[mikl_plkcc]

Tonight I had a session where we got a very poor result, -52.30 IMPs over 26, however, if we compared against double dummy, we would be +24 IMPs. That was a gigantic difference.

https://www.bridgewe...ub=youngchelsea

For example, our worst board was board 9, defending 3NT which ended up +1, -9.70 IMPs for us, but double dummy was just making, so we were -1 IMP from par. The actual reality was that not everyone bid game despite having 25 HCPs combined, and among those bid game, only a minority made with a few table going off in the DD-making 3NT.

Similarly, another bad board for us was board 7, defending a making 24 HCP major suit game in a 6-1 fit, where only a minority could bid it. Most were in partscore while a few were in 3NT going down.

Other bad boards include board 3, defending 6♣+1 where DD was 7NT, but other tables ended up playing 6♦x-1 which was much better than letting their slam making, or board 4 playing 5♦ to the DD result of -1 (losing 1 ♠ and 2 ♣s) when other tables played it from the other side and the ♣ opening lead gave a trick.

How can we know what we did wrong in these boards? For example, when defending a DD-making 3NT but other tables successfully defeated it, or when the opponents could find a cold game where other tables couldn't?

[blackshoe]

Sometimes you can't figure it out. Sometimes you did nothing wrong. Look at the boards. If you see an obvious problem, discuss it with your partner. If you don't see anything obvious, work on your defense. :-)

[bluenikki]

mikl_plkcc, on 2025-June-27, 18:18, said:

How can we know what we did wrong in these boards? For example, when defending a DD-making 3NT but other tables successfully defeated it, or when the opponents could find a cold game where other tables couldn't?

This was pairs? That's the inevitable role of luck in pairs. At teams, you can hope your teammates will make the right (or lucky) decisions.

[awm]

There's no magic way to tell when you made a mistake vs. you were just unlucky. However, I'd definitely not use double dummy results for this purpose. Some things you might look at:

1. Take a look at what the rest of the field did. In a strong-ish game like the Young Chelsea, the results from the other tables are usually reasonable. If most other tables are doing better on a board, it means either your side made some mistake or your opponents did something good.
2. Try to figure out why the double dummy results say what they do; this is a good exercise in any case and will improve your play, but when you get to be good at it you'll be able to tell things like "this contract is supposed to go down, but I'd have to make a very weird lead to set it, so the fact that it made at my table is not really a mistake" vs. "this contract was supposed to make, but it requires dropping a singleton king offside, so no surprise that most declarers went down."
3. Ask other players what happened at their table, or how to best bid/play the hands, and really listen to their replies.

[awm]

I discussed this situation with my wife (an experienced bridge teacher) and her recommendation was to find a mentor who will (at minimum) go over the hands with you after the session and point out things you could've done better. Usually there are experienced bridge players in the community who are willing to help a young(ish) and keen player who wants to improve, and someone who actually played in the game might be more suitable than throwing things to an online forum (where the quality of commentators varies widely and even the best of us may not be familiar with the people or methods appearing at Young Chelsea).

[pescetom]

My club has a technical discussion group (on WhatsApp) which is primarily intended for this kind of peer review: where did we go wrong, how did you bid the slam, etc. etc.
If Young Chelsea has nothing similar (I would be surprised) maybe you could propose it.

[jillybean]

send me an invitation!
Perhaps this is what's needed to resurrect the post game bar discussions. I'm too new to the game to have participated in those.

[mike777]

 pescetom, on 2025-June-29, 06:30, said:

My club has a technical discussion group (on WhatsApp) which is primarily intended for this kind of peer review: where did we go wrong, how did you bid the slam, etc. etc.
If Young Chelsea has nothing similar (I would be surprised) maybe you could propose it.

Sounds wonderful

[pescetom]

 mike777, on 2025-June-29, 21:29, said:

Sounds wonderful

Took me all of one minute to create
The only real problem was convincing people to admit their mistakes publicly, which is contrary to Italian culture... but once people gained courage it worked fine, although a few players still snob it for one reason or another.
Of course like any discussion there are always more readers than contributors, but it helps them too so that's fine.

WhatsApp doesn't have bridge diagram support, but that is no issue as it's a cinch to post a screenshot from a bridge program. They finally added polling too, which helps.

[P_Marlowe]

jillybean, on 2025-June-29, 20:38, said:

send me an invitation!
Perhaps this is what's needed to resurrect the post game bar discussions. I'm too new to the game to have participated in those.

Discussing at the bar is great, I only exp. this shortly as a student.
The problem is, fulltime work, you need to get up in the morning.

It still happens if you play a larger tournament, league matches and go eating together.
But rarely.

Its a loss, ..., the social aspect of the game is reduced.

Guided play, ..., is a method that works some way similar, ... as long as they dont
play a tournament / have to focus on getting moved.

