[FrancesHinden]

To come back to this thread, a couple more thoughts.

At one point in Poznan, we had a quick look through our scorecards from the KO rounds to find boards where cardplay or defence had swung imps (even if it was a flat board) compared to bidding, and it was "about 80% bidding"

BUT

we wanted to get this result to reassure a teammate who was worried about playing teams with very famous top players in them, so we 'didn't count' hands where one of our team had done something stupid and cost a load of imps... because obviously we 'knew' that wasn't going to happen again. I think lots of people gloss over the stupidities at the table and just think 'oh I don't usually do that, it's not a real reflection of the importance of bidding compared to play' which biases opinions.

and

when you achieve a flat board, or the normal result, or the DD result you don't always see that there was a much stronger defence available which might have led declarer to go wrong, or that you had a stronger line available that might have caused the defence to go wrong, you just note it down as 'no swing'

and

bidding swings tend to be 'absolute' i.e. differences in judgement often cause swings; those in the play can have little affect e.g. I took a 90% line in a game, the opponents took a 60% line, but there's still only going to be a swing 30% of the time. Compare with I bid a slam, they don't: even if the slam is exactly zero EV, there's always going to be a swing.

[phil_20686]

I seem to remember that Robson wrote a book in which he pitted strong club players vs strong tournament players, and then the strong tournament players played against some International experts.

He concluded that tournament players beat club players because they bid better, especially in competitive situations. The international experts beat the tournament players because they had better card play.

My conclusion is that we normally compare ourselves to the "next level" above us, and the matches we "might have won", and if you take this view whether you think bidding or play is more important will depend almost entirely on your own level.

[Bad_Wolf]

Agree completely that card play is, at any given time in bridge evolution, more important than bidding. However it seems to me that bidding has improved over time to such an extent that even methods regularly scoffed at like SAYC are far superior to methods that Ely and Jo for instance employed.

Example, a few local players around here are advocating penalty doubles of all preempts (2 level and up). I am trying hard to stop the spread of this virus, but my point is that it would be easy enough to come up with a set of agreements and style decisions that are now acknowledged as hopeless but that at one time or another had a loyal following.

I think we forget how much good bidding is worth because good players - in an absolute sense - generally bid so well!

[awm]

This sometimes depends on how you measure luck versus skill.

For example, suppose a slam is bid and fails at one table, and the other table stops in game. Is this luck or bidding skill? Suppose the slam had no legitimate play, and the auction was exactly the same except at one table south signed off in five and at the other he bid slam. It could be that south made a bad bidding decision to end in the bad contract, or that his decision was percentage given the information he had and the actual hands were just unlucky. Or maybe a better bidding system would've enabled him to find out. Further, suppose the slam could've been made but required an exotic squeeze that south didn't spot at the table and which was still very much odds-against. Now is this a "card play" swing? Or is it still a "bidding" swing because south shouldn't have bid this ridiculous contract in the first place (even though the 3% squeeze line can win on the layout)? Or somehow both?

I guess my point is that it's quite hard to measure these things. Sometimes it depends on what you attribute to luck versus skill. For example, say on board one partner and I bid 1NT-3NT and it goes down because we are wide open in hearts, while the other table plays a different notrump range and discovers the problem to stay out of game. I decide this is a "bidding mistake" because I could've opened 1♣ on my 4225 15-count, but another player might chalk it up to luck. On board two, partner and I bid to 3NT again. This time my LHO makes a great lead and my only chance to make the contract is a suicide squeeze, which I fail to find. I decide this swing is my teammate's fault for not finding the lead that gives declarer a problem. But I could've blamed it on luck (LHO found a lucky lead) or I could say it's my bad declarer play (even though declarer at the other table didn't have a hard problem on the lead he got). I could even say it's a bidding mistake because 4♠ is just ice cold no matter what they lead. The thing is, I suspect different players would evaluate these things differently.

