrics I have looked at so far don't address this (other than the aggresiveness in the scatter plot).

On the other hand, that it made such a big difference to take the balanced 11-counts out of the IMPrecision 1♦ opening is indeed weird. I think part of it is down to walrus mentality of my scoring system, but I will try to look a bit deeper into it.

[awm]

Part of the problem is the emphasis on “know you have game.”

If opponents preempt and I have say 14 points, it’s really helpful to me if partner opened because now I know we have game values, whereas if partner passed it’s tougher.

But if I have say 19, I expect a game even opposite a pass. If partner opened it is not so much help to me (actually it might make me think we have slam, so a marginal opening by partner could actually hurt here).

I think you are giving credit for opening the balanced 11 any time partner has 14+, whereas I think it really only helps when partner is in the borderline range of like 14–16. Against that, you are behind when partner has 12-13 because partner could’ve made a better decision if you had a higher minimum.

[DavidKok]

I think a better metric is 'uncertainty that we have game', i.e. the entropy of the binary yes/no question, conditional on our hand, partner's first call and the preempt.