[blackshoe]

I had an expert mentor some thirty years ago. We'd go to some fast food joint after a game and spend another three hours going over boards. Here's a typical discussion:

Mentor: Okay, board 12. Do you remember your hand?
Me: No.
Mentor: You had <blah, blah, blah>. Do you remember the bidding?
Me: No.
Mentor: It went <blah, blah, blah>. Do you see the flaw(s) in your bidding?
Me: No.
Mentor: Your second bid should have been <blah, blah, blah> because <blah, blah, blah>.
Me: <taking notes> I see.
Mentor: Do you remember your opening lead?
Me: No.
Mentor: <describes lead>. What was your plan for the defense?
Me: Plan? What plan?
...

We had hand records. He didn't need them. After a while I began to improve. I also found that I began to remember all that stuff -- and that the splitting headaches I had after the session began to disappear. <grin>

[mycroft]

My opinion from a year ago hasn't changed.

Par is, frequently but nowhere near always, close to a reasonable bridge result. But it is not a good tool for learning what contract you want to play in [cue hrothgar's "run up 30 hands opposite the one of interest, look where you *want to* be looking at both hands, then figure out what the best choice is systemically"] unless you can guess queens 100% and know when to finesse-the-7/crash Qx offside/work out which of the 5 squeezes available works on this hand/... And even then, you have to deal with the outliers, like my two examples from that other thread.

[Tramticket]

Let's look at this piece by piece:

The first question is how did you play the hands? Double Dummy analysis is far from the ideal tool, but let's go with your assumption that it is useful. I followed your link through to the Young Chelsea website and from there followed the "Plat It Again" link and then the "Results Analysys" link. This confirms that you averaged -2.01 IMPs per board (in line with your -52.3 IMP score). It also shoows a number for EFT, defined as "the number of tricks made by the current pair, as declarer or defenders, relative to the double dummy target for a particular contract." and you averaged -0.42 per board, or -11 IMPs for the session. So if we take the double dummy analysis at face value, you are under-performing in the play of the cards. I haven't been to Young Chelsea for years, but it was always a tough place to play!

But you seem to be taking the extrapolation of Double Dummy analysis one step further. I can't see the +24 IMPs that you quote anywhere on the YC website. However, I think that this might have been arrived at by IMPing your score against a theoretical "Optimum", which is calculated by playing the cards double dummy in every possible contract, extracting the double dummy result for each and selecting the optimum score if each side bid and played double dummy. This really is piling double dummy on double dummy and I doubt that the result is very useful.

Board 3 shows the problem perfectly. Your opponents bid 6C and made with an overtrick -940. This was poor for you, as you missed the profitable 6D sacrifice (down 1), which was found at four tables. The opponents might have bid to 7C - a bit pushy, but one pair bid it. 7D would be a profitable if unlikely sacrifice against 7C, but 7Dx-2 isn't the optimimum because 7NT can be made double dummy. All 7NT needs is to correctly guess the two-way heart finesse (the bidding might remove the guess). But your opponents would be mad to bid 7NT. Your -940 compares with the -1,520 "optimum" and guess what? You are +11 IMPs versus optimum!

What is the conclusion? this sort of comparison against a theoretical optimum is of little useful value.

[barmar]

Tramticket, on 2025-July-01, 08:24, said:

What is the conclusion? this sort of comparison against a theoretical optimum is of little useful value.

Obviously there can be extreme examples like this. But the expectation is that these are outliers, and also that some of them will be in your favor, while others will be against you.

But if your total over a large number of boards is significantly negative, it's unlikely that you encountered a string of boards that just happened to be like this. Isn't it more likely that you played poorly?

However, IMP Pairs is a poor format for this kind of analysis, because boards don't have equal weight on the final results. A single extreme result like the one Tramticket described can totally overwhelm all the "normal" results.

[mycroft]

My WAG is that hands where "par is significantly stupid" is about 5 in a standard 26-28 board session.(*)

If the chance that "wrong side of par" is 50%, then one in 32 sessions will have *all of them* against you. One in 16 will have 4 bad-1 good. So about 10% of the time, through no fault of your own, you'll be down three big results against par. So, once a month, if you play twice a week and have an occasional game outside your regular.

If you're in a one-winner movement (especially a Howell), there's a good chance that you're the *only pair* that has this problem. If you're playing an ACBL-style "Mitchell with overall awards", then the other direction will have somewhat of an advantage if scored against par, and your direction is SOL.

If, however, you can look at a hand and say "sure, we're +11 against par, but nobody is getting to the grand (or, nobody who gets there is making it), so I won't worry about that result" you can evaluate what is "double-dummy loss" and what is "partnership loss". Unfortunately, this is not a skill that we teach (frankly, because teaching actual play skill, "make a plen" skill, defence and proper signalling, all are required to analyse a par result against sanity. And if we could teach all that simply, there would no longer be any C players or Life Novices). But practise, practise, practise; and talk to better players when you find something that "looks right but was very poor" (and listen to them when they tell you something new that is obvious to them but not to you. There's a reason for that) - and you'll get better at it.

As in everything, "Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement."