[awm]

It’s been mentioned on a number of occasions that expert players typically make a double dummy winning opening lead a bit over 80% if the time, while intermediate players are a bit below 80%. Surprisingly the expert advantage in this aspect of the game is not huge. Extreme outliers on the positive direction (much better than 80% over many boards) are often suspected of cheating, and this method has been used to detect illegal information passing with partner (or “self kikbitzing” online).

Anyway, my question is more about the opposite — are there players who are reasonably skilled (not beginners or anything) but whose rate of double dummy successful opening leads is unusually low? We all sometimes feel like we’ve played with partners who constantly blow a trick on lead; is this just observation bias of some sort or do such players exist?

[barmar]

I doubt you'll find too many players who are generally skilled at the game but poor at just this one aspect. Experience likely helps you improve in all parts of the game. It's not like opening leads is a skill that's totally divorced from the rest of the game. One of the skills you gain from experience is making inferences from the bidding, and this is your primary input when selecting an opening lead.

Plus, if someone is routinely bad at opening leads, they're probably not going to be considered "reasonably skilled". We judge players by the totality of their play, we don't divide them by specialties like members of sports teams (wouldn't it be great if we could have a "designated slam declarer"?). Good opening leads is something that goes into being a good player, and bad opening leads will keep you from being considered a good player. It's not like you can make up significantly for bad opening leads by being really great at something else; it's sometimes possible to recover the defense on a specific hand from a bad opening lead, but it's not really a skill you can cultivate, you just need to be lucky.

[pescetom]

barmar, on 2024-October-09, 13:39, said:

Good opening leads is something that goes into being a good player, and bad opening leads will keep you from being considered a good player. It's not like you can make up significantly for bad opening leads by being really great at something else; it's sometimes possible to recover the defense on a specific hand from a bad opening lead, but it's not really a skill you can cultivate, you just need to be lucky.

I only partly agree. GiB for instance has cultivated the skill of opening leads (from a study od Bird & Anthias plus a very solid memory of the auction and related inferences) and my impression at least ( I would be curious to see the percentages) is that this partly makes up for not being great at anything else.

barmar, on 2024-October-09, 13:39, said:

we don't divide them by specialties like members of sports teams (wouldn't it be great if we could have a "designated slam declarer"?).

As an OT (sorry) provocation, I've always thought "why not?". In other sports roles are specialised and reflect individual abilities, nobody expects a good defender to score or a good attacker to prevent a goal. This could be a way forwards for the game. Tournaments are disputed over an inhuman number of boards, Teams are usually composed of 4 (very tired) or 6 (4 very tired and 2 frustrated), nobody is great at everything. Why not play less boards and fight each board to the death with the non-playing Captain inserting the best team members for each seat, having just seen the layout?

[mikeh]

A friend of mine, a very occasional partner and somewhat more frequent, although not regular, teammate, is a very skilled player…has many, many masterpoints (far more than I) and has had some of the highest mp sessions I’ve seen (on a 156 average, in an Saturday regional pairs back when that was the major event of the week he had a 237.5 first session and a slightly better (!) second session).

I won’t name him but his then regular partner said that they stopped playing reverse smith on defence against notrump….reverse smith means that if declarer wins the opening lead and tackles another suit, you follow low if you like the opening lead and high if you don’t. His partner explained that he never liked the lead, so reverse smith meant that he was always playing a high card next trick….regular smith was less costly.

It wasn’t that this player didn’t know how to lead, but he’d developed a complex about it…he’d figure out the best lead and then self-doubt would sometimes cause him to change his mind and he’d make a terrible lead.

[akwoo]

I could imagine a player developing an extremely aggressive opening lead style for IMPs and deciding they were too lazy to change it when playing MPs, or vice versa.

[smerriman]

I suspect the main reason the percentages are close between experts and non-experts is that on a fairly large proportion of hands, all decent choices will work fine double dummy, even if they aren't necessarily a great lead in terms of partnership information / single doubly defense.

When there's a killing lead, experts will find it more often, but there is still too much variability where too many hits could only be achieved by cheating. But it might too be too hard to go the other way and have a player who never finds them, even by pure luck.

[jillybean]

I've just watched Mike make some pretty bad leads.
His comment was "I'll have to read that book on leads again"