Thursday, March 1, 2007

About the Deals in the Book

A few folks have asked how I put together the "hands from actual play" at the end part of the book. Some have even been skeptical that these might be "cherry picked" hands.

Over the course of several months, I put together my notes as to what I thought made sense as to a complete cuebidding package. I then went to archives of vugraph broadcasts to review auctions by the best of the best. From that group of thousands of deals, I printed out every deal where at least one team failed to reach a slam, where at least one team ended too high, or where the wrong slam was bid.

I then tested my ideas against these deals, to see if I could handle these problems better, and to see if any recurring problems might have solutions. The review was not to find great deals where my idea worked. Rather, it was to test my ideas against real world problems faced by experienced experts and make improvements where needed.

The end result was that I found many deals to be much more easily handled with these techniques. I also ran a similar test against random deal generated hands, with the same findings.

Some folks just seem to be skeptical by nature, apparently without testing the approach against real hands themselves.