ROFL! That's perfect. Indeed, I may steal it. Though you've no doubt picked up enough to know that the skills of dummy are encompassed by:
* Sitting still and not saying anything * Not criticising partner afterwards
:)
I am being slightly facetious as I assume there *must* be something more to it than that, but really, it certainly can seem that way!
No, that's pretty much it. Except you don't make it sound skilful or fun :) OK, the differences are:
0. Bidding a number of tricks is *half* the skill. The other half is in playing the hand the same way as whist and actually making that many, though they are intertwined because you have to know your chances of making tricks and what they will score to know what you should bid.
1. Most of the time, the opponents *do* know what the bids mean.
Hiding information is generally a nice side-effect or occasional bonus, rather than normal. Finding a contract is normally a much higher priority than hiding information, though you do so when you can.
Indeed, conventions which encrypt deliberately, eg. "the partnership know they have the aces between them, they can swap the next bid by if the bidder has the SA or not, and they know and the opponents don't what it means." are AFAIK extremely illegal at many competitions, simply because it's too complicated and no fun for everyone else :)
2. Your information has to be successively revealed (like a partially downloaded interlaced GIF :)).
Your first bid has to say if it's worth going farther or not, there's no point having a more accurate description if it means you've committed yourself to trying to make more tricks than you can.
3. Because of this, most bids are at least somewhat natural, ie. claiming a number of tricks in trump suit you actually think you can make. Otherwise you get stuck again.
4. Most people rely more on skill accumulated by thinking and experience to judge how good a hand is, rather than a predefined metric. Which is more fun.
It would in fact be interesting to try to determine a mathematically optimum metric. I've no idea if it would be possible or good. Optimum defense play is really difficult to codify because there's so many little things, but declarer play has more knowledge available, so you should be able to decant experience of what combinations of hands are good into an expert system to some extent.
5. Most people like tinkering with systems built by rules of thumb and experience-acquired skill in efforts of improving them a bit. So enjoy this.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-08 06:22 pm (UTC)ROFL! That's perfect. Indeed, I may steal it. Though you've no doubt picked up enough to know that the skills of dummy are encompassed by:
* Sitting still and not saying anything
* Not criticising partner afterwards
:)
I am being slightly facetious as I assume there *must* be something more to it than that, but really, it certainly can seem that way!
No, that's pretty much it. Except you don't make it sound skilful or fun :) OK, the differences are:
0. Bidding a number of tricks is *half* the skill. The other half is in playing the hand the same way as whist and actually making that many, though they are intertwined because you have to know your chances of making tricks and what they will score to know what you should bid.
1. Most of the time, the opponents *do* know what the bids mean.
Hiding information is generally a nice side-effect or occasional bonus, rather than normal. Finding a contract is normally a much higher priority than hiding information, though you do so when you can.
Indeed, conventions which encrypt deliberately, eg. "the partnership know they have the aces between them, they can swap the next bid by if the bidder has the SA or not, and they know and the opponents don't what it means." are AFAIK extremely illegal at many competitions, simply because it's too complicated and no fun for everyone else :)
2. Your information has to be successively revealed (like a partially downloaded interlaced GIF :)).
Your first bid has to say if it's worth going farther or not, there's no point having a more accurate description if it means you've committed yourself to trying to make more tricks than you can.
3. Because of this, most bids are at least somewhat natural, ie. claiming a number of tricks in trump suit you actually think you can make. Otherwise you get stuck again.
4. Most people rely more on skill accumulated by thinking and experience to judge how good a hand is, rather than a predefined metric. Which is more fun.
It would in fact be interesting to try to determine a mathematically optimum metric. I've no idea if it would be possible or good. Optimum defense play is really difficult to codify because there's so many little things, but declarer play has more knowledge available, so you should be able to decant experience of what combinations of hands are good into an expert system to some extent.
5. Most people like tinkering with systems built by rules of thumb and experience-acquired skill in efforts of improving them a bit. So enjoy this.