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Looking for tips on strategy to improve MPs

#1 User is offline   thepossum 

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Posted 2022-July-12, 18:39

Hi

Back in my correct forum for a while.

I keep feeling I have reached something of a plateau. I'm doing well. I'm still doing well next day. Oh dear what happened on the last day :(

When I look at my hands in MPs (and compare with better players) its clear that its not the level of the good scores letting me (others down) but the frequency of bad-very bad in the mix which can destroy an otherwise good/average set of hands

Has anyone developed any ways of trying to analyse if certain types of hands out of a set are the ones bringing you down. Competitive auctions, say, or ones where you were overambitious with opening bid or defence. I appreciate maybe we don't play enough hands to meaningfully analyse that but curious if anyone does it or has done

I've tried using the filter on Double Dummy Solve although not all my hand sets are available and I am not sure I have sufficient hands for any reasonable filters in order to compare

My analysis of MPs while playing seems to be fairly accurate. I tend to know when a hand will score badly

P
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#2 User is offline   P_Marlowe 

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Posted 2022-July-13, 02:41

Hi,

a first question is, how diverse is the field.
I started playing MP tournaments on BBO, ..., what I saw, there is always someone,
who is doing stupid stuff, and if you happen to be on the wrong axis, it hurts your
score, if this happens more than once, ..., your total score goes down, and you did
nothing wrong.

In other words doing regular really well in those tournaments is nearly impossible.

What helps:

Try to go plus

- Play in a regular partnership
- tone down your game bidding a little, ...
- work on your defence

Larry Cohen said (others most likely as well): Dont try to win the tournament on one boards,
you cant, but you can loose it.
This means focus on part score battles / game bidding, slam bidding is fun, but wont win the
MP tournament.
Barry Crane (?), very good MP player, had the saying "Only Jesus Saves", i.e. tone down
sac. bidding against their vul. game.
"5 Level belongs to the opponent", is also a way to go more often plus.

In the German Bridge news paper there is a series by Pierre SAPORTA, which deals with MP
strategy, on amazon I only found

JOUEZ UN TOURNOI AVEC MOI

I have no idea, if the series was adapted from the book, my french is non existing.

The suggestions / ideas are not earth shattering, but there were some interesting points.
The German version is online, ..., I can add the link, if it would be helpful.

And have fun.

With kind regards
Marlowe
With kind regards
Uwe Gebhardt (P_Marlowe)
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#3 User is offline   helene_t 

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Posted 2022-July-13, 03:34

Competitive bidding is not an area where you can transfer GIB experience to your human partnership, unless your partnership agreement is to mimic GIBs style as closely as possible.

This is because competitive bidding is a weak spot for GIB. Even if your human partnership isn't very sophisticated, there are still many ways in which your judgement and agreements would be much better than GIBs.

Partnership bidding problems like "Beat today's experts" in the EBU magazine are good for partnership training. You can also use a bidding table on BBO.

Maybe you and your partner can also agree both to read "To bid or not to bid".

When it comes to bidding, there is not so much you can do alone. It has to be coordinated with your partner. Reading books will give you some general tips such as how to value shortness in opps' suit, but it will still be a matter of partnership understanding who's responsibility it is to act when for example one partner is weak with shortness in their suit while the other is stronger but with a flatter hand.
The world would be such a happy place, if only everyone played Acol :) --- TramTicket
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#4 User is offline   P_Marlowe 

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Posted 2022-July-13, 04:05

Another thing: be well rested.
At MP every boards counts, at IMP, you can take a nap, when it is clear, the undoubled contract is making,
and declarer is just trying to execute a beautiful play to get the add. trick, at MP you dont have the luxury,
if they run their long suit and you throw away a trick at trick 12, this is as costly as it gets.
With kind regards
Uwe Gebhardt (P_Marlowe)
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#5 User is offline   pescetom 

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Posted 2022-July-13, 04:46

Also watch out that it's easy to be insufficiently concentrated or over confident on the first board, you need to be in the flow right from the start.
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#6 User is offline   AL78 

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Posted 2022-July-13, 05:55

I have been trying to do this myself after years of regression with limited success. My thoughts are to note down any boards where you were declaring or defending, where you feel you had to guess from a choice of plays, you chose wrong and got punished. Did you get punished because you were unlucky, or because you missed some information which would have guided you to the correct line? I was planning to pay more attention to these situations in my own game as I think I am not using all the information available when a critical decision has to be made in at least some cases. Another thing to consider is whether you are reaching good contracts in the bidding. If you are missing cold games and slams, or being battered in the partscore contests, that will not help your results.

