In backgammon there is a program called Snowie, which plays as well as
the best humans on its highest analysis setting and better on its
simulation settings (which are too slow for practical use). Strangely
enough, while experts will sometimes make side bets on who will have
the best Snowie rating in a match, tournaments have been slow to adopt
the idea that the winner of the match should not be the one who scores
the most points, but rather the one with the better error rating.
Random events are part of bridge. Period. Bad players play "Eight
ever" and drop the doubleton Q offside and get a good score. When you
screw up your agreements, you are much more likely to suffer for it
than the opponents. If your bad bid happens to result in a good
board, or perhaps be irrelevant, that's part of the game.
If a player miscounts the trump suit and drops the doubleton Q
offside, should we penalize him because his bad bridge got his
opponents a bad score? Good grief.
On May 2, 8:52=A0am, David Babcock <d...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> > =A0 =A0After all, who wants to allow beginners and novices to spoil
our
> > bridge game, right?
>
> Since nothing so far has mentioned beginners and novices, I infer that
> your mention of these folks is intended to suggest that acting on my
> concerns would impact them especially. =A0OK, let's go there. =A0I
> certainly do not want discourage such players -- just the opposite --
> which is why I sup****t the notion of the Laws' allowing relaxed rules
> in some club games. =A0But novices are already are told, or should be,
> not to use tools they aren't ready for; going another step and saying
> that (for example) if your auction goes off the rails because you
> don't know your agreements, you cannot get more than A- on the board,
> merely underlines this lesson. =A0This can scare off only people who
> were very fragile to begin with, and in my experience, any newbie who
> survives the first couple of weeks in the (to him) totally foreign
> duplicate environment after some years of social bridge is not
> fragile, or at least not *that* fragile.
>
> If there is a practical reason why this cannot be done, let's talk
> about that, but the general idea that the outcome of a bridge game
> should reflect skill as much as possible and random events as little
> as possible -- the more so the higher the level -- is something I hope
> we are all agreed on. =A0If we are discussing what is and what is not
> reasonable along those lines, fine.
>
> David
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