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Advice for analysing bridge hands

#1 User is offline   AL78 

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Posted 2023-April-30, 13:38

I've just played in the local club Swiss pairs which turned out be a very strange event from our perspective. Six rounds, six boards per round, a refreshment break after round 3. Partner and I had an appalling first half losing two out of the three rounds 19-1, one of those against a pair who appeared to have little clue about the game (although what does that say about our ability lol). In the second half we won all our matches and finished with the ascendancy prize.

I would like to go back and have a look at the hands where we did badly to assess whether or not it was our sub-optimal play that was the primary cause. I can't really post 20 hands on here to invite expert comment so need to look at them myself. Could anyone give any advice on techniques/thinking methods on how to objectively go back and analyse the awful hands with the aim of looking at what we are doing wrong, because the amount of battering we got is too much to be dismissed as bad luck or being fixed in my estimation. No good pair would be languishing third from bottom in an eleven table Swiss movement at the halfway point.
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#2 User is offline   DavidKok 

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Posted 2023-April-30, 14:05

The first thing I always do is wait a day or so. I find that I'm not objective on the day of, or usually the day after, an event. It is much easier to spot errors a while after the fact. If you have any notes or thoughts on specific deals write those down and save them for later analysis.

As a first pass I'd look for deals where you missed games or ended up not playing in your best strain. You can use software to tell you the par on each deal if you want, but it comes with all the usual issues of using a double dummy program. If you really had multiple bad boards in brief succession there might be a common theme.
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#3 User is offline   AL78 

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Posted 2023-May-01, 08:07

I've looked at the first round where we lost 19-1 and it was one of the worst examples of getting on the wrong side of bad luck I've seen in a while:

Board 1: The opponents have 25 HCP between them and stop in 1NT making +1. Double dummy we can get another trick in defence but it make little difference when most of the field are going off in 3NT.

Board 2: We got a good score by pushing opponents to a non-making contract.

Board 3: We went off in a slam that was slightly better than 50%. Success depends on finding the heart queen with a nine card fit. Many other declarers were getting a singleton heart switch after cashing a top diamond which solves that problem. How someone ended up in 7NTX-7 is unknown.

Board 4: We could have done better by taking another trick and holding it to nine tricks. Either I have to switch to a top club at trick two or partner has to overtake my king, cash a second diamond on which I signal for a club, then lead a club. Having said that even holding to nine tricks would have got us an average minus, the scores were all over the place.

Board 5: The opponents bid and make 3NT which should always make but a few people went down. I made it easier for them because I didn't play declarer for QTxx after she denied a four card spade suit in the auction, so her queen didn't fall under my ace and I established it.

Board 6: Opponents bid to 5 which is cold and only three other pairs find it, with two only reaching 4 and the rest allowing NS to play in a major.

A why-did-I-bother-to-turn-up round.
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#4 User is offline   pescetom 

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Posted 2023-May-02, 15:23

View PostDavidKok, on 2023-April-30, 14:05, said:

The first thing I always do is wait a day or so. I find that I'm not objective on the day of, or usually the day after, an event. It is much easier to spot errors a while after the fact. If you have any notes or thoughts on specific deals write those down and save them for later analysis.

As a first pass I'd look for deals where you missed games or ended up not playing in your best strain. You can use software to tell you the par on each deal if you want, but it comes with all the usual issues of using a double dummy program. If you really had multiple bad boards in brief succession there might be a common theme.


I have one partner who was a surgeon and has had quite enough of bleeding bodies, will refuse to look at anything more than one or two hands and only if they evidence a partnership problem rather than a unilateral mistake (even if it is his and it might help avoid repetition).
I have others who will cheerfully examine all the poor scores, an attitude I prefer.
I decidedly avoid discussion the same day, but also always do it the day after: objective or not, I will lose interest in all but the most intriguing of boards two days later, my partners even more so.
I use both double dummy analysis and analysis of contracts and scores obtained at other tables.
No compunction in pointing out lapses of lucidity or partnership trust on either side, if that is what the results suggest.
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#5 User is offline   mikeh 

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Posted 2023-May-02, 16:05

In my current main partnership, after every event (other than a multi day event such as the regional we played a couple of weeks ago) we talk by phone after the session or the day…we go over every hand…not just the ones where we got a bad result but every hand.

