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[fp]

Off topic again.

Why do bidding conventions has to be disclosed in Bridge? What would be so bad about letting people bid however they want without disclosing it?

This is the part of Bridge that scares me the most- there are rules and upon rules regarding what types of bidding are and are not allowed- which for the most part seem arbitrary. Just as an observer, (although this probably has been mentioned above) it appears that many of these rules are created by players who did not want to adapt to a new creative strategy, and instead, just got rid of it altogether. And many of the rules (this is coming from a mathematician mind you) are not well-defined.

I am someone that would love coming up with new, twisted, weird conventions but having to keep them within arbitrary rules seems limiting- especially since the legality of the use of such a convention could subsequently be penalized at the whim of a director.

[WanderingWinder]

Bridge is the most complex and challenging of the popular trick-taking games by about a factor of two It's in a whole different league of depth and strategy from, say, Spades or Euchre.

Man, I haven't played much bridge, like I said, but I want to disagree with this. Obviously euchre isn't all that deep, with only 24 cards. But spades I would say is simply a different kind of depth. There's a lot more uncertainty, which IMHO creates more strategy and leaves room for more skill in the game. Certainly there's much more of the logic puzzle kind of analysis in Bridge, but that's not the only kind of logical strategy that goes on in a card game. How much competitive spades have you played?
Also, a big part of your argument is based on what counts as "popular". Certainly bridge is the most popular card game (sans-solitaires) there is, so any level of exclusivity you want to put on based on popularity is going to include bridge. But I'm not sure Euchre is even the third-most-popular.

[guided]

How much competitive spades have you played?

None, but I am familiar with the game. How much Bridge have you played at any level? I think you are simply not grasping the depth of the game. Setting the trump suit via the auction is a big deal. Unlimited bidding rounds is an enormously huge deal. The structure of scoring bonuses related to contract denomination and level is also a highly significant strategy consideration. The issue of Vulnerability adds another layer. Compared to Spades we're talking about perhaps 80% as much card-play complexity in suit contracts (setting aside the issue of notrump contracts) vs. 50 times the bidding complexity.

I cannot think of another trick-taking game that has half the depth of bridge. I used the word "popular" simply to rule out any obscure games I am not familiar with at all. There is no particular game I am trying to weasel out of including.

[guided]

Why do bidding conventions has to be disclosed in Bridge? What would be so bad about letting people bid however they want without disclosing it?

Read the DdJ post from BGG that theory linked on the previous page.

[WanderingWinder]

How much competitive spades have you played?

None, but I am familiar with the game. How much Bridge have you played at any level? I think you are simply not grasping the depth of the game. Setting the trump suit via the auction is a big deal. Unlimited bidding rounds is an enormously huge deal. The structure of scoring bonuses related to contract denomination and level is also a highly significant strategy consideration. The issue of Vulnerability adds another layer. Compared to Spades we're talking about perhaps 80% as much card-play complexity in suit contracts (setting aside the issue of notrump contracts) vs. 50 times the bidding complexity.

I cannot think of another trick-taking game that has half the depth of bridge. I used the word "popular" simply to rule out any obscure games I am not familiar with at all. There is no particular game I am trying to weasel out of including.

I think I've played about five games of bridge. As for the popularity point, that's what I figured, but I don't how many trick-taking games you know. I think I know (and have played) about a dozen, if you don't include different forms of bridge, different forms of spades, etc. as different, and probably like 50 if you do. I don't think you're qualified to make the comparison without having played the others at a high level; I'm also probably not qualified having not played nearly enough bridge. I'm sure you don't understand nearly all of the complexity of these other games, as I'm sure I don't understand nearly all the complexity of bridge. We can guess at them, but they'll probably be pretty far off. And that's ok.

[fp]

... Up to fifty-two Unlimited bidding rounds is an enormously huge deal...

Just being nit-picky. It is still a big deal.

[guided]

Just being nit-picky. It is still a big deal.

There is no limit to the number of bidding rounds except that you run out of bidding space, as opposed to Spades where there is one round. When I wrote that I was intimately aware that there is in practice a finite limit. In order to speak clearly it is sometimes best to give up some small amount of precision where precision is less important than clarity.

