Leo LaSota’s Amazing May!

Hello,


Leo LaSota is one of the leading robot battlers in the world. He is the top masterpoint holder on BBO with well over 25,000 ACBL masterpoints won against the robots, and over 30,000 BBO points.


It just so happens that I looked up the top masterpoint winners for May on BBO. I was something like 12th or so with 145 points. That is pretty good but I looked at Leo’s total. He won 876.40 points in May! That is a jaw-dropping number. When I was temporarily unemployed last October I played a ton of robot bridge but I only got just over 200 points.


How did he do it?


To answer this question, I just pulled up his masterpoint history from BBO. You can do this by going to bridgebase.com and clicking on “BBO Points” and putting in your user ID or anyone else’s ID. Mine is cake_eater and Leo’s is “Leo LaSota”. Imagine that. Then I did a cut and paste into a spreadsheet. 
When BBO awards points for the daylong $1.35 automated tournaments, it does so right after midnight. 


Leo starts his day anywhere between 7:30 and 9:00 in the morning and he starts playing bridge and he keeps going until 1:00 AM. He is very quick to play, I think he takes about a minute per board (11-12 minutes per 12-board instant tournament). During the day, he plays all of the $1.35 tournaments. There are five of these now which can be played any time. Two regular instant tournaments can be played each hour. He must have it timed very well. 


If you start playing at 8:00, for example, you could play your two instant tournaments and then start playing your daylong tournament until exactly 9:00. If you time it right, you can play robot bridge non-stop for several hours, which is what Leo does. 


30 sessions a day times 30 days in the month is still 900 sessions per month. But Leo got points in 1200 sessions! That is 40 sessions per day, every day! When I played my robot marathon I played 48 sessions in 24 hours, without sleep. Leo did close to that over an entire month! And that doesn’t even count the (few, I’m sure) times he did not place!

I think I will omit the spreadsheet but if anyone reads this and wants a copy of the spreadsheet, and who is not a spambot, let me know.

Nice job, Leo!
Cheers,Daniel

Success in ACBL “Support Your Club” game

Hello,

ACBL and BBO have teamed up to create club games you can play with robots. You can support your local club and play robot bridge at the same time! $4 of the $6 entry fee goes to the club. Points you win are black points and count for Ace of Clubs and Mini-McKenney awards. You can get up to 2.5 points (top eight places overall).

https://www.acbl.org/clubsupportonlinegames/

If you are min-maxing your points per dollar spent, it is true that these games cost more to play in than a regular $1.35 automated tournament. If you are interested in Ace of Clubs / Mini McKenney awards, these games might have some appeal for you.

Recently I was fortunate enough to score 80% in one of these games for first overall. I have made a video of me analyzing these 18 hands. You can follow along if you want.

This particular tournament took place on March 31, 2020.

Link to tournament is here. I hope that it is clickable for you. It has results for all 18 hands and the travelers.
https://webutil.bridgebase.com/v2/daylong_hands.php?tourney=ARDARD%3A3d7474b9.730d.11ea.b96d.0cc47a39aeb4-1585631129-&username=cake_eater

For this game I will not put comments inline, you can see my comments in the video.

Here’s the link to the video.
https://youtu.be/pteuBwipb7w

Hand 1: 80%
https://tinyurl.com/ydypkts9

Hand 2: 98.81%
https://tinyurl.com/yb66pf9l

Hand 3: 90.48%
https://tinyurl.com/ycvovdew

Hand 4: 89.39%
https://tinyurl.com/yd29luzw

Hand 5: 93.75%
https://tinyurl.com/yargk7sh

Hand 6: 85.56%
https://tinyurl.com/ybcejxra

Hand 7: 74.42%
https://tinyurl.com/y7wem8ll

Hand 8: 39.80%
https://tinyurl.com/ybxh3obr

Hand 9: 61.25%
https://tinyurl.com/y7tvemrr

Hand 10: 84.88%
https://tinyurl.com/ybug9rxw

Hand 11: 98.84%
https://tinyurl.com/y76b8e3c

Hand 12: 51.32%
https://tinyurl.com/y7mgdszl

Hand 13: 73.33%
https://tinyurl.com/y6wkan9p

Hand 14: 81.25%
https://tinyurl.com/yca9yqle

Hand 15: 93.06%
https://tinyurl.com/ya8yfjfp

Hand 16: 94.59%
https://tinyurl.com/y7op4dtn

Hand 17: 54.65%
https://tinyurl.com/ycak3hla

Hand 18: Finishing strong with a cold top, 100%
https://tinyurl.com/y9fda2jp

Cheers,
Daniel



Grand Life Master Ira Chorush

Ira Chorush is from Houston. He does not play too much face-to-face bridge any more, only a few tournaments, and not at all at the club that I know of, but he has taken up robot bridge with gusto starting in 2017.

Robot bridge has allowed Ira to earn the points necessary to get the 10,000 masterpoints required for Grand Life Master, without even leaving home! Typically Ira will play all three daylong tournaments at matchpoint scoring as the masterpoint efficiency is slightly higher than the instant tournaments. You can get up to 1.5 masterpoints from a daylong tournament for a cost of $1.35 versus a maximum of 0.9 masterpoints for an instant tournament for a cost of $1.25.

Congratulations to Ira for making Grand Life Master!

Here are some hands from Ira from recent daylong tournaments. For anyone that is new, you can click on the link and it will show you a complete hand with my little commentary on each one.

https://tinyurl.com/quxqvs9
https://tinyurl.com/vg26kfs
https://tinyurl.com/umwt8hc
https://tinyurl.com/vrrqe3m
https://tinyurl.com/wejg3jf
https://tinyurl.com/w2coet5
https://tinyurl.com/rbsnybh
https://tinyurl.com/vm9jke3
https://tinyurl.com/swa6tuf
https://tinyurl.com/sfa2ncs

Cheers,
Daniel

Introducing the 10-Block!

Hello,

BBO has begun to run four daylong tournaments, per day instead of two. I’ve calculated that I can compress more robot bridge into a smaller window of time.

BBO has a limit of two instant tournaments per hour. If these new daylong tournaments would fill the gap in time, I would not have to stop playing. I would play two instant tournaments, then two daylong tournaments, two more instant tournaments, two more daylong tournaments, and finally two more instant tournaments.

I creatively dubbed this block of ten sessions a “10-block”.

Although I have more important things to do, I could not resist playing a 10-block last night. I started at exactly 8:00 and ended at exactly 10:50. That is two hours and 50 minutes, 17 minutes per 12-board session. Not super speedy but I was able to play through without stopping. It was successful as I got more than 5 points.

Two hours and 50 minutes seems like a lot of time but it is roughly the same amount of time as a session of bridge at the club takes. The cost of a 10-block is $12.90 which is comparable to the cost of a session at the club.

So it takes roughly the same time and the same amount of money to play a 10-block as it does to play a game at the club, with a lot more expected masterpoints. What’s not to like?

Try a 10-block!

Cheers,
Daniel

More 1NT with 14

Hello, Robot battlers!

Changing your notrump range and distribution is the best way to get swings. I’ve got a dozen hands for you where I opened 1NT with 14 HCP. Some of them were balanced, and some were unbalanced (a singleton). Most of the time I get good boards doing this.

https://tinyurl.com/y6j7pe7j
https://tinyurl.com/yxmxfkau
https://tinyurl.com/y3o5v3cj
https://tinyurl.com/y6t5yx2m
https://tinyurl.com/y4g6psa8
https://tinyurl.com/yxcv64rh
https://tinyurl.com/y63jqgxr
http://tinyurl.com/y27ss2eg
http://tinyurl.com/y2zks3l5
http://tinyurl.com/y5rgy6hp
http://tinyurl.com/y4azbm6q
http://tinyurl.com/y5ed3lqf

I have actually started opening 1NT with 13 HCP,

Lastly, I have posted a video for you.

Cheers, Daniel

Metrics and System Change

Hello Robot Battlers,

My bosses are big believers in performance metrics. Their thought is that you should be able to measure everything that is job related, such as the number of defects closed, the number of customer service cases worked, and so on.

When it comes to robot battles, a change in what system you play should have an effect on your long-term average percentage score, other things being equal. If I was to play 5000 hands playing a certain system, and 5000 hands playing a different system, the skill and luck factors should cancel out over that long of a time.

I started keeping track of net monthly average score in October. My preferred game is matchpoints but you could do the same thing with IMP scoring.
October 2018: 60.6556
November 2018: 60.1736
December 2018: 60.2520

January 2019 is not complete but it is 60.2230. Over this four-month period I played over 5000 hands using pretty much the same system. As expected, playing a consistent system yielded consistent results over a large sample size.

Starting February 1 I am going to experiment with opening notrump ranges:

With 10-12 HCP I will open 1 of a suit and rebid 1NT (or pass a 1-level suit bid if suitable)
With 13-15 HCP I will open 1NT. (currently 14-16)
With 16-17 HCP I will open 1 of a suit and rebid 2NT (currently 17-18)
With 18-20 HCP I will open 2NT. (currently 19-20).
With more points I will open same as before.

The next ACBL robot championship is scheduled for March 16-18, 2019. Hopefully I will have enough information to see if this system change is effective before then. But I am cutting back on robot play this year, to two sessions a day (720 hands a month), so I may not be able to tell one way or the other before then.