I have noticed that slam bidding at the upper echelons is far from an exact science; there are many slams which are single-dummy excellent but strong pairs fail to reach, or which are single-dummy awful and are bid (even both tables bidding grand off the trump ace). So it certainly seems like there is space for substantial wins due to better bidding. If bidding is really "pretty even" at the top levels then maybe the science of bidding has a long way to go. I'm quite certain that a team of advanced players from today could beat a team of experts from sixty years ago despite the old-time experts being better card players, simply because bidding has advanced so much since then (and Benito Garozzo seems to agree, from some of his comments I've read).

[hotShot]

As phil_20686 pointed out, it is also a matter of level.
I really doubt that a player of FrancesHinden's team playing in Poznan, has less than good card play skills.
Although at that level excellent card play can still make a difference, bidding gets more important.

A typical declarer at beginner level, will often capture his high card tricks before he developed his long suit, losing unnecessary tricks since he's out of stopper now.
Imagine a NT contract and you hold 3 cards in 3 different suits. You have an Ace, a Jack (in a suit where K and Q are still out) and a 6 (the last card of that suit).
Most of you would have the informations added, because you can count, to those I suggest to play an individual tournament with average BBO player an be prepared to see them throw away the 6 most of the time.

[blackshoe]

I am continually amazed at local club games at how frequently the results on a given board are all over the map. One of our better local players lamented "there's no field protection!" Some of this is play skill (I've had near bottoms when I'm in the "par" contract our way, going down one, because at 3/4 of the tables, the defenders let the contract make) and some, I'm sure, is in the bidding.

[whereagles]

hotShot, on 2011-June-27, 14:04, said:

Bidding is the most overrated part of bridge.
I think that is a consequence from the fact that most books and teachers lessons are about bidding.
I think that is because it is incredibly hard to teach declarer play and defense.

Totally disagree. I think card play is easy to teach. There are only a couple of plans available and the counting and reconstruction of hidden cards is only a matter of not being lazy. Sure, it can get complicated at a high level, but for most hands it's a relatively simple thing.

There are dozens of excellent books on card play. Not so when it comes to bidding. Most books fail on explaining the basic principles of bidding and end up being but a bunch of cooking recipies with no systematics nor clear direction. I've read hundreds of bidding books but I would only call a few "good". Curiously, most of those were written by people whose name is not familiar. The only good one written by known experts is Robson/Segal's "Partnership Bidding".

Bidding is far more intricate than card play. It has to do with judgement, knowing your partner, psychology, personalities and, above all, understanding your responsibilities at every stage. Very few are able to grasp this last point.

Card play is obviously more popular because it's more of an erudite activity. It's romantic (in the melodramatic sense), logical, inductive, deductive, brilliant. But it's not where most battles are won.

[JLOGIC]

FrancesHinden, on 2011-June-27, 14:32, said:

To come back to this thread, a couple more thoughts.

At one point in Poznan, we had a quick look through our scorecards from the KO rounds to find boards where cardplay or defence had swung imps (even if it was a flat board) compared to bidding, and it was "about 80% bidding"

BUT

we wanted to get this result to reassure a teammate who was worried about playing teams with very famous top players in them, so we 'didn't count' hands where one of our team had done something stupid and cost a load of imps... because obviously we 'knew' that wasn't going to happen again. I think lots of people gloss over the stupidities at the table and just think 'oh I don't usually do that, it's not a real reflection of the importance of bidding compared to play' which biases opinions.

and

when you achieve a flat board, or the normal result, or the DD result you don't always see that there was a much stronger defence available which might have led declarer to go wrong, or that you had a stronger line available that might have caused the defence to go wrong, you just note it down as 'no swing'

and

bidding swings tend to be 'absolute' i.e. differences in judgement often cause swings; those in the play can have little affect e.g. I took a 90% line in a game, the opponents took a 60% line, but there's still only going to be a swing 30% of the time. Compare with I bid a slam, they don't: even if the slam is exactly zero EV, there's always going to be a swing.

Yes I agree with all of this. Lol I forgot this was an old thread and was about to make a super long post but I see I covered all of the points I was going to make.