And for whatever it's worth, the maximum number of auction rounds possible before running out of bidding space is 80, or rather 79 3/4 (319 total calls)

Code: [Select]

P  P  P  1C
P  P  X  P
P  XX P  P
1D P  P  X

...and so on!

[guided]

I'm sure you don't understand nearly all of the complexity of these other games, as I'm sure I don't understand nearly all the complexity of bridge.

I'm highly confident in my assessment of the relative complexity of Bridge vs. Spades, even acknowledging that I have not actually played high-level Spades. I have good familiarity with advanced card-play on defense against suit contracts in Bridge, which will be quite similar to Spades card-play (though somewhat less complex due to the extra information provided by the auction and in the Dummy). Use of signaling is extensive, for example.

I'm definitely not willing to grant that we're both making equally ill-informed guesses based on symmetrical lack of knowledge so somehow we both have an equally valid point. If you disagree with my assessment, OK, I'm not willing to spend a lot of effort trying to convince you. For whatever it's worth, I think you'd really enjoy Bridge if you decided to get into it.

[fp]

This is a silly, and slightly off topic question:

What if players had to Bid (say in points) for which opening/position they got?

[guided]

What if players had to Bid (say in points) for which opening/position they got?

For Dominion? Makes perfect sense to me, if the players are interested in doing it. You still can't compare VPs between different tables though, even with duplicate boards.

The bidding method I've suggested in the past (for those who can't stand first-player bias, and I am actually not one of those people who can't stand it) is that you can bid in half-point increments starting from 0, and you can duplicate the current high bid. Tied highest bids are broken randomly. There's a separate auction for each seat starting with the 1st.

[rrenaud]

We had the bid for points discussion already.

In terms of "what should you bid", I think this is pretty reasonable, the bias removal method might even be clever ;P.

http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=20.msg438#msg438

Is the game with bidding more fair? Of course.  Is it more interesting and fun?  I don't know.  Is it more complicated? Certainly.

[WanderingWinder]

I'm sure you don't understand nearly all of the complexity of these other games, as I'm sure I don't understand nearly all the complexity of bridge.

I'm highly confident in my assessment of the relative complexity of Bridge vs. Spades, even acknowledging that I have not actually played high-level Spades. I have good familiarity with advanced card-play on defense against suit contracts in Bridge, which will be quite similar to Spades card-play (though somewhat less complex due to the extra information provided by the auction and in the Dummy). Use of signaling is extensive, for example.

I'm definitely not willing to grant that we're both making equally ill-informed guesses based on symmetrical lack of knowledge so somehow we both have an equally valid point. If you disagree with my assessment, OK, I'm not willing to spend a lot of effort trying to convince you. For whatever it's worth, I think you'd really enjoy Bridge if you decided to get into it.

I'm not trying to say our lack of knowledge is symmetrical or our points are equally valid. I clearly think mine is better than yours, you clearly feel the reverse. That's fine. What I am saying is that they're both from incomplete experiences (which does not mean the same level of incompleteness).

[timchen]

I have to second guided here, that bridge is a lot more complicated than any other trick taking games I can think of.

The reason? With the rule of dummy it makes huge difference. Without a dummy, lots of times you can do nothing but guess.
There are skills there too, but being overly scientific really does not yield much.

For example, how often can one side get to 12 tricks or more, without dummy? I would say less than 1/50.
Play with dummy, in my experience it is between 1/10 and 1/15, probably closer to 1/10. The difference is that after seeing both hands
it is much easier to develop tricks (or getting the tricks you should be getting.)

Starting from this, since one side can get a lot more tricks, it is possible for the bidding to be more scientific as well. And then the scoring system follows (with some twist) to reward the accurate bidding and good play.

Now, there is also a good reason why it is hard to convince people. The problem is, you cannot really appreciate the game unless you know how to play it. Knowing the rules are just not good enough. In fact, after you know how to play it it then becomes boring to play with people who only knows about the rules, as they cannot really make any intelligent decisions at the table. Indeed, for 4 novices, playing bridge would feel almost the same as playing spades.

