[awm]

Nope this hand not from the session I won. That session had many interesting features, perhaps notably that partner totally misplayed a hand (miscounted trumps) turning a top into a bottom and we still finished with a 74.45%. It would've been 78% barring that mistake, which would've been the highest percentage I've ever gotten in a 24+ board game (I've broken 80% in the BBO speedballs a couple times, but those are only 12 boards of course).

Anyway, my view is that "swinging" is a tactic which increases your variance while slightly decreasing your expected score. It makes sense to "swing" if the score you are trying to obtain is substantially better than your expected score in the field, whereas you don't want to swing if your expected score is pretty close to what you're aiming for. Usually swinging is something you do when you're having a bad set and need to recover (i.e. your expected score given the boards you have already played is not very good), but it also makes sense to swing early on if you think you're outclassed, or almost any time that your goal is to win a tough pairs event and finishing second is roughly equivalent to finishing last as far as you're concerned. Typically in a club game a good player does not want to swing, because his expected score is pretty close to a winning score in any case (for example my expected score with this partner at this club is probably around 60% which sometimes wins our direction anyway), and it's also not clear that the embarrassment of finishing around 50% due to unsuccessful swinging is equivalent to putting up a 60% and winding up second. However, in a STAC my expected score is far enough from the 70+% that I need to make the high overalls that it seems reasonable to do some calculated swinging.