Monthly Archives: May 2012

U Over U: My Favorite Bidding Convention

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Unusual over Unusual works well against Michaels and the Unusual No Trump. Continue reading →

Bidding conventions in bridge are agreements between partners that assign unnatural meanings to bids in specific situations. The down side of using conventions is that the natural bids are lost. My favorite convention is called Unusual Over Unusual. What I like about it is that the two bids that it gives up are almost never of any value whatsoever.

U over U is used when the opponents have employed the Unusual No Trump, a Michaels Cue Bid, or any other two-suited bid after your partner has opened one of a suit. For example, if your partner opens 1♦, and RHO overcalls 2NT, he is announcing that he has at least five clubs and five hearts. If RHO had bid 2♦ in the same situation, he would be showing five hearts and five spades. This is a Michaels Cue Bid.

U Over U is designed for these situations. The first thing to do is to map “our suits” to “their suits” using the mnemonic “lower-lower; higher-higher” (or “cheap-cheap”). In the first example above in which RHO used the Unusual No Trump, their suits are clubs and hearts. Ours are diamonds and spades. We map the lower of their suits, clubs, to the lower of our suits, diamonds, and the higher of their suits, hearts, to the higher of our suits, spades.

In the second example above in which RHO used the Michaels Cue bid, their suits are hearts and spades. Ours are clubs and diamonds. We map the lower of their suits, hearts, to the lower of our suits, clubs, and the higher of their suits, spades, to the higher of our suits, diamonds.

The U over U responses are:

  • Weak hand without support: pass.
  • Weak hand with four-card support: raise partner’s suit using the LAW of total tricks.
  • Limit raise or better with support: Bid the suit that is mapped to partner’s suit. This bid is forcing.
  • Invitational values or better with no support but five or more pieces in our other suit: bid the opponent’s suit that is mapped to our other (unbid) suit. This bid is forcing.
  • Weak hand with at least six pieces in the other (unbid) suit: Bid the suit.
  • Double: No support, but a strong enough hand to be able to set at least one of the opponent’s suits.

The biggest advantage of using this approach comes when responder has support. He can distinguish between a weak hand (raise), an invitational hand (cue bid and pass), and a strong hand (cue bid and take additional action). Without the convention his options are much less descriptive. It is possible to assign the limit raise to one or the other cue bids, of course, but if you are willing to go that far, why not just assign both of them?

Many people, including some of my partners, refuse to play this convention because they are afraid that they will forget it. This seems silly to me. Everyone cue bids to show support for regular overcalls. In this case, you have two cue bids available; why not agree to define them? The mnemonic is not that hard.

The worst situation arises when partners have not discussed what the bids after a two-suited overcall mean. In that case, the raise becomes ambiguous. Is partner showing a bust hand with four-card support, a simple raise, or a limit raise? If the opener does not know, he is in a poor position to determine where to place the contract.

You can also use the principles of U over U when the opponents have made a two-suited overcall of 1NT. In this case the biggest advantage may be the ability to alert partner to the possibility of a penalty double. For example, suppose partner opens 1NT showing 15-17 and the RHO bids 2NT showing the minors. If you have three cards or more in each minor and at least five points, you know that the opponents will probably end up playing in three of a minor with at best an eight-card fit and half of the deck or less. If they are vulnerable, you may be looking at a four-digit score on your side of the card.

Of course, if you are playing “stolen bids” (AKA “mirror doubles” or “shadow doubles”), you cannot do this because you have assigned a different meaning to the double.

Land Sharks in Tanzania

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So many decisions! Continue reading →

We are in the early stages in preparing for our next trip, the destination for which is Africa. At this point the focus has been on Tanzania. I looked it up in Wikitravel.org and found this rather disconcerting entry: “Tanzania has its fair share of venomous and deadly insects and animals, such as Black and Green Mambas, scorpions, spiders, stinging ants, lions, sharks, and others. You should take care when walking through high grass; when visiting national parks, or when shoving your hand under rocks or into dark holes — unless you know what you are doing.” I must say that if I come upon a shark in high grass, under a rock, or in a dark hole, I will certainly be surprised.