[WanderingWinder]

I have to second guided here, that bridge is a lot more complicated than any other trick taking games I can think of.

The reason? With the rule of dummy it makes huge difference. Without a dummy, lots of times you can do nothing but guess.
There are skills there too, but being overly scientific really does not yield much.

For example, how often can one side get to 12 tricks or more, without dummy? I would say less than 1/50.
Play with dummy, in my experience it is between 1/10 and 1/15, probably closer to 1/10. The difference is that after seeing both hands
it is much easier to develop tricks (or getting the tricks you should be getting.)

Starting from this, since one side can get a lot more tricks, it is possible for the bidding to be more scientific as well. And then the scoring system follows (with some twist) to reward the accurate bidding and good play.

Now, there is also a good reason why it is hard to convince people. The problem is, you cannot really appreciate the game unless you know how to play it. Knowing the rules are just not good enough. In fact, after you know how to play it it then becomes boring to play with people who only knows about the rules, as they cannot really make any intelligent decisions at the table. Indeed, for 4 novices, playing bridge would feel almost the same as playing spades.

But this shows again that you're unfamiliar with the other games. The bidding in Spades is pretty darn, well, as a scientist I can't call it scientific, but logically-founded and precise. In the play, I've played other games with dummies, and in general, it's slightly less interesting in the play. You can do a lot better than 'just guess' basically all the time. There's a LOT of skill, and (once again, as a scientist) you can't really be scientific, but knowing what you're doing yields great benefits. I'd expect to beat someone like you, who clearly has decent experience with trick-taking games in general, but little experience with spades in particular, 97 or 98 times out of your first hundred games, assuming we were each matched with comparable partners to ourselves. Not meaning to insult, just that there's actually a pretty good learning curve involved.
How often can one side take 12 tricks or more without the dummy? Did they get to set the trumps? Probably 1/25ish, assuming they took the bid. Without getting to set trumps, it's much much less likely. But it doesn't necessarily strike me as more interesting if one side can just roll over the other with good frequency.

[timchen]

Yes you are right, I actually have zero experience playing Spades. Is there an official rule? As what I found from wikipedia, it looks pretty similar to some card games we played casually, without dummy or partnerships. In that game described in wikipedia, you can beat me probably 9 out of first 10 I believe, but after that it should be pretty even. 98 out of 100? I don't think so. It is not even due to my skills; in bridge I don't think a world champion can beat you 98 out of 100 times say, on 100 boards in a MP pairs game. (Well, assume that you have reasonable trick taking and bidding skills, to the point that makes you claim you can beat me 98/100.)

How do you set the trumps with a single round bid? Anyway, what I am interested in is the chance of bidding a slam (12 tricks) and have reasonable chance(~50%) to make it. In bridge this happens every 10-15 boards. How is that number in your experience of Spades, maybe putting every player at your caliber? I don't think it can be as high as 1/25. The game is just not as precise without dummy. It is certainly true that you can easily do better than purely guessing, but I think if you compare it to bridge, the difference is enormous. There is no certain hold off, throw in, planned squeezes, or even finesses for example.

[WanderingWinder]

Probably 98 is too much. I'd expect something like 9.8 out of 10. Probably over 90 of 100. There is a big luck factor, but there are a LOT of tricks you can throw in, and if you don't have familiarity with the game, well... Let's say I'd expect it to be at least 50 level difference on isotropic, down to like 40 after 100 games probably. There's really that much complexity.
"How do you set the trumps with a single round bid" - doesn't happen in spades obviously. But there are games like Euchre and 500 where you can.
In spades, you can't set trump. Spades are trump. Reasonably bidding that high is almost never the right play, simply because the penalty for not making is very high, and the gains for going 12 instead of 11 are very very low. If this weren't a concern, I'd imagine that one side or the other would have 50% chance of making 12, oh... about 1 out of 100 hands? Very tough to guess though, especially since there is generally some penalty for making extra tricks, which adds extra complexity and dissuades people from going all out.
If the bridge world champion couldn't beat me that often, it's down to two things: one, bridge matches are shorter, IIRC, than spades, which ups the luck factor, and two: bridge is a game where he has to, to some extent, tell me what he's doing, so my bidding might be sorta bad at first, but not SO bad, my trick-playing will carry over pretty well, I think I could adapt to the dummy, and with the extra information I have, I'd go into serious analysis mode. On the other hand, I'd probably find it very hard to not inadvertently cheat by going off of the bidding system, at least without some practice.

