[mike777]

Been watching the Soloway matches.
I had hoped to pick up information on bidding transfers over one club or unbalanced diamond auctions. If not, at least seeing other top systems in action.

What I did see, it seemed, were preemptive actions every other hand by one side or the other. Perhaps that was the real lesson...

[mike777]

Last hand of the night was exciting if excruciatingly slow to watch at the tables.
Ew can make 3NT. South was 5-6 in the majors. Some jumped immediately to 4H.
Good sacrifice, even better if not doubled.

Very last table in play EW got to 5D.
Made it on a squeeze where the count was NOT rectified, for a last second win.

[akwoo]

mike777, on 2025-December-02, 10:35, said:

Been watching the Soloway matches.
I had hoped to pick up information on bidding transfers over one club or unbalanced diamond auctions. If not, at least seeing other top systems in action.

What I did see, it seemed, were preemptive actions every other hand by one side or the other. Perhaps that was the real lesson...

The most important thing to figure out with your partner is all the uses of 2N in competition...

Everyone's constructive bidding systems are so good now that you just get eaten alive if you don't jump in. (Of course, if you don't have a suitable hand, you get eaten even more badly if you do.)

I actually think this is a problem for the survival of competitive bridge. The experts are just too good - and make the game too hard for their opponents - for anyone to want to play them, and even competent club players are too good for beginners to want to get into the game.

mike777, on 2025-December-03, 08:41, said:

Last hand of the night was exciting if excruciatingly slow to watch at the tables.
Ew can make 3NT. South was 5-6 in the majors. Some jumped immediately to 4H.
Good sacrifice, even better if not doubled.

Very last table in play EW got to 5D.
Made it on a squeeze where the count was NOT rectified, for a last second win.

One of the commentators pointed out that it was a squeeze TWO tricks off the count. I also watched it in real time, and I could barely figure it out seeing all the cards AND having it pointed out to me.

[DavidKok]

akwoo, on 2025-December-03, 09:39, said:

I actually think this is a problem for the survival of competitive bridge. The experts are just too good - and make the game too hard for their opponents - for anyone to want to play them, and even competent club players are too good for beginners to want to get into the game.

Allow me to arrogantly take the opposite view: there is so much uncharted territory about bidding in competition especially. Just reading two or three chapters of Robson & Segal (and adopting the methods verbatim, of course) will put you ahead of most intermediate and advanced players. Not the experts, they'll have likely read the book and studied competitive auctions in considerably more depth, but enough for 95% of competition up to the national level. And that book is 30 years old! People have failed to use that as a baseline and improve from there - the development is mostly stagnant, and it's not that much of a challenge to do better using modern insights.

I don't think the rare encounters with these experts is what's keeping novices from enjoying the game, or from winning.

[akwoo]

DavidKok, on 2025-December-03, 11:02, said:

Allow me to arrogantly take the opposite view: there is so much uncharted territory about bidding in competition especially. Just reading two or three chapters of Robson & Segal (and adopting the methods verbatim, of course) will put you ahead of most intermediate and advanced players. Not the experts, they'll have likely read the book and studied competitive auctions in considerably more depth, but enough for 95% of competition up to the national level. And that book is 30 years old! People have failed to use that as a baseline and improve from there - the development is mostly stagnant, and it's not that much of a challenge to do better using modern insights.

I don't think the rare encounters with these experts is what's keeping novices from enjoying the game, or from winning.

I think you are imagining a different level of 'beginner' and 'competent club player' than I am.

The 4th and 5th best players locally recently stopped playing Lebensohl. Why? They can't remember it. Why can't they remember it? Playing at the club, no one ever interferes over strong NT openings; they're just too afraid of going down. They also played it after takeout doubles of weak 2s, but opponents also have such strict requirements for weak 2s that they hardly ever see them. So they only got to use it when they travelled to play at a tournament, and using it 4 times in a week, two weeks a year, was just not enough for them to remember it.

Sure they could study competitive auctions - and then they would forget everything they learned because, 50 weeks out of the year, they encounter almost no competitive auctions. Meanwhile, the beginners we're playing against don't want to play with us because we don't automatically pass when they open, and they don't know what to do even over a simple overcall.

[DavidKok]

Sorry, I'm confused now. I read your previous comment as saying that the gap between experts and novices has grown wide, and people are scared of trying to close it. Putting aside experts for the moment, I think we're in agreement on nearly the opposite: the gap between weaker players and the local top dogs is slim, and learning how to compete and what to do in competition is incredible returns for comparatively little effort.

[mikeh]

akwoo, on 2025-December-03, 12:34, said:

I think you are imagining a different level of 'beginner' and 'competent club player' than I am.

The 4th and 5th best players locally recently stopped playing Lebensohl. Why? They can't remember it. Why can't they remember it? Playing at the club, no one ever interferes over strong NT openings; they're just too afraid of going down. They also played it after takeout doubles of weak 2s, but opponents also have such strict requirements for weak 2s that they hardly ever see them. So they only got to use it when they travelled to play at a tournament, and using it 4 times in a week, two weeks a year, was just not enough for them to remember it.

Sure they could study competitive auctions - and then they would forget everything they learned because, 50 weeks out of the year, they encounter almost no competitive auctions. Meanwhile, the beginners we're playing against don't want to play with us because we don't automatically pass when they open, and they don't know what to do even over a simple overcall.

