[pilowsky]

 mycroft, on 2024-May-12, 10:22, said:

Understanding the Laws is no more complicated than, say, understanding how to use the python requests module

QFP

[barmar]

 blackshoe, on 2024-May-12, 01:31, said:

Transfers are not inherently logical? Interesting viewpoint.

My mother played social bridge her whole life. I played mainly duplicate bridge much of my adult life (I didn't learn from my parents).

Some years ago, she decided to take bridge classes at her retirement community. She complained to me about those new-fangled transfer bids they were teaching, they didn't make sense to her. No amount of my explaining how they allowed for more accurate bidding (by providing a way to invite after showing your suit) would sway her.

I have no idea what artificial bids she was actually familiar with. If I had to guess, I'd say just Stayman, plain Blackwood, and simple takeout doubles, since those were in Goren. I can't ask her, she passed away a couple of years ago.

She once told me that my father didn't play conventions, he just "bid what he thought he could make". Maybe not optimal, but quite logical.

I've never played with my mother. Based on comments like this, I think we both would have been extremely frustrated with the other's approach.

[blackshoe]

Lots of people have problems with logic -- and more to the point in your mother's case, with doing something differently to the way they've "always" done it.

In similar vein, my stepmother was at one time adamantly against nuclear power. Anywhere, not just in her back yard. Nothing I could say, in spite of a Master's in Nuclear Engineering, could change her mind. Then she heard Edward Teller speak. I don't know what Dr. Teller said that I didn't, but suddenly she went from "Hell no" to "Hell yeah!"

[pescetom]

Like barmar I refused to learn bridge from my parents and only decades later took a course. But many of the players I have met since then were still pretty much at kitchen table level and even the presumed experts in my club have learned little new in the last three decades. I don't find that they often have logic problems, however, and they can usually understand and evaluate a convention even if they would never bother to adopt it (or abandon one they know is inferior).

What does disconcert them, whatever their level of skill, is even limited reliance on the so called Law of Total Tricks. It goes against the grain of their basic assumptions and is as unacceptable to them as is relativity to a Newtonian. No amount of argument, examples and simulations will sway them.