Back from Hamilton

I just returned from a week at the 22nd national NZ Bridge congress, and am predictably tired. Trying to get to sleep day after day after three hours of intense concentration finishing about 11:30 pm is no easy task, so I usually didn't drop off until 2:00 am or so, and was often up by about 7:00 am (stupid body clock.)

My results weren't great, partly because I was playing in unfamiliar partnerships, having left my decision to play until the last minute. The other reason of course is that I haven't been taking bridge seriously for a number of years now, and am more than a little rusty. I did get a few articles published in the bulletin (see links at the site above) including a couple of rather dodgy poems. And they were kind enough to give me a couple of bottles of decent wine for my contributions. So, that was nice.

But what was even nicer was rediscovering the sheer joy that bridge can provide. A large part of that comes in the endless post mortems with your friends and peers, analyzing hands from the bidding through the play of each card and trying to learn and profit from that learning (profit of course, purely in the abstract sense -- we're not talking about real money here.) This is something that doesn't really happen much in poker, for a couple of reasons. The glaringly obvious one is that you don't play the same hands as others (though I see that an attempt has been made to introduce duplicate poker) so they can't offer fully informed comment on your play, nor do you necessarily want to share your thought processes and techniques.

And then there are purely sublime moments that occur at bridge, which I at least have never experienced the like of in poker. The closest I can come to it in poker is the feeling that comes after you've carefully misrepresented a monster and dragged someone into an all in pot, massively behind. Times when you profit not from the mistakes of your opponents (which is also in bridge where the large part of your profit must come from) but from your own skillful play. And in bridge it can be a matter of pure skill -- of spotting an opportunity because of the combination of the 26 cards you can see and the 26 that you can't and exploiting it. Or, of using the ideas and features of your own bidding system to arrive at a good contract that won't be found elsewhere.

On Saturday morning there were three such hands in a 26 board session. I'm still not entirely down from the high that they produced. That may be a juvenile and inappropriate reaction but it's taught me something: I'm a bridge player, not a poker player.

I'll probably keep playing a bit of poker. If nothing else it's a method of relaxing and enjoying ones self for an hour, with the possibility of a bit of profit on the side. When I do, I'll probably blog a bit about it here, but updates will be even more irregular than they have been until now.

I might start a bridge blog too ... or maybe not ...

A bridge too far

My partner and I had a 68% game in a 30 table field at the bridge club last night. That's, oh I don't know, doubling up twice in an orbit on awesome reads? Except for one early hand when I bid like a pussy, and one late hand when I basically forgot the contract I was playing in (how embarrassing -- that's like not noticing that you have a flush) I was “in the zone” as was my partner throughout. That the opponents fell over themselves taking questionable actions, to put it as kindly as possible, didn't hurt.

There was one interesting hand which reminded me in retrospect of the idea of “levels” in poker (you know, level one players just play the cards they have, level two players try to play the cards they have and the cards that others are representing, etc.)

I was playing a hand in hearts, holding eight hearts missing the jack and ten between my hand and dummy. On the first round of the suit, my right hand opponent played the jack. Now, on the surface, this is a situation where bridge players apply what they call the principle of restricted choice, but which rather less pretentious people refer to as the Monty Hall problem.

The relevant holdings (apparently) that RHO might have are singleton jack or doubleton jack ten. In the latter case, she might equally well have played the ten (when you have picked the right door, Monty might freely choose between the two wrong ones), so the weight we assign that holding is halved (we assume that her choice was restricted - you should always switch).

So, playing someone whom I knew to be a level one player, I assumed a singleton, which turned out to be correct, and made an extra trick. Not perhaps as satisfying as winning a buy in, but we bridge players have to take our pleasures where we find them.

Where does the level one, level two stuff come in? Well, a level four (or thereabouts) player in this situation would have realised (from the bidding) that we had exactly eight hearts. Such a player, holding three hearts to the jack ten, would have known that it could never cost to play the jack or ten on the first round (seeing A92 in dummy, and with the dummy leading the 2). This opportunity for deception could be used to make it incorrect for me to assume that the play of the jack or ten represents a singleton.

