[pescetom]

BTW, am I the only one who has reservations about using "to declare" as meaning "to play the contract we declared"? I recognise that we need some way of saying it (and "to attack" is even worse) but this never felt right to me. The first time I noticed a "Just declare" tournament I assumed it was bidding only, not the other way round.

[pilowsky]

pescetom, on 2024-February-08, 03:34, said:

BTW, am I the only one who has reservations about using "to declare" as meaning "to play the contract we declared"? I recognise that we need some way of saying it (and "to attack" is even worse) but this never felt right to me. The first time I noticed a "Just declare" tournament I assumed it was bidding only, not the other way round.

Well there used to be a tournament called 'classic' where the robot 'attacked' so how about: vintage, modern, antique or progressive.
If none of those appeal you could try Pepsi.

But is it a substitute for the real thing?

[jillybean]

paulg, on 2024-February-08, 01:54, said:

This is what happens when you reply after playing 136 boards face to face over the weekend!

How did you do. Do you have any good boards to share?

[paulg]

paulg, on 2024-February-08, 01:54, said:

This is what happens when you reply after playing 136 boards face to face over the weekend!

jillybean, on 2024-February-08, 06:21, said:

How did you do. Do you have any good boards to share?

We won the SBU Winter Foursomes.

It is a double elimination event and we went undefeated through the entire tournament. Our opponents played 160 boards, since they had to play a semifinal whilst we had a bye.

If you like lots of bridge, it is scheduled for 32 boards on Friday evening (may be cut to 24 boards next year), 72 boards on Saturday and 56 boards on Sunday. If you get eliminated at any point, then dropping into the two plate events does not reduce the number of boards significantly.

It is played in a very pleasant location, a few miles from the airport with a hotel across the street. We would like to see more teams playing.

You have to play the following hand in 7♣:

West leads the ♥10

---

Edited to complete auction

[jillybean]

Congratulations! I will keep it in mind for the future, winter in Scotland sounds like fun.
I would have to start training now, I could not play that number of boards.

What are your opponents leads ? (I'm just delaying giving the wrong answer)
♥QT9x?

[paulg]

jillybean, on 2024-February-08, 10:26, said:

What are your opponents leads ? (I'm just delaying giving the wrong answer)
♥QT9x?

Leads are pretty standard, so ♥10 is the normal lead from that holding.

[jillybean]

I have to hope for a 3-2 club break

I'm going to win ❤️ in hand, ruff a diamond
Draw trump, no I think I may need to ruff a heart

[pescetom]

It's a very neat auction, compliments.

I suspect we were lucky with the lead which will show us the way to tackle hearts.

[barmar]

pescetom, on 2024-February-08, 03:34, said:

BTW, am I the only one who has reservations about using "to declare" as meaning "to play the contract we declared"? I recognise that we need some way of saying it (and "to attack" is even worse) but this never felt right to me. The first time I noticed a "Just declare" tournament I assumed it was bidding only, not the other way round.

We call the person who is playing the contract the "declarer". So what they're doing is declaring.

During the auction you bid to the final contract. While I've hear people call this declaring the contract, I don't think that's standard terminology. I've also heard people use the word "declare" when they mean "claim".

[pescetom]

barmar, on 2024-February-16, 12:10, said:

We call the person who is playing the contract the "declarer". So what they're doing is declaring.

During the auction you bid to the final contract. While I've hear people call this declaring the contract, I don't think that's standard terminology. I've also heard people use the word "declare" when they mean "claim".

Thanks, by now I understand that, but I still find it messy if not downright illogical... like much of the terminology of bridge.
There is historical logic in the first player to bid being named "Dealer", even if nowadays some computer performed that action.
I also like his RHO being "Elder", but that seems to have disappeared even before computers arrived on the scene (maybe because bridge has some sense of guilt about the atypical decision that "Dealer" rather than "Elder" makes the first call).
"Declaring" I think should logically be the first bid in a given denomination.
Once the auction is won, it seems more logical to me that they are "Defending" the contract that they risked calling... but the accepted usage is that this is not so.
Even so it would clearly be exaggerated to call it "Attacking" (especially at favourable vulnerability), so people settled on the euphemism of "Declaring".
Until someone clears up this mess I prefer to say "the player playing the contract declared" or some similar circumlocution.

[0 carbon]

pescetom, on 2024-February-05, 14:02, said:

When robots get better it will obviously be meaningless to expect equal strength from robot-robot, robot-human and human-human pairs... but in the meantime it seems arbitrary to allow human-GiB in the bidding but insist the human substitutes GiB as declarer in play.

With only 1 human, it's hard to have human-human bidding....
Since this is a contest for humans, I think it is better for the human to be declarer.

[pescetom]

0 carbon, on 2024-February-18, 20:01, said:

With only 1 human, it's hard to have human-human bidding....
Since this is a contest for humans, I think it is better for the human to be declarer.

But it's not a contest between individual humans, it's a contest between pairs, which may be either human-human or human-robot. I can see why you might want to have separate classification for each type of pair, but not why you want to upturn normal bridge by having one partner do all the declarer play. It seems odd to have some idealogical bias against the robot doing its share of declaring yet be happy with it doing its share of bidding and defending.

But it's up to the TD. One reason I can see that they might like it is to slow down the human-robot pairs a bit, although I think they would still hog the front of the pack in an unclocked tournament if that is a concern.

Come to think of it, the clock might influence my preference as a player too: it's relaxing to be dummy in a fast unclocked tournament but it might be more interesting to always declare in a clocked tournament.

[smerriman]

pescetom, on 2024-February-19, 03:18, said:

It seems odd to have some idealogical bias against the robot doing its share of declaring yet be happy with it doing its share of bidding and defending.

I have always wished it were possible for human me to bid and defend both sides at the same time.. without the UI..

[pescetom]

smerriman, on 2024-February-19, 03:32, said:

I have always wished it were possible for human me to bid and defend both sides at the same time.. without the UI..

It's not, of course... but at that point why not just relax and follow the laws of bridge for declaring too ?

[barmar]

pescetom, on 2024-February-19, 03:47, said:

It's not, of course... but at that point why not just relax and follow the laws of bridge for declaring too ?

We do have tournaments like that. I think someone upthread mentioned "Robot Duplicate (Classic)" -- these allow the robot to declare.

But most tournaments are human-declare because we think people enjoy this more.

The same regarding "best hand" -- it's not very much fun defending with a robot partner. The interesting part of defense is sending and receiving signals and using them properly. But the robots don't understand signals, so it can be extremely frustrating.

[pescetom]

A follow up to this after a month of 'Human Declares'.

The Director of the tournament in question has maintained the tag, but for some unrelated reason reverted to clocked.
As I imagined, the resulting combination is much less stressful and indeed welcome because there are less long waits.
So from a player's point of view I am quite happy with this revised situation.

It's early to quantify the effect on score, but so far it seems around +2% per tournament compared to letting the robot declare its own contracts.
So if a Director is counting on this to to make it harder to win with a robot he should probably think again.