Author Archives: Mike

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.

LTC v. Bergen (Real World)

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Diagnosing some slam hands. Continue reading →

In last Saturday’s club game my partner and I missed a slam at each of the first three tables. We later missed still another slam, but we salvaged one on the very next hand. This may sound like a recipe for a disastrous session, but in fact we enjoyed a 65+% game.

Hand #16: My hand (16 HCP; 6 losers):

♠AKJ864 ♥JT ♦AK2 ♣T5
Partner’s hand (12 HCP; 8 losers):

♠T75 ♥A832 ♦65 ♣AKJ3
I opened a spade; partner put in the game force with 2♣. I rebid my six-card suit. Partner bid four spades.

The opponents held a motley collection of four queens, the K♥, and the J♦. The finesse of the Q♠ works, but so does the drop. You can ruff the diamond at any time. The club finesse works, and there is no reason not to take it. Three of the seven pairs only took twelve tricks, but it is hard to see a strategy that fails to produce thirteen.

Two popular methods for assessing the viability of slams are Losing Trick Count and Bergen Points. These two approaches were described here.

Losing Trick Count predicts that we would only take ten tricks with these cards. It is easy to understand how the spade loser disappeared, but only one finesse was even available. Even if it had lost, twelve tricks would be easy if the opening lead were anything but a heart. This hand seems to be a good example of the type that LTC systematically undervalues.

How about Bergen Points? My hand upticks to 18 using Bergen’s starting points. I can add two points for the long spades and one for the quality of the spade suit. I have to discount the JT doubleton, at least for the time being. Partner earns an extra point for the quality club suit, and he gets to add a point for his doubleton. That gives him 14 dummy points. We are getting close.

The final adjustment goes to my hand. When he shows support for my suit, I get to add another point for the sixth spade and one point for the doubleton. Together we have 34 Bergen Points, and we should definitely have bid 6♠!

How could we have done it using our bidding methods? I think that my partner’s bidding was fine. Even with the two extra points that Bergen allots him he does not have much to brag about. If anyone is going to go on past game, it would have to be me.

What if I had cue-bid the A♦ after he signed off with 4♠? If I think of my hand as a 20-point powerhouse with two flawed suits rather than as a level-two hand with too many losers, it seems a natural bid. If partner then bids five hearts, I know that he has the ace of hearts, but I can never learn about his club holding. Some play that bidding the heart ace implies that he also has the club ace (because I skipped clubs), but we had never discussed his. Maybe we should.

If I had bid Blackwood instead, however, I would have learned about three cards — the two aces that he had and the trump queen that he was missing. That would tell me that at worst the slam was probably hinging on a finesse. If I had an optimistic view of the hand from the point count, I probably would have gone.

The other alternative would have been for partner to bid 3♠ rather than four. That would have made it easier for me, but it would have overstated his values.

Hand #22: My hand (9 HCP; 8 losers):

♠T54 ♥AQ72 ♦K753 ♣32
Partner’s hand (21 HCP; 3 losers):

♠AKQJ3 ♥4 ♦A4 ♣AK976
Partner, the dealer, faced a very difficult decision. His hand met the 4×4 criterion for opening 2♣, but there were two pretty good reasons to open 1♠ instead. Many experts never use 2♣ for two-suiters. Moreover, one of partner’s suits is clubs, and it is hard to show clubs after a 2♣ opener. At any rate he opened 1♠. I bid 1NT. He jump-shifted in clubs. I vacillated between 3♠ and 4♠. Which would be stronger in this situation? I was not sure. I picked the former, and partner signed off in 4♠. I thought about going on, but I figured that my partner had no fewer than five losers.

This auction was not one of our finest moments, but we beat the two pairs that went to seven, and the two pairs that somehow found a way to lose two or three tricks.

Bergen values partner’s rock-crusher at 24 starting points. I have ten dummy points. Even before partner starts adding in distribution after he discovers our spade fit, we are in slam territory. In fact, Bergen would probably have joined the two pairs who bid the unmakeable grand. For all I know, he would have made it, too.

Hand #31: My hand (17 HCP; 5 losers):

♠Q6 ♥AKQJ852 ♦KT8 ♣Q
Partner’s hand (12 HCP; 8 losers):

♠A743 ♥9743 ♦A2 ♣KJ8
I opened a heart. LHO liked her seven-count well enough to overcall a five-card spade suit headed by the jack. They were even vulnerable! I will try to keep this information in mind for future reference.

Partner bid 2♠. I did not think that I had enough to do anything besides sign off in 4♥.

Three pairs out of seven bid and made 6♠, which can be set with a spade lead. Two defenses found the killing lead.

LTC says that we should stop at four or five. In theory that is correct, but getting the twelfth trick only required the LHO to set down the unprotected A♣ (or any other non-spade) at trick one.

Bergen values my hand as worth 22 points as declarer. Partner has 13 points in support of hearts. From the perspective of Bergen points this one is a no-brainer. The best possible result is 6NT played by partner. I doubt, however, that too many people are going to ignore an eleven-card fit.

At this point I gave our partnership the Wienie Award. We had only played eleven hands, and three times we had been able to claim unbid slams after the first few tricks.

Hand #27: My hand (10 HCP; 7 losers):

♠AQ842 ♥A94 ♦9652 ♣7
Partner’s hand (17 HCP; 6 losers):

♠K93 ♥Q8 ♦KQJ ♣AQT93
No one found this slam either. After two passes LHO opened 1♦. Partner overcalled 1NT (15-18). I transferred to spades, and we settled for the game in spades. My hand’s only exceptional feature was the singleton in clubs.

Partner had to bring in the club suit in order to score twelve tricks.

I had only 11 starter points; I was not thinking about slam. Partner gets a point for his long club suit and one each for the quality of his minor suits. All told, he has 19 dummy points. When I learn of his spade support, I can add three more points (two for the singleton plus one for the four diamonds). That gives us 33 Bergen Points, and we should have bid slam again!

Maybe this pair of hands would look like a slam to Marty Bergen, who might have consider partner’s hand as too strong for a 1NT overcall. However, my four-card suit is the one that LHO bid, and my singleton is in my partner’s long suit. Adding points for these features seems dubious. The only positive intangible is the fact that the points are all sitting between us. We needed both of those long club tricks to make twelve tricks, and that required RHO to have no clubs higher than the 10. The transportation was tricky, too.

In fact, only three out of seven pairs found all twelve tricks. One played in no trump (making four), two made only four spades, and one five.

Hand #28: My hand (10 HCP; 5 losers):

♠74 ♥KQ6543 ♦__ ♣AJT87
Partner’s hand (17 HCP; 7 losers):

♠KQT9 ♥AJ8 ♦AT ♣K954
I had no scruples about opening my shapely ten-count. Partner forced to game with 2♣. I rebid my hearts, and he supported. At this point I was not stopping short of slam, and we made it easily.

I was shocked when I discovered that we were the only pair that had bid the slam. LTC says that this one is in the bag as soon as partner shows support for hearts. Bergen would value my hand at 18 declarer points! The challenge for him would have been to avoid bidding the grand without the A♠.

This was a really interesting set of hands. We only bid and made one of them, but our total score was still above average. Someone who used LTC exclusively would have done better than we did, provided that they did not get carried away on hand #22. If Marty Bergen could have controlled his tendency to see thirteen tricks where there are only twelve, he would have been the overall winner.

Here is the final scorecard. The edge for Bergen Points in slam-oriented hands seems even greater in practice than in theory.

161012101012221313101×10,3×12,2×1312311112101×10,2×11,3×1211271112101012281212121012

Hand # LTC Bergen Us Field Possible