The problem is at MPs, there are several factors which can damage your scorecard, and a few of those you can do nothing about. If the opponents punt a 40% game against you which is cold on the lie of the cards and no-one else bids it, you are getting a bottom like it or not. If your opponent makes an insane bid which works perfectly you are getting a bad score. If your partner butchers the play or defence you are getting a bad score. If you are up against opponents playing a different system to the field and they rightside 3NT and make one extra trick as a result, you are getting a bad score. If you are playing in a field with a high standard deviation in variance, and you get the technical hand against the strongest pair in the room, you will have to bust a gut to get even an average minus. It is not easy to tease out your contributions to the poor scores from all these other factors, and you have to remember that these random fluctuations can also act in your favour, so just because you get a good score doesn't necessarily mean you and your partner played the hand better than the others.
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#7 User is offline   P_Marlowe 

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Posted 2022-July-13, 08:45

There is a weekly youtube stream by Peter Holland, using the BBO Free weekly Solitaire Bridge Session.
This is MP, and he discusses his MP session, you can compare.

https://www.youtube....z4rLQ/playlists
With kind regards
Uwe Gebhardt (P_Marlowe)
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#8 User is offline   mikeh 

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Posted 2022-July-13, 11:19

View PostAL78, on 2022-July-13, 05:55, said:

I have been trying to do this myself after years of regression with limited success. My thoughts are to note down any boards where you were declaring or defending, where you feel you had to guess from a choice of plays, you chose wrong and got punished. Did you get punished because you were unlucky, or because you missed some information which would have guided you to the correct line? I was planning to pay more attention to these situations in my own game as I think I am not using all the information available when a critical decision has to be made in at least some cases. Another thing to consider is whether you are reaching good contracts in the bidding. If you are missing cold games and slams, or being battered in the partscore contests, that will not help your results.

The problem is at MPs, there are several factors which can damage your scorecard, and a few of those you can do nothing about. If the opponents punt a 40% game against you which is cold on the lie of the cards and no-one else bids it, you are getting a bottom like it or not. If your opponent makes an insane bid which works perfectly you are getting a bad score. If your partner butchers the play or defence you are getting a bad score. If you are up against opponents playing a different system to the field and they rightside 3NT and make one extra trick as a result, you are getting a bad score. If you are playing in a field with a high standard deviation in variance, and you get the technical hand against the strongest pair in the room, you will have to bust a gut to get even an average minus. It is not easy to tease out your contributions to the poor scores from all these other factors, and you have to remember that these random fluctuations can also act in your favour, so just because you get a good score doesn't necessarily mean you and your partner played the hand better than the others.

While you’re quite right about how one can get a bad score simply through having the opps be lucky or by having a difficult hand played by or against the ‘best pair in the room’, these factors even out and generally do so over as short a span as two sessions.

As I mentioned in responding to your post about how to improve defensively, I don’t think that studying the hands one has played, whether with good, bad or indifferent results, is the best way to improve

One huge problem is that if one lacks the skill necessary to have done better (on those hands where the poor result was one’s fault) then one may well be incapable of seeing, even with hindsight, where one went wrong.

Also, even if one identifies the error, one may not be able to correctly identify the correct bid or play, tending to look instead at what would have ‘worked’, which could even be a worse mistake than was made.

The flip side is that imo most novice/beginner/intermediate players have trouble differentiating between good results where they made errors but got lucky (or as so often happens their errors were offset by opposition errors) and good results where they actually played correctly.

The harsh reality is that most players below advanced make a staggering number of errors in any one session. I’ve kibitzed more than a few boards played between non-experts and it’s not uncommon to see five or six mistakes on any given board with the side that makes the last mistake getting a bad board.

That’s why, imo, reading is the most important way to improve. Preferably reading a book that poses problems after each chapter…if one can’t solve all of the problems, re-read that chapter.

This is true for every aspect of the game. Of course, at the table one is subject to the vagaries of partner. However, if one improves beyond the level of current partners, one can usually find better players to play with, or one might try encouraging one’s partner to do the same homework.

Another alternative is to hire an expert…preferably a real expert….to mentor. For example, the mentor could discuss what methods one uses (to afford a context) and then go over a session’s results board by board, bid by bid, play by play. Having bbo makes that easy, with no need for the expert to spend time watching.

That way, if one has hired a real expert, one would learn where the result, good bad or indifferent, was caused in whole or in part by one’s bidding or play, and how one might have done things differently and, most importantly, why.

That’s likely beyond what most are prepared to do since, unless one is very fortunate, one is unlikely to find a real expert willing to do this on a volunteer basis.

Short of that, my advice is to ‘read, read and read’….and maybe consider a subscription to something like The Bridge World.