The main one I wanted to emphasize this time though is that I think it is easy to confuse the fact that most swings are caused by bidding differences (true imo), with bidding is more important.

Largely random events can cause bidding swings, even if there is little to no difference in expected value of some action. A marginal light overcall that maybe half of experts would make and half wouldn't, it probably doesn't matter that much in the long term if you do it or not, but one player passing and one player bidding will almost certainly cause a swing (maybe it will alter the play, maybe it will go for 1400, maybe it will catch great and win some huge swing...who knows).

Yes, as MFA and others have said, this does not make bidding all about luck or random, and perhaps I am downplaying the skill element of it, but I do think that even though cardplay swings will be less frequent, there will routinely be a much greater cost of making an error in imp expectancy than almost any bid you can make. Even one player taking a 100 % line and one player taking a 90 % line in a vul game, which does not sound like a huge difference and tbh is not, is going to result in losing 12 imps or whatever 10 % of the time. That is massive.

A more common scenario is reading the cards at the endgame and making the right decision, perhaps you found a nice clue that makes your play 100 % vs 0 % or close to it, even if it seems like a guess, you have gained a massive amount by making that inference.

Or even something like making the right falsecard at trick one giving them a chance to mess up (for example, LHO opens 2H, and leads the ace of hearts and dummy has QJTx, RHO plays the 3 and you have 42. If you play the wrong one from your hand, they know the layout, if you play the right one, they have a guess. The right or wrong one depends on if they play upside down or not. This is something that many players never even think of, perhaps they always play the 4 thinking it will be trickier, or perhaps they just always play low. These kinds of things can give them a chance to go wrong and let you make a contract, and that will always have a huge EV for you, even if it's a small chance).

I guess my point is, those things matter a huge amount, even if they happen less often and when they do happen usually result in a push anyways, than some bidding thing that might swing 1/10th of an imp in EV or less but will always create a swing.

I also think Frances is getting at something even more important, the biggest cost of imps is making stupid cardplay mistakes. Losing focus or whatever playing a cold 2H and making a silly play, oops 5 imps down the drain. If you consistently don't make stupid costly mistakes, you will always win. That is why Levin/Weinstein win all the cavendishes, they so rarely make stupid mistakes, and as we all learned early in our bridge career, that is what bridge is all about. So more important than increasing your skill at cardplay or bidding at some point is increasing your ability to stay focused and make few mistakes that you are capable of not making. Becoming better at executing to your capacity is at some point way more important than increasing your maximum capacity for what you know and how well you can play.

If I was an advanced player trying to improve my results and the amount of times that I won I would focus on increasing my cardplay capabilities, and increasing my ability to play at my top theoretical level at the table. Improving my bidding judgement would just be to improve longterm as a player, I don't think it would fit in at all for trying to improve my results in the short term. I would just grind level 3 bridgemaster type hands to the point that I could always get them right on paper, and then make sure that I could do it at the table too. Seems easy enough but few people can do that.

[cherdano]

FrancesHinden, on 2011-June-27, 14:32, said:

we wanted to get this result to reassure a teammate who was worried about playing teams with very famous top players in them, so we 'didn't count' hands where one of our team had done something stupid and cost a load of imps... because obviously we 'knew' that wasn't going to happen again.

That's my favourite part of Frances' post.

[whereagles]

justin: staying focused works for all sports and a lot of points are won/lost from lapses of concentration.

It is probably easier to blow up points in card play than in bidding, though.

[JLOGIC]

whereagles, on 2011-June-28, 05:11, said:

It is probably easier to blow up points in card play than in bidding, though.

Yup, thats what I meant

[jogs]

JLOGIC, on 2011-June-28, 04:47, said:

Yes I agree with all of this. Lol I forgot this was an old thread and was about to make a super long post but I see I covered all of the points I was going to make.

The main one I wanted to emphasize this time though is that I think it is easy to confuse the fact that most swings are caused by bidding differences (true imo), with bidding is more important.