I think that, at least in NA, this is a function of where the ‘new’ players have been coming from for the past 20+ years. They’re all at least late middle aged when they start and they have neither the desire nor, for many, the ability to emulate how I and my peers were hooked on the competitive aspect of the game. I still recall playing in the local ‘big club’ monthly team game…the 4 of us university students had maybe 20 masterpoints between us and our first round opponents each had over 1,000..back before the rampant masterpoint inflation meant that even bad club players could accumulate 1,000. We were thrilled and excited. I don’t recall the result but I’m sure we lost. But that wasn’t the point…we always wanted to play up. There must have been 15-20 players of roughly our age who felt the same way. Some of them still play…others are dead. And almost none of the ‘new’ players seem to feel the same way

In fairness, the skill and knowledge gap between the top players and people like us back then was a small fraction of the gap between even fairly experienced club players and top players these days. I don’t think I’m mistaken when I say that my current team trying to win our CNTC this year would likely win the BB if we could be time travelled back 60 years…and could eliminate cheating, lol. That’s not because any of us are as good as the top players back then but because we play a very different game than they did back then. We might not outplay them but we’d definitely outbid them time and time again. But the club players on average seem no better than when I started out in the 1970s.

[akwoo]

DavidKok, on 2025-December-03, 12:43, said:

Sorry, I'm confused now. I read your previous comment as saying that the gap between experts and novices has grown wide, and people are scared of trying to close it. Putting aside experts for the moment, I think we're in agreement on nearly the opposite: the gap between weaker players and the local top dogs is slim, and learning how to compete and what to do in competition is incredible returns for comparatively little effort.

You think it's relatively little effort (and for both of us it's relatively little effort), but the weaker players around find it a lot of effort. Remembering a bidding system is hard; remembering that some bids change meaning if RHO has come into the auction is too much. Working out that partner can't possibly want to play in the suit opponents have shown (so a cue bid must be artificial) is more logic than they can handle at the table.

Also, overcoming the psychological barrier to going down is very tough, and so is finding a partner who wants to put in the effort.

[mike777]

 akwoo, on 2025-December-03, 09:39, said:

The most important thing to figure out with your partner is all the uses of 2N in competition...

Everyone's constructive bidding systems are so good now that you just get eaten alive if you don't jump in. (Of course, if you don't have a suitable hand, you get eaten even more badly if you do.)

I actually think this is a problem for the survival of competitive bridge. The experts are just too good - and make the game too hard for their opponents - for anyone to want to play them, and even competent club players are too good for beginners to want to get into the game.



One of the commentators pointed out that it was a squeeze TWO tricks off the count. I also watched it in real time, and I could barely figure it out seeing all the cards AND having it pointed out to me.

Funny enough simply doubling 4h would win the match as other table failed to double

[mike777]

My coming back to the club after many years confirms the stories mentioned here.
As a kid we always played up and wanted to learn everything under the moon that people mentioned. No convention or treatment was too outlandish to try....
One reason perhaps why that local club/group produced two world champions and numerous top players...I am not even counting Kit Woolsey who came and left just before us...

Even more than a decade later moving to the city of angels, the clubs were full of top players and a few younger ones who play in the team trials, today.

This year coming back to bridge even getting one person to talk about the hands after the session was almost impossible, Leb or other common stuff, forget it...

Fortunately, out of the blue, one person who I did not know called me and asked me to play, very lucky.....

[akwoo]

mike777, on 2025-December-03, 14:06, said:

Funny enough simply doubling 4h would win the match as other table failed to double

I think IMP odds are against doubling. Of course, if you think you're down 1-5 IMPs going into the last board, the general odds go out the window since losing by 1 or losing by 7 are the same.

[mike777]

akwoo, on 2025-December-03, 14:54, said:

I think IMP odds are against doubling. Of course, if you think you're down 1-5 IMPs going into the last board, the general odds go out the window since losing by 1 or losing by 7 are the same.

Not sure what the odds were, other tables doubled 4H, and EW do make 3NT and even 5d as it turned out, smile...

[DavidKok]

akwoo, on 2025-December-03, 13:56, said:

You think it's relatively little effort (and for both of us it's relatively little effort), but the weaker players around find it a lot of effort. Remembering a bidding system is hard; remembering that some bids change meaning if RHO has come into the auction is too much. Working out that partner can't possibly want to play in the suit opponents have shown (so a cue bid must be artificial) is more logic than they can handle at the table.

Also, overcoming the psychological barrier to going down is very tough, and so is finding a partner who wants to put in the effort.

I find it so cheap to say "it might be easy for you, but for most people it is hard". It completely shuts down the discussion, regardless of whether it's accurate. I am saying the exact opposite: most weak players are overestimating the magnitude of the gap, they are overestimating how complicated competitive bidding is, they spent too large a fraction of their time and effort on the constructive system, they would see swift and significant improvement in results for spending even a little time on competitive bidding. I resent the implication that the common current approach is good for a majority of weaker players and it's just a different set of preferences or ability to learn. I'm saying that, at any level of ability to learn, you can make a lot of progress by venturing at least a little bit into competitive auctions.