fred, on Jan 10 2008, 08:01 PM, said:
- the more experts that agree, the better the odds that they are right
- the more experience these experts have playing and thinking about the system in question, the better the odds that they are right
- if the system inventor happens to be an A1 player himself (as opposed to an unknown player) the odds of him being right go up
First one is good.
Second one is good.
Third one...not so good.
Think about it for other sports:
"The more runners agree that a shoes is bad, the better odds that they are right".
Sure.
"The more experience these experts have with a shoe, the better odds they are right."
Sounds good.
"If the system inventer happens to be a great runner, the odds of it being a great shoe go up".
Ummmm, no.
Do the same thing with golfers and golf clubs, NASCAR drivers and cars, etc.
If you want to build a great system, being able to play cards well at the table, decipher when opponents are bluffing, and so forth is completley useless. Most 1A bridge players don't design their own system from scratch, and yet they seem to do all right. If I was looking for a great bridge system, I'd start with mathematicians who know bridge. Bidding can be mapped- what's important to know, what isn't, what's thrown into 'default' bids, what can be interfered with, etc. This is all just math, set theory, and flow charts. You need experts to test it out, see if it's playable, etc. But only to test it.
To think that experts in one field will therefore be experts in another field is just an inflated ego about that field. Yes, experts tinker with their systems a bit (just as drivers tinker with their cars), but just the fact that experts play a variety of systems implies that the tinkering doesn't improve it much. If it did, everybody would play the new and improved version. The reason that the changes we do see are mostly by experts is not because experts are particularly good at modifying systems, but because experts aren't willing to test systems created by non-experts. The fact that there's better people out there to do it doesn't matter if they can't get tested.
So I'm curious, Fred. Short of hiring an expert to play it, what would it take to convince you that Ken's system is superior, both in theory and in play? What if he could show over a large number of random hands that his system did a better job of telling you what you needed to know? What if he ran it against robots, and you looked at the results of the bidding (not play) against those robots? I mean, what he's discussing here isn't all that novel. He's completed ideas that to me look very similar to the old Blue Club 1
♣-1M-2M auctions to me. He's just done the math to make it good in theory instead of a hodgepodge of what "seemed" good.
If you want a great sword, you don't go to a great swordsman, you go to a great blacksmith. But if all the great swordsmen refuse to try swords made by blacksmiths, it'll look like great swords come from great swordsmen.
Until a great swordsman actually gets a weapon from a great blacksmith.
Then watch out.
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In fact, I would go as far as to say that aspiring players will be much better off if they completely ignore all of the bidding theory ideas made by random non-famous guys that they encounter. For every one genius there are a lot of non-geniuses who are, intentionally or not, selling snake oil.
Funny, I would say that aspiring players will be much better off if they completely ignore all of the bidding theory ideas made by random experts. They're much better off going with the advice of the Audrey Grants of the world. Of course, the experts know the Audrey Grant stuff well, and they do a much better job of describing and explaining it than, say, I would. But I notice that the random experts here tend to give advice based on
Their (the expert's) bidding judgement
Their (the expert's) play
The Standard bidding theory, regardless of what they play with regular partners (or believe is the best).
If I may be so bold, I think it's because they consider themselves experts in judgement, and play, and perhaps in what's standard, but they don't consider themselves experts in bidding theory.