That never occurred to me. In the USBC finals there were 30 swings of 9 imps or greater. Only on 5 of those boards were both teams playing in the same contract. On 25 swings the winning side was either in a better contract or got lucky.
The best players in the country have problems evaluating hands. Can you imagine how badly the rest of us bid?

[cherdano]

jogs, on 2011-June-28, 06:45, said:

That never occurred to me. In the USBC finals there were 30 swings of 9 imps or greater. Only on 5 of those boards were both teams playing in the same contract. On 25 swings the winning side was either in a better contract or got lucky.
The best players in the country have problems evaluating hands. Can you imagine how badly the rest of us bid?

I don't mean to single you out, but I think your post exemplifies the main reason I think many people overestimate the importance of bidding. Just because the two teams played in different contracts doesn't mean that the IMP expectancy gain of the stronger team was due to better bidding. Maybe the good team was in a good-looking vulnerable game, while the worse team stayed in a part-score. As expected, the good team wrapped up the 10 IMPs.
What you don't realize is that if the roles in the bidding had been reversed, the better team would have found a better defense that gives declarer a difficult guess - which he would have gotten wrong, for 6 IMPs for the good team.
(Say this was a 60% vulnerable game missed at one table - huge swing in the bidding -, then just finding a defense that causes declarer to misguess 20% of the time is as big a swing as in the bidding.)

[jogs]

Said, "On 25 swings the winning side was either in a better contract or got lucky." Didn't claim they always bid better.

[mgoetze]

I dunno, if taking one trick more is massively important, then surely playing 1M-2♣-2♦-2M as my 3-card limit raise instead of 1M-3M is also massively important?

[jogs]

In general the ninth trump is worth a full trick over the eighth trump. That means you bid four of a major with 25 HCP and 8 trumps. Bid four of a major with 22 HCP and 9 trumps. The tenth trump doesn't generate a full trick over the ninth trump as often. Bid four of a major with 19 HCP, 10 trumps provided someone holds a singleton. Need more points when both partners are 5332.

[Vampyr]

mgoetze, on 2011-June-28, 12:45, said:

I dunno, if taking one trick more is massively important, then surely playing 1M-2♣-2♦-2M as my 3-card limit raise instead of 1M-3M is also massively important?

It's funny, many teachers in the UK teach that if you are playing 5-card majors, you only need 3 cards for a limit raise! But I would never wish to play a method that didn't distinguish between 3- and 4-card support in an invitational hand.

[jogs]

Vampyr, on 2011-June-28, 18:04, said:

It's funny, many teachers in the UK teach that if you are playing 5-card majors, you only need 3 cards for a limit raise! But I would never wish to play a method that didn't distinguish between 3- and 4-card support in an invitational hand.

In the U.S. many if not most distinguish 3-card raises from 4-card raises. Use forcing NT then 3 of a major for a 3-card raise.

1M - 1NT
2m - 3M

Is a 3-card raise.

1M - 2NT

Is Jacoby 2NT and a 4+-card raise.

[Zelandakh]

The problem with your example, jogs, is that the first is an invitational raise and the second GF. But your point is valid that playing a FNT allows you to bundle more raises through it than, for example, SAYC. Another solution, as mgoetze puts forward, is to use 2C as a multi-purpose bid. Bocchi-Buboin (inter alia) played this. A third solution is to use the first step as a relay. Then 1H - 1S - 1NT/2C - 2H and 1S - 1NT - 2m - 2S can be 3 card INV raises.

[phil_20686]

many use jacoby for invitation+ raises. No reason not to with a sensible response structure.

the point about bidding is that is is pretty easy to get within a few % of optimal agreements if your judgement is sound. All these agreements and relays come up so rarely that it is difficult to have enough of them to really gain a lot vs another good pair. Sure if you compared WC players to your average joe then their bidding agreements help a lot, but mostly it is stuff like lebensohl in competition, or a sensible cue bid structure, or a good 1nt structure, andn these things are played by all reasonable tournament players. Experts have a greater depth of agreement but it is rare for any board to come up in a 24 board match where the in depth agreements of WC pairs substantially improve their equity vs strong tournament players.