A little more assuring is this conclusion: “The insect/animal most residents fear is the mosquito.” However, according to this article, “Outside of Dar es Salaam, and especially outside of the larger cities and towns, you will be hard pressed to get even basic medical help as many doctors are poorly trained and/or have limited equipment and medication. You should ensure you have your own medical kit to hold you over in case of an emergency. Misdiagnoses are frequent for even common ailments such as malaria, as high as 70% of the cases.”

On the one hand, researching this trip is about as daunting a task as I can remember undertaking. The choices are myriad — time of year, country, specific areas to visit, kind of lodging, air v. land travel, and all manner of tour companies, both local and America-based. On the other hand, absolutely everyone that has written about it, no matter which choices they have made, seems to say that an African safari was the experience of a lifetime.

Swiss Teams

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Too much power-matching? Continue reading →

Back when I was coaching debate in the 1970’s I became annoyed at what I considered to be the excessive use of “power-matching” in tournaments. A debate tournament, at least in those days, usually consisted of eight rounds in which all the teams (fifty or so) participated followed by elimination rounds in which the top sixteen (or occasionally thirty-two) teams faced off.

In order to assure that the teams in the elimination rounds had to “debate their way in,” power-matching was implemented for the last few preliminary rounds. In power-matching every team competes against another team with a similar record. Because of other constraints this is not as simple as it sounds. In debate a team cannot face another team that it has already debated, it cannot face another team from the same school, and every team must have four rounds on the affirmative and four on the negative.

In the early seventies power-matching was only employed for the last round or two. By the time that I left the activity in 1979 it had generally spread to every round after the first one. Few or no tournaments had access to computers in those days. So, the process was slow (two hours per round was standard) and unreliable. In one case my team was scheduled to meet the same team in the second round as in the first and on the same side!

Nevertheless, it was taken as an article of faith that power-matching was the fairest way to schedule, and nearly everyone embraced it. I was never enthused about it. I even considered doing a study to try to document the effects.

The format used for Swiss Teams at bridge tournaments is similar. The opponent for the first round is usually determined by when a team signs up. Team #1 plays team #2, 3 plays 4, etc. After that the computer determines the match-ups based upon each team’s total victory points in previous matches. Every match has a total of twenty (or occasionally thirty) victory points that are divided between the two teams. So, the possible scores are 10-10, 11-9, up to 20-0. The only constraint is that no team can play the same team twice.

At the top and the bottom this works quite well. The team with the most victory points at the end is almost always one of the very best teams. The team at the bottom is almost always one of the weakest. The problem concerns the teams in the middle two quartiles. Teams that get clobbered in the first two or three matches are rewarded with a weak schedule the rest of the event. The ones that start strong are forced to face strong competition the rest of the way. The effect can be so dramatic that it can arguably be an effective strategy for some teams to throw the first match or two. It is beyond dispute that for the teams in the middle the result of the last match is much more important than the first.

This is not sour grapes; I am certain that I have benefited from this phenomenon as often as I have suffered from it. This last weekend, however, the results were so bizarre that I felt a need to vent. There were only six matches. My team won four matches, including victories over the team that won and the team that came in second. Nevertheless, we finished sixth out of ten teams, and that was not the worst part. There were two strats, and we finished third in the lower strat! Our losses were to the team that came in fourth and the team that came in fifth. The team that won the lower bracket and finished third overall lost the second, third, and fourth rounds, but won their last two rounds against weak teams by large margins. We played six of the other nine teams, but we never got to play against them head-to-head.

Is there an alternative? I think so. If the strats are set by the computer so that there is an equal number in each one, the first few rounds can be seeded so that each team meets an equal number of teams from each strat. Then, the last couple of rounds can be power-matched regardless of the strats. I have a database of results from previous Swiss tournaments. I will think about how it might be possible to evaluate various hypothetical formats on their ability to provide a clear-cut set of winners that reflect performance and fairness.

Registration for Comments

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I decided to require registration for comments on the blog. Someone was using a program to post a comment on every entry every day. I got tired of trashing them, and I was afraid that I might accidentally trash a real one.

The registration requires entry of an e-mail address, but if you want to use a fake one, that will probably work.

I promise to read all the comments. You can also send me an e-mail by clicking on the Feedback link at the right.