We’re looking for systemic errors or areas where our system could be improved. We’re looking for judgment issues. Was one too aggressive, given maybe warning signs from the auction? That’s usually be my partner. Was one too conservative, given his hand and the auction? That’s usually me.

Did we get our carding screwed up on defence?

On the hands where we got a good result, was that due to a lucky mistake? Or simply due to the opps screwing up? Or to our teammates having a great result?

We NEVER use double dummy analysis to assess our performance and I think it a colossal mistake to do so unless you are mentally rigorous enough to recognize when the double dummy play or contract is ridiculous, as it often is. We do sometimes use software to generate hands o allow us to practice gadgets…we’re now playing 1C (P) 1N as a balanced game force with relays. This arises so rarely (in some 300 hands in real life it hasn’t happened once) that the only way to practice is to generate hands.

I used to give a lecture at a local club…before the Friday evening game I’d go over the previous week’s results, with an emphasis on having the audience ask questions. The hand records of course gave the double dummy results. Every week….every single week…some people would ask something like….on board 13 we can make 4S but we played in 2S, making three. What did we do wrong, both in the bidding and the play?

Every week I’d say much the same thing….what you read is how you could play if you saw all the cards. You had 13 high and a 5332 hand. Partner had a soft nine….no competent pair would even try for game. Then two finesses worked in side suits and missing five to the queen, you have to drop the doubleton queen offside. They’d all nod in agreement…but next week I’d get two or three similar questions.

One of the other tough aspects of self-improvement is the tendency to think that ‘if we got a good result, we must have done something right’, not necessarily so. Just as you can get bad results doing everything right, so too can you get good results from screwing up. At the regional we lost a KO event on a number of hands where we could have done better but one hand exceeded the margin of defeat. Declarer, a good but not A level expert, had to play spades for one loser holding KQ109xxx opposite x. I’d opened behind him…a weak 1N….but he was missing some 20 hcp and had zero reason to place me with the Jack. I held AJ tight…he played low to the king then dropped my Jack. Lose 12 when our (A level expert) teammate hooked the 10 on the first round.

We lost another meaningless match (in a round robin qualifier for a KO we won) when declarer in 4H had to guess trump with K9xxx opposite AJ10. A guess, you say? What if the auction began 1H (3D)? The clearly, imo, correct line is to play the preemptor to not hold the heart queen. Our opponent, without apparent thought, played low to the J, picking off Qx in the 3D hand. So our team made no errors and we dropped 22 imps on those two boards, lol.

Finally, of course, one’s ability to analyze is limited by one’s knowledge of the game. Whereas double dummy will unfailing find the trump squeeze or pull of a criss+cross, most club players can’t see it even when the can see that they ‘should’ make an extra trick. So I wish you luck and I definitely think it’s a good thing, especially with a partner….just be aware of the limitations and don’t hesitate to reach out (here or elsewhere) for advice from more experienced players.
'one of the great markers of the advance of human kindness is the howls you will hear from the Men of God' Johann Hari
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#6 User is offline   AL78 

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Posted 2023-May-04, 16:05

Thanks Mikeh for the warning that trying to analyse hands I've played is extremely susceptible to bias steering me towards the wrong conclusion. Is it worth me trying to do it solo, I don't want to spam this forum with a ton of hands from one of my poorer sessions and get people's backs up.

One of the harder questions to answer is when I look at a hand and the double dummy analysis, see how we could have got the extra trick (e.g. by finding a switch at a critical moment), but am wondering whether there was a way of working it out at the table. I'm certain I am blowing tricks through not taking in and/or using all the information available to find the optimal play.
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