Cheers,
Daniel

78.27% Still Only Second Place

Hello,

Normally a 78% game will win an instant tournament on BBO. But this time it didn’t. For this entry I will go over all twelve hands to see what could have gone better, if anything, to beat the guy who got 83%.

Hand 1: 78.57%

After the auction goes 1NT-all pass, the robot leads the !CQ from queen doubleton instead of from its nice five card diamond suit. A lot of times robots will lead singletons so I finessed the !C9 into the 10. I figured a lead of !CQ from !CQ singleton or !CQx small doubleton was more likely than from !CQT doubleton.

Here’s me playing the hand:
https://tinyurl.com/yavrqma3

Here’s dustinst22, our hero, playing the hand.
https://tinyurl.com/ycngj3ea

Same auction from both of us. Note that we both chose to open 1NT with the singleton small heart. This is standard practice in robot bridge due to the severe rebid problem. If you would open 1!C with this hand, what would you rebid? If you would open 1!D and rebid 2!C, robots will drop you in 2!D with 2=3 in the minors. I talked about this briefly in my lecture back in June.

Do you see the very subtle difference in the play that Dustin had from how I played the hand? It took me a while to see it. When Dustin played the last spade at trick 11, he discarded a heart, where I discarded a diamond. This made the robots defend wrong at trick 12 and Dustin made 4 for 96% and I only made 3.

Hand 1 illustrated the principle that you should discard the suit that you want the robots to discard. Here, it is hearts.

Hand 2: 100%
I overcalled 1NT instead of doubling. The doublers generally got into trouble by getting too high, so I was getting a good result. Then I played the hand pretty well. Obviously there is no room for improvement on 100%. 😊

https://tinyurl.com/ybybb93j

Dustin had the same auction but did not cover the !D9 with the !D10, then he tried to crossruff and went set. But he still got 60% for down one.

Hand 3: 42.83%
https://tinyurl.com/ya5o4kv3

I made 3 on this one for average minus. Some declarers were playing the hand from the other side. The declarers who did better than I did started the diamonds by leading the jack. I think this is better, in hindsight.

My boy Dustin went set on this one when he misguessed diamonds like I did, but I got my ninth trick in hearts and he did not. Dustin got 25%.
https://tinyurl.com/y8lljkpf

Hand 4: 85.71%
I was tied for next to top on this one. There was one slammer who got to the good 6!D slam, which makes on 3-2 trumps, even on a heart lead. Dustin chose to open this hand 1NT. That is too convervative for me. But Dustin avoided the heart lead and made 6 for the same 85%.
https://tinyurl.com/yaf3asvx

Hand 5: 39.29%
I got to 4!S from the robot’s side after making a takeout double. Against me, they led the !DAK and then I had no chance. I felt like I had a 3!S bid after partner’s raise, but maybe my doubleton diamond should have cautioned me against it.
https://tinyurl.com/ybnlful8

Dustin threw a monkey wrench into the works when he made a 1NT overcall of 1D with a doubleton jack. The contract was the same, but now the opening leader led the singleton club instead of a diamond. Then, when Dustin ducked two rounds of diamonds, LHO led a third diamond, giving a ruff-sluff. Dustin made 4!S doubled for 100%!
https://tinyurl.com/yc3gx9xp

Hand 6: 85.71%
This one is pretty easy, the only issue was avoiding a trump promotion. It was 85% because a lot of pairs passed the hand out with 11 HCP. Do not ever pass 11 HCP! Dustin did the same exact thing and also got 85%, tied for top.
https://tinyurl.com/ycdy3l96

Hand 7: 100%
On this one I had 15 HCP and opened 1NT, even though I had a singleton queen of hearts and also a six card suit. But minor suits are minor.

Also, the preemptive effect of 1NT showed itself on this hand as a lot of E/W pairs got to 4!H, making. It’s a lot harder to get to game when your opponents open 1NT.

That pesky Dustin also opened 1NT with this hand, but he made 4 clubs where I made 5. Dustin still got a nice 93% board.

Dustin and I got the same opening lead, but the play diverged after that:
Here’s how I played it:
https://tinyurl.com/yavuunfm

Here’s Dustin:
https://tinyurl.com/ybowbtz4

Hand 8: 85.71%
I overcalled 2!S with a four card suit over 2H, expecting a fit. Sure enough, partner raised to game. Unfortunately, partner had 3 hearts as well and they got a heart ruff. But I was able to pull off an endplay for down one. -50 was 85% for a good board.
https://tinyurl.com/y6uw5xuq

Dustin irritated me with this one. He made a takeout double of 2H holding a singleton diamond, and got away with it! He landed in 2S making 3 and got 100%.
https://tinyurl.com/ydbccqqt

There is no way I am going to make a takeout double with a singleton in a side suit, without a very powerful hand. Dustin got lucky.