Grottaferrata and Santo Lucà

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Greek meets Latin in Grottaferrata. Continue reading →

Grottaferrata is a town in the Alban Hills twenty kilometers south-southeast of Rome. Its primary claim to fame is its exarchic monastery of St. Mary, which was established in 1004 and has been continually in operation ever since. The land was donated to St. Nilus the Younger, the first “hegumen” or abbot, by Gregory, Count of Tusculum. Count Gregory is not remembered so much for what he did as for whom he sired. He is the only man in the history of the world who can claim to be the father of two popes, Benedict VIII (1012-1024) and John XIX (1024-1032). He is also the grandfather of the notorious Pope Benedict IX.

The monastery in Grottaferrata is run by Basilian monks. Unlike the other orders of monks in the Roman Church, the Basilians have long been associated with the Greeks. This particular monastery is unique in that the priests there still perform religious ceremonies using the ancient Greek rites, not the Roman rites. Nevertheless, they have always stayed in communion with the Roman Catholic Church. The monks have toiled for centuries to end the schism between the two Churches. Despite their efforts, the break has endured since 1054. How the break occurred is addressed here.

My interest in the monastery can be traced to my fascination with Pope Benedict IX. Although he was pope for approximately fourteen years, and his is the only name that is on the roster of popes more than once, very little of substance is known about him. He was supposedly very young (one chronicler claimed that he was only ten!) at the time that he became pope, and his behavior as pope was reportedly execrable. However, the reliability of all of these reports is low, and historically verified information about his pontificate is sparse indeed, even in comparison with his immediate predecessors and successors. We do not even know when he was born, and speculation abounds as to what happened to him after he was driven from the papacy in 1048.

I had read that the monastery in Grottaferrata, which is quite close to Pope Benedict’s ancestral home of Tusculum, once had in its possession an inscription that indicated that Benedict and two of his brothers had joined the monastery and become monks and that Benedict had died at Grottaferrata. Apparently the evidence of this was destroyed in World War II, during which time the monastery was bombed by American aircraft.

On October 1, 2011, my traveling companions and I hired a driver to take us to the Alban Hills for the day. It was my idea, of course. I did not know what to expect, but I wanted to see both Tusculum (which was leveled by the Romans in April of 1191) and Grottaferrata. It was a major disappointment. I discovered that Tusculum is now basically a park that surrounds an archeological site that has discovered remains of the Roman town from the imperial days a millennium before the era of my interest. We arrived at Grottaferrata just as the monastery and church were being locked up for the daily riposo, which lasts over two hours. I visited the museum there, but the exhibit only covered the celebration of the 900th anniversary of the monastery back in 1904. I considered requesting that we return to Grottaferrata after lunch, but other considerations made that impractical.

I recently came across a 46-page pdf file on the Internet written by Santo Lucà entitled “GRAECO-LATINA DI BARTOLOMEO IUNIORE, EGUMENO DI GROTTAFERRATA († 1055 ca.)?”. I knew that Bartholomew the Younger was a protege of St. Nilus, and he had been the hegumen of the monastery throughout the pontificate of Pope Benedict IX. In fact, he was considered to be a close confidante of the pontiff. The manuscript concerns the work of an anonymous scholiast, who, according to Professor Lucà, lived and worked in Grottaferrata in the second half of the eleventh century. The ancient author, as part of his duties as a copyist, added his own opinions in the margins of the folios that he was assigned to transcribe.

For the last few weeks I have been struggling to translate the paper. Prof. Lucà, who is one year older than I am, works in the field of Greek paleography, which is about as obscure as it gets, at a university in Rome. He has been able to identify the place and time of the scholia based on historical referents and on the style of handwriting used by the author. I did not even know that this field existed.

As I read through the paper, it became obvious to me that Prof. Lucà had read and analyzed quite a few scholia. Almost all of them were housed either in the Vatican Library or the monastery of Grottaferrata itself. So, Professor Lucà, on a daily basis, seems to have unfettered access to information about this extremely obscure but eventful period that virtually no one else has seen for centuries. Moreover, he has the knowledge and tools to make sense of it. How I envy him!

I wish that I had discovered this before we went to Italy. I might have been able to schedule a meeting with him. Perhaps no more would have come of it than our ill-fated trip to the Alban Hills, but there are a hundred questions that I would love to ask him.