It's actually a really interesting situation, because the reason to play jack or ten from jack ten third is not to pick up a free trick when you have that holding, but to protect your partner's four card holding when you have a singleton. Just like the reason to “vary your play” occasionally is not so much for the possible return on this particular hand, though if it happens, that's nice, but to protect your action on your otherwise predictable holdings when you do have strong hands. And that's why, before you decide to vary your play, you have to think about the level of your opponents.

Oh my head hurts.

Of odds and evens

Not much postage here recently. I haven't been playing a huge amount of poker, and, for various reasons, when I have been playing it's mostly short cash game sessions. While these have been more than reasonably profitable, and have done a nice job of padding the bankroll for some future MTT entries, I just don't find the situations that arise in cash games to be generally as interesting as tournament ones (and of course, there's a greater incentive to keep key observations to ones self!)

I've been weighing into the debate over at Hoy's place concerning pot odds/tournament play etc. Naturally enough, I've been playing the role of math guy, but I don't believe that the math is the be all and end all of such analyses. May I beg your indulgence and illustrate with a bridge hand from last night? I promise not to get technical and talk about rectifying the count for a double squeeze or anything like that. I do need to describe some background though.

The event is the first of four qualifying nights for the main pairs championship at the club. To qualify for the main event, you must finish in roughly the top third of the field (sum of best three scores). The field as a whole is weak, and it would be a major surprise not to qualify -- think "surviving the first hour of a multi table tournament" but with the added kicker, that, regardless of how many chips you wind up with at the end of that hour, everyone will start fresh with the same chip count in the second hour.

Hmmm ... there's an interesting concept for a poker tournament format ... after every four levels everyone still surviving gets the average chip stack ... anyhow back to our story.

My partner and I bid to a small slam in hearts, requiring us to make all the tricks but one. The opponents, unfortunately good, rudely cashed their side ace at trick one, so I needed to make the remaining tricks. The key situation was the trump suit, where we held 9 of the 13 cards, missing the queen.

This is a standard situation and, without other information, there is a slight edge (about 2%) in playing for the queen to drop, as opposed to an alternative play of finessing. The first trick in trumps needed to be played in a particular way to guard against one of the possible 4-0 splits (I could't cope with the other one), but both players followed. The second trick in trumps was the decision point.

I led the trump from dummy, the player to my right followed smoothly (as I would expect him to whether he had one or two trumps remaining), and I paused ...

My gut was telling me to finesse. There was something, some tell, that I couldn't pin down. Was this enough "other information"? My head fought back with a threat to tear up my mathematicians union card if I didn't play for the drop. My head won. My gut was right.

I still don't know what the tell was -- I've pinned it down to something that happened on the first trump trick, and I think from the player who had one trump, not the one who had three.

Will I finesse next time? I don't know.

Poetic justice

I played that other card game again last night, and was hugely amused by the following sequence of events at one particular table (poker analogy follows). We had just arrived, to play the next hand (in duplicate bridge one set of players moves around the room) and were treated to the following conversation from the pair seated at the table:

TC: On that last hand, you shouldn't have taken the king with your ace when hearts were led from dummy.
NP: But we learned that “Aces are for taking kings”
TC: Yes, but not when the dummy has QJT9 as well, and no outside entry.
NP: (Looks confused)
TC: Blah blah blah (translation: I'm a much better player than you are and am doing you a favour by playing as your partner; aren't I a wonderful and clever person?)

Meanwhile, in the hand we were playing, TC had become declarer at 3NT, requiring nine tricks to fulfill the contract. My partner, god bless him, found the only troublesome lead, in fact the only lead that could restrict declarer to exactly those nine tricks (sometimes, virtue has to be its own reward). But a funny thing happened. Despite it being clear to everyone at the table (and even the family next door watching “Prison Break”) that the contract would be defeated if he lost the lead before cashing his nine top tricks, TC cashed precisely eight, and then lost the next one.

The poker analogy:

TC: In that last hand, you should have over-limped from late position with 64s.
NP: But we learned that hand selection is important, and the cutoff, button or one of the blinds might have raised.
TC: Yes, but the table's been passive so that's not very likely, and you have great implied odds if you hit the flop.
NP: (Looks confused)
TC: Blah blah blah ...

To be followed immediately by a hand where TC holds the mortal nuts on the river, last to act, and simply calls.