[timchen]

No, I guess we have a misunderstanding here. Bridge can be scored board by board, and so can any game you mentioned, I suppose.

For a single board, I believe Bridge is already the one which involves the least luck factor. Even so, (in duplicate situations) you cannot win every time. There are always decisions which are right for one distribution and wrong for the other. Still, it can only be more luck-dependent in games without dummies. This is simply the reason why I am saying that you cannot beat anyone with reasonable skill to the game 98/100. Now if you talk about a series of boards to form a match, I guess I could probably beat you in a 8-board session 100/100 of the time, given what I can read from your posts here.

Frankly speaking, after reading the rules for all the games you mentioned, I don't see how they are significantly different from one another. And bridge is just the even more scientific, complicated version of all of them. The only reason you would say that you can beat someone who is reasonable at bridge that much in a trick-taking game, I imagine, can only either be that you are only scratching the surface of the trick-taking games (i.e., thinking the average level of play too incompetent), or that you are trying to offend me.

Or maybe just some naive way of comparing the complexity: how much time do you think you need to get to the level you are at for those trick-taking games, when there is a teacher who knows all the techniques and will teach you everything he knows? For the game of bridge, I think it takes at least a year for an average guy to reach my level, if he spends, say, ten hours per week on the game.

[Thisisnotasmile]

I think bridge has been played enough in this thread now...

* Thisisnotasmile buys a Colony

* Thisisnotasmile buys a Colony

* Thisisnotasmile buys a Colony

* Thisisnotasmile buys a Colony

* Thisisnotasmile buys a Colony

* Thisisnotasmile buys a Colony

* Thisisnotasmile buys a Colony

* Thisisnotasmile buys a Colony

* Thisisnotasmile buys a Province

* Thisisnotasmile buys a Province

* Thisisnotasmile buys a Province

* Thisisnotasmile buys a Province

* Thisisnotasmile buys a Province

* Thisisnotasmile buys a Province

* Thisisnotasmile buys a Province

* Thisisnotasmile buys a Province

* Thisisnotasmile buys a Duchy

* Thisisnotasmile buys a Duchy

* Thisisnotasmile buys a Duchy

* Thisisnotasmile buys a Duchy

* Thisisnotasmile buys a Duchy

* Thisisnotasmile buys a Duchy

* Thisisnotasmile buys a Duchy

* Thisisnotasmile buys a Duchy

* Thisisnotasmile buys an Estate

* Thisisnotasmile buys an Estate

* Thisisnotasmile buys an Estate

* Thisisnotasmile buys an Estate

* Thisisnotasmile buys an Estate

* Thisisnotasmile buys an Estate

* Thisisnotasmile buys an Estate

* Thisisnotasmile buys an Estate

[ARTjoMS]

I'm not sure how this has went so far off topic, but there is no way that other card game comes close to bridge in complexity at high levels. Even the very top pairs don't play perfect bidding/card defense methods, because of memory reasons (or time it is needed to put ideas together in working mechanism). Still, many top pairs have written their bidding agreements on hundreds of pages, and i wouldn't call these systems particularly complex.

Random chance in one board is quite high in bridge, but it is compensated by enormous amount of deals you play to determine winner.

[mcshoo]

I thought my first post was going to be about dominion, but this thread was enough motivation to get me to register.  I wanted to chime in and say that I agree with guided and would say that bridge carries significantly more depth and complexity than spades.  I play and love both greatly, and I'd like to believe that I'm decent at both, though by no means expert level.  It’s no contest, bridge is way more complex. 

Spades has 1 round of bidding - your given hand value goes up or down depending on the bids before you, your opinion of your opponents, and the score.  There are only 14 different calls (and a number of them aren’t used ever), and because of the limited nature of the bidding, only a few calls carry special meaning beyond the simple, “I think I can take n tricks.”  Maybe a bid of 4 promises either the A or K of spades, and a bid of 7 promises a hand that you think your partner can go Dnil with. 

Bridge has many rounds of bidding – each successive bid can change the value of your hand. There is a lot you can communicate as a result of having so many different calls, and the calls can carry different meanings depending on what has been bid before.  For example, a 1S bid is different when opening [According to my systems, it promises 12-15 high card points, and at least 5 spades] than responding [6-9 high card points and 4 spades] than competing [7-12 points and 5 spades].  In spades, I’ve only commonly come across two or three bidding conventions, but in bridge the possibilities are nearly endless.  There are entirely different systems (sets of bidding convensions), and a good bridge player not only needs to be familiar with his own system, but also with the dominant systems that other people are playing.   

WW I think you'd probably be great at bridge, but you're not going to learn it nearly as quickly as a bridge player can learn spades.  But if you want to play - bridgebaseonline is the place to go.  We could set up a dominion players bridge game sometime =D

[guided]

my bidding might be sorta bad at first, but not SO bad

Yes, it will be SO bad, and it will remain so until you've dedicated tens or hundreds of hours of study to it. Modern bidding systems can fairly precisely convey a great deal of information, and there are huge incentives for determining exactly how many tricks your team's combined holding can take. Novice bidders will be utterly and routinely smoked by bidders who can reliably distinguish between situations where they can take (say) 9 tricks vs. 10 tricks.

Something that nobody else has emphasized about luck in bridge is that serious bridge is played with duplicate boards, and you are scored against other teams playing the exact same set of hands. There's very little luck at all, even on a hand-to-hand basis. Occasionally a board will play toward your bidding or signaling system's particular strengths or weaknesses, so that you'll score better or worse than people playing a different but equally strong system, but this isn't a major factor over the course of a many-hand match.

[WanderingWinder]

my bidding might be sorta bad at first, but not SO bad

Yes, it will be SO bad, and it will remain so until you've dedicated tens or hundreds of hours of study to it. Modern bidding systems can fairly precisely convey a great deal of information, and there are huge incentives for determining exactly how many tricks your team's combined holding can take. Novice bidders will be utterly and routinely smoked by bidders who can reliably distinguish between situations where they can take (say) 9 tricks vs. 10 tricks.

Actually this quote is taken out of context: I was saying that this would be a reason why the world bridge champion (if such a person exists) wouldn't be able to beat me essentially all the time. In fact, I imagine that (s)he WOULD beat me all the time for a while. But also I'd probably instinctively bid defensively (read, high) rather a lot, and have the cards to back it up sometimes.
mcshoo, thanks for the link. I may play some just to get a better feel for it, though I don't think I'll ever be too big into it. But all this discussion makes me want to know for myself.
All: I'm starting a thread on bridge in the Board Games section so as to not continually be off topic here. Further comments on the bridge topic should go here, though obviously stuff about duplicate dominion should remain to be posted here.

[zorch]

First time poster, fwiw also an experienced tournament bridge player (1500 mp).  The idea of duplicste Dominion is rather interesting, and while a good balance of elements should be identified to level the field, that shouldn't be the main concern once you accept the broad duplicate concept.

Aying Dominion this way will be a different game.  Period.  You will think about the game abit differently, the results, over a large number of trials will ne different, and you will address somewhat different concerns.

No one has touched upon one of the other elements of Bridge, namely the different forms of scoring.

   At "pairs" or "board-a-match" the object is to neat the other lined up card holders by any margin.  U then score 1 pt for each pair u beat. 

At imp pairs or teams it is the amount by which u beat them that matters.  Small gains or losses asre largely irrelevant.

You think and strategizr differently... Somewhat... At each form of scoring.

So it would be with Dominion.  !ut the differences would add some richness and vasrierty to the gasme, while also having their own built in limitations.  It sounds like it would be worth trying, if only, as WW points out, for the ability to report the choices made from multiple executions, afterwards... And the faste that befell those choices.