Also, posting hands here can help, but one has to learn whose analysis to trust. Everyone has an opinion but not all opinions are equal.
'one of the great markers of the advance of human kindness is the howls you will hear from the Men of God' Johann Hari
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#9 User is offline   thepossum 

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Posted 2022-July-13, 20:46

Hi everyone
Thanks so much for all the comments. Will respond when I get chance to read them all
One of the problems I have tried to articulate is the actual identification/annotation/flagging of hands that cause problems. apropos of posting them, but also trying to establish a pattern of hands to post :)

regards P
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#10 User is offline   AL78 

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Posted 2022-July-14, 16:15

View Postmikeh, on 2022-July-13, 11:19, said:

Short of that, my advice is to ‘read, read and read’….and maybe consider a subscription to something like The Bridge World.


I have taken this on board and have ordered three books which were recommended on here. Lots of bedtime reading to come for the rest of this year.
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#11 User is offline   thepossum 

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Posted 2022-July-14, 19:43

Hi everyone

Thanks again for all the comments which I've had chance to read and think about

My general approach is similar to some of the suggestions above but its the inconsistency that can bring me down. I rarely miss a bid slam for example (often one of the few in the field on 5). I often prefer part score plus rather than risking games. I struggle with complex competitive auctions and often feel I get pushed too high by partner (usually GiB) which often pushes things to the next level unnecessarily - thats a problem with Gib - or an over-complex bidding system and unnecessary use of cue bids when a natural raise is available, and the underutilisation of the pass - one of my favourite bids

I feel my judgement is reasonably good. My play varies a lot. I try just to play fairly simple percentage plays with occasional random low percentage risks thrown in. I usually focus on getting plus scores at IMPs or MPs and hope the rest will work out.

I need to weed out the errors really

Thanks P

PS Regarding analysis I thought about it more several years ago and tried to get a grip on the scale of analysing duplicate Bridge. Always interested in anyone who has come close

PPS Also interested in any categorisation of thematicisation of Bridge issues. As a small sample in a recent disappointing set of hands 4 (what I regard) as very bad scores out of 24 (1/6) First 2 of them I was in the modal contract but missed one easy trick, 3rd I was defending the modal contract but clearly made a basic error in defence, and 4 was a rather complex auction where sadly after a slightly light double (unfavourable) and interference partner pushed us up to problematic sacrifice (1 too high), which I then played even worse :) One trick each time and one bidding half-error out of 4
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#12 User is offline   thepossum 

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Posted 2022-July-15, 19:13

Couple of examples. One where a sacrifice by North was the top score (which we missed, and I missed an obvious trick) and one where it was almost the bottom (which sadly we bid).
How would you bid as South in each?

First hand was Hand 1 of set



Next hand was Hand 5 - same seat




I should mention I have certain anxiety about doubling 2S :)
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#13 User is offline   Evies Dad 

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Posted 2022-July-16, 02:24

I would Pass both.
#1 Partner has already indicated they don't want to play at the 3 level opposite a standard take out. But depends on your agreements over the 2S.
#5 The auction is not dead, but your partner must have very little in any case.
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#14 User is offline   P_Marlowe 

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Posted 2022-July-16, 13:58

Hi,

I would most likely go with a double in the first hand, and pass with the 2nd hand.
In the 2nd hand you are red vs. green, ... add to this, that partner was not able to respond
to your 1 level opening bid, you are outgunned for sure in the 2nd hand, going down red could
already be bad, with or without double.

The danger in the 1st hand is, that responder has an easy XX, if he has a max. responding hand,
the Queen of spades is also a minus, move the Queen into another suit, reopening would be automatic.
Hopefully you also play scrambling 2NT, i.e. you are able to find your 44 minor suit fit, if you have
one.

With kind regards
Marlowe
With kind regards
Uwe Gebhardt (P_Marlowe)
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#15 User is offline   thepossum 

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Posted 2022-July-16, 17:54

Hi

Thanks. Sorry I forgot to mention the limitations/specifics of the system we were playing. I was playing South in human declares GiB 2/1 tourney

I did indeed pass hand 1 (anxiety about doubling 2S) and sadly played the defence badly getting a bad score. Double and sacrifice to 3C-1 was the top





In hand 5 I doubled, opps went to 2S and unfortunately North took us to 3C which sadly I played badly (human declares in a bot tourney)



Please don't take the opportunity to have a go at North over the bid. I wasn't happy. But I didn't play it well. I didn't really care much anymore and wanted the next hand Note I appreciate my double was slightly light but.....FYI top scor on bottom hand was bidding 1 NT+2 :) - the real top was 2SE-1

EDIT I appreciate not liking to have to play bad contracts and making a bad score even worse is a weakness
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#16 User is offline   Douglas43 

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Posted 2022-July-17, 08:33

On Board 1, 3 can go two off (spade, heart, club, two diamonds and a ruff) and could go three off if the clubs were less well distributed (e.g. East has A10x and can ruff another diamond), so I wouldn't worry too much. Pass looks reasonable to me.

On Board 2, the double is tempting. The only downside is that if partner has 4-5hcp and length, it's in clubs. Probably a marginal pass when vul. But if partner had a fifth club, you might have come up smelling of roses.
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