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Free Weekly Tournament Questions

#1 User is offline   CntrlCoast 

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Posted 2024-October-08, 18:10

I'm a novice player and would like to learn about how to play better in the weekly free tournament. Toward that end, I have a couple of questions:
1. Is there somewhere where I can find the "answers" to the free weekly tournament hands? I see that the top 100 people often get a 100%, first time they play, and I would like to learn from how they played the hands.
2. If there isn't a way to see how the hands were "supposed" to be played, is there a tutorial on the hierarchy of bidding a hand? For example, if you bid game in a suit and make your contract but still have your ranking go down, it seems like the program "thought" you should have bid differently, either in NT or possibly made extra tricks. How do I know which it was?
TIA for any enlightenment
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#2 User is offline   smerriman 

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Posted 2024-October-08, 18:56

1) The top 100 leaderboard and scoring 100% has nothing at all to do with bridge logic or "playing better" - even if it says it's the first time someone has seen the hands, it's not. In fact, it's not humanly possible to score 100% on all 8 boards without seeing the hands in advance.

This leaderboard is for an entirely unrelated mind game where you analyse all four hands of each deal double dummy and see what potential scores you can achieve, along with what type of crazy bidding / plays you can make to fool the robots into giving you extra tricks that aren't apparent at first sight (by experimentation / redealing multiple times). You can see possible solutions each week on Hanoi5's YouTube channel in his 'The Quest for the 100%' videos. As you'll soon see, the way he bids and plays doesn't have any connection with real bridge - they're solutions that have been worked out in advance, and he's just following the plays he has written down, as the robots are deterministic and won't vary if you follow the same sequence.

2) Completely aside from the above, you can of course play this tournament as real bridge. In that case, the initial scores you receive for each hand (and that you see on the first leaderboard that pops up afterwards, with just a dozen or so players) are the ones you want to concentrate on. You're being compared against a fixed set of players who played the hands in an old tournament, so could only play it once.

After you've played a hand, you can click on the Other Tables button in the results panel on the right to see how each of the other tables bid and played in that original tournament, and thus how you received your score.

Of course, just because someone scored better on a hand doesn't necessarily mean they played it better; if you search YouTube for the weekly free tournament, you'll find a number of bridge experts who play through the hands and talk about the decisions they're making, which is the best way to learn from this tournament. (Most other tournaments on BBO deal different hands to different players to prevent cheating; this is the only one which ensures you can play the same hands and learn from what they did differently.)

(And watching those videos and/or logging in with a different account is how you get 100% on your 'first' attempt).
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#3 User is offline   CntrlCoast 

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Posted 2024-October-08, 22:48

thanks, I'll go look up those videos
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