This week I made a grand discovery and I was all set to reveal it to the world. But it turned out that my discovery is already extremely well known. In fact, one author declared it “the greatest bridge book ever published.”
Well, it was still new to me. The “it” to which I refer is S. J. Simon’s “Why You Lose at Bridge.” I declare it grand after only reading the foreword and the introduction and skimming the first chapter, because I absolutely love Simon’s writing style. I used to sit around thinking, “Wait till the bridge world discovers my writing. No one has ever blended humor and bridge commentary the way I will someday do.” Well, wrong again, Cubby. But to compensate for the crushing disappointment of not being an original article myself, I can look forward to enjoying all of Simon’s writings.
Perhaps I can be excused for thinking I had discovered Simon’s book because I found a 76-year-old copy in a used book store. I lucked into a first edition (fourth printing) for which I paid all of five buckaroonies.
But of course upon further research I found that you can easily get a fresh copy because this thing has been continually in print since it was first published.
I’m sure that as I continue my study of bridge, I will make other such “discoveries” only to find out that I am late to the party, but that’s OK. It is fun learning about the history and the personalities of the game as well as learning how to play.
Today’s set of deals is based on Chapter One of “Why You Lost at Bridge,” called “The Points You Lose ‘Ignoring the Odds’”. While I have yet to translate the scoring from this chapter from rubber bridge to duplicate scoring, the general points about knowing and acting upon the odds are eye-opening.
In discussing awareness of the odds, Simon uses an example where he asks under what conditions you should double your opponents who have bid a small slam. I won’t attempt to summarize his arguments but I strongly urge you to buy and read the book. What we will do is get down to creating deals based on this chapter—deals that you can actually play.
Recall that in my first blog post about my new manual deal feature, I went on about how I get a lot from reading bridge deal analysis, but I often wish I could easily play the hands that the author is describing, and that I could play them from all different seats and with variations in some of the cards. Well, today’s deals show that concept in action. I used the manual deal specification at the top of this page to set up East exactly as described on page 6 of my first edition (4th printing) of The Book. Did I mention it’s a first edition? I got the other seats’ spades from page 7 of my 1E/4P copy of the book. I made up the other cards because Simon did not specify them exactly. However, he did say that South would wind up in six spades, so you can see I weighted the hands heavily to favor North/South. I haven’t tried these deals in BBO yet to see how the robots would bid them, or if when playing South I could maneuver it to 6S, but that’s what I plan to do with them and so should you!
Since I specified some cards with “X” placeholders and I left others totally to chance (see West’s blank specification up there), the resulting deal did have an element of randomness in a few cards. I could have taken the first generated deal and made my specification exact so that I could then generate sixteen deals with identical cards (but rotating dealer and vulnerability) but instead, I let each of today’s sixteen deals generate those “X” and blank cards randomly. I wanted to see if that small bit of randomness in the distribution of non-honors would affect the play.
And so, please read the book and try your hand at these deals inspired by a great writer and humorist (Simon, not me):
This is the link to the PBN file with 16 deals.
This is the link to the LIN file with 16 deals.
If you want to see how sets of deals are generated for this blog, or if you want to try to generate your own deals, check out my website and program that I use. This blog post has a link to the program website and to other useful information.