Hand 9: 64.29%
This one seems pretty normal. I opened 1H and accepted the Drury invite.
https://tinyurl.com/y94auc4s

But Dustin strikes again! He opens 1NT with six hearts, 16 HCP and a singleton club. I don’t necessarily disagree with this call had the robot had only five hearts, but there wasn’t a rebid problem. Adding insult to injury, the robot led the singleton king of hearts, so he made six for yet another cold top.
https://tinyurl.com/y7dgzf9j

Hand 10: 96.43%
You’d think that 96% would make up some ground on Dustin, but he also got 96%. He also opened 1NT with five hearts, all pass. The play went similarly to my line, but not different enough to post here. I just claimed 8 tricks after the hearts came in.
https://tinyurl.com/y894hkw7

Hand 11: 78.57%
After getting a favorable spade lead, I cashed my 10 top tricks. I kept x across Kx in both other suits and hoped for something favorable. It didn’t happen and I made 4. The top score went to the pair in 4S and they led their unsupported ace on opening lead. Dustin’s play was the same as mine and he also got 78%.
https://tinyurl.com/ybhq2t93

Hand 12: 82.14%
After robot partner opened 1H, I chose to bid 4H instead of 3NT with my doubleton spade. I think I guessed right and played well to make 5. 82% was not good enough to make up any ground on Dustin, he did almost the exact line of play. In fact he probably improved on my line by cashing the CA earlier than I did.
https://tinyurl.com/y763kus3

So there you have it. 12 hands, 78%, second place.

Although I have not encountered Dustin before, he is a ranked player on BBO (Jack rank, requiring a lot more BBO points than I have), so he is obviously not a scrub. But I think he got lucky here.

Cheers,
Daniel

Hands from Fall 2018 Robot Championship

Hello,

My 43rd place in the robot championship was my best showing so far, but my scores haven’t improved as much as I had hoped.

Summer 2017: 62.44%, 64th place out of 2428, 2.63% of entrants
Spring 2018: 60.95%, 94th place out of 1910, 4.92% of entrants
Summer 2018: 62.45%, 67th place out of 1704, 3.93% of entrants
Fall 2018: 62.81%, 43rd place out of 1531, 2.81% of entrants

In order to break into the top 1% of players in these tournaments, I think I need to step back and analyze where things went right and where things went wrong on these hands, to see if I can tweak my system a little bit. I would like to do better in these events, as the $40 entry for four and change masterpoints doesn’t have a favorable dollars spent to masterpoint ratio. Normally $40 will get me about 15 points on BBO.

I have posted the videos from the tournament already. Here are some hands from the tournament that I found interesting.

https://tinyurl.com/yaz4nkoo
https://tinyurl.com/y72m85uh
https://tinyurl.com/ydamgy2r
https://tinyurl.com/y9f36sl9
https://tinyurl.com/y7hkf48k
https://tinyurl.com/ybjp4lgr
https://tinyurl.com/ybfgbxu8
https://tinyurl.com/y9uzuuy5
https://tinyurl.com/ybfnyjpt

Also, Richard Lawson (sterman on BBO) has posted all the hands he played, with commentary, on Bridge Winners. Some of the comments in his articles relate to the psychological aspects of the robot game, which I think is important. Very interesting articles. Some of his hands overlap with some of the hands I played, but not all.
Richard’s day 1:
http://bridgewinners.com/article/view/my-nabc-robot-individual-journey-day-1/
Richard’s day 2:
http://bridgewinners.com/article/view/my-nabc-robot-individual-journey-day-2/

Richard’s day 3 hasn’t been published as I write this. He didn’t have a good game on day 3.

If you have hands you would like to share, please send them my way!

Thanks,
Daniel

Passing Forcing Bids

Hello,

I would like to feature some hands where I passed a bid which would normally bid forcing. The robot will have high card points less than or equal to your own HCP, so if you have 11 HCP, the robot will have 11 or less.

https://tinyurl.com/ycmu38yf
https://tinyurl.com/y7e4e2qo
https://tinyurl.com/y8vlzhgc
https://tinyurl.com/yag35pfh

Here are a couple of videos I published recently.

Fun Hands 181112
Some interesting hands in this one including a neat double squeeze.
youtu.be

Practice Tournament 181110
Daniel plays in the free practice tournament on November 10, 2018 and does fairly well.
youtu.be

Cheers,
Daniel

Opening Non-Standard NT ranges

Greