Dumoti, on 2018-July-24, 14:57, said:
Uhh… yeah. By me. As I pointed out, the original Banzai/Cowan points were developed using an exhaustive analysis of all the combinations involved in hands containing 4-3-3-3 and 4-4-3-2 shapes.
You can't debunk something when you have zero experience, zero data, zero logical arguments to back your conclusion. Multiple people have done many computer simulations and tabulated the general accuracy of estimating via work points vs. actual tricks taken and concluded it is more accurate than using Banzai points vs. tricks. You have basically taken the position "I declare Cowan is right", and will ignore all data or studies by any other people, having no experience, no data of your own, and no data from Cowan on whole bridge deals, only suit combination analysis. What does that prove? I might as well do something like say "Kyrie Irving claims the Earth is flat", I assume he is right and ignore all other evidence and arguments to the contrary, then claim I have therefore debunked the idea that the Earth is not flat.
Cowan analyzed suits in isolation, not having tools to look at whole hands. It has been explained to you why this is flawed. You have provided neither any reasoning nor any data why analyzing suit combos in isolation gives better conclusions than analyzing entire hands. Suit combos in isolation is inferior, because of tempo issues. Bridge hands are constrained to have 13 tricks. If the opponents can take 5 tricks before you, you can no longer get 9, even if looking at the suit combos in isolation not having to make discards on the opp's winners you'd eventually add up to 9 tricks.
You keep on complaining about Andrews restricting stiff Kings initially, when trying to get establish a "pure" value. You ignore that he specifically notes the controversy, and also provides data *without* that restriction, and shows the conclusions are not significantly different.
Come back when you have actually played hundreds of hands using Banzai, instead of pulling a conclusion out of your gut/rear end that Cowan sounds convincing to me, therefore everyone else is a bozo so I will ignore them.
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But why should I go for that number? By figuring in a 5-4-3-2-1 + points for a 5-card suit, Klinger has shown that he never bothered to understand the initial system nor the reasoning behind it. 5-card suits are not to be considered in such a system because they are out of scope of the original analysis.
You can hypothesize whatever number for game you want. If you want to wait for 38 or 39 or 40 Banzai's to bid game, go ahead. I haven't done the computer studies so I won't claim 37 is ideal. But it looks approximately right to me from the sample deals I generated for the normal amount of HCP for game, and I assume Klinger published 37 based on experience. I have high confidence that if you wait for near guaranteed 38 Banzai's to raise partner's 1nt to 3nt to game, that you will underbid far too many hands and will show a huge net loss at either matchpoints at IMPs. Come back with data!
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Well, you'll forgive me if I find your counter-examples unconvincing.
Of course singular examples are unconvincing. It's about what works on average, over many thousands of hands. That's what everyone doing computer simulations is doing. It's impractical to print out 10000 bal vs bal hands for you here and show that x% of them with 25 hcp combined make 3nt.
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Oh, well, I guess there's no scope for innovation in bridge anymore. Maybe we should all stop playing the game.
You are free to try out Banzai if you think it will work out better. But for Pete's sake go ahead and actually do it for at least a few hundred 1nt openers, where using Banzai leads you to do something different to what the field using Work does, landing in a different contract, so you can argue from actual experience, rather than just making your argument from gut feeling without having played a single hand this way!
Sure some players in your club have played for decades and still suck. But the general class of player here on the forums is much higher, and we have low tolerance for B.S. arguments with zero evidence & experience behind them. You are doing an argument purely from authority, anointing Cowan as an authority and dismissing all others as bums who don't know anything about bridge or statistics. This will convince no one here. Come back after having played Banzai with whatever threshold you imagine is correct, and carefully recording # of hands, total work pts, total Banzai's, tricks taken, MP score, IMP score, etc. Continuing to argue just from pulling numbers out of your ass is just a waste of time.
There's a ton of innovation in bridge in terms of system design. There are lots of artificial bidding systems around, and in natural systems tons of new twists being introduced all the time in terms of transfers, switches/swaps, relays, puppets, asking bids, multi-way bids, competitive bidding techniques etc. That's where good players are putting their time in to gaining edges over the opposition. Zero of the actual good players think that optimizing point count to the second decimal point is worth any effort, because we know about estimates and error bounds and how much this is potentially worth (e.g. helene's 2 imps over a thousand hands result). And less than zero, if that were possible, would think it a good use of time to try a point count that multiple computer analyses have shown to be actually *worse* than the normal Work count. Some people study point count for curiosity's sake and publish some data and are done with it. A few people become completely obsessed with point count schemes, apparently believing that if they finally work out THE perfect formula for evaluation that their bidding will become so accurate that they slay all in their path, and post pretty much nothing else about bridge. But I've only ever seen this last group of posting on bridge groups/forums (here, bridgewinners, rec.games.bridge), I never see them out in real life winning/high placing in tournaments.
If you think you are going to revolutionize hand evaluation by a new point count for balanced vs.balanced, get better results than the field because of this, and start winning tournaments left & right, based on a debunked study from 1987, good luck with that. We who have played decades longer than you, some at the highest levels, are warning you against that. But you are of course free to do as you wish. But please don't claim you have proved something or know something when you haven't even tried the method in practice!
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Yet, you are here attacking me for saying that I want to try the system out.
I did not attack you for wanting to try the system out. In fact I said you would *not have been attacked* if you just said you wanted to try the system out. You are being attacked for casually dismissing other studies and results as bogus and claiming Cowan is right, with no data or experience of your own, just your say so.
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Heck, you can't even defend why 37 points is the magic number for games. As far as you know, no real research of any kind has been done on that matter. Nevertheless, you are here telling me that it's a waste of my time based on nothing more than a firm jut of your jaw as you issue your edicts like some Pharaoh of old? Give me a break.
I'm saying 37 is probably about right, because Klinger settled on that for his book and hopefully did so based on experience. Also we have data that shows 25 hcp work count is a good target for games, and 15 vs. 10 work points, 15 opposite an average 10, is going to be about 22 opposite 15 for Banzai, so that's 37. If you want to use 38, go ahead. You are making the claim for Banzai, not us, so use whatever you think will work best, report back. But please f*ing play some actual boards first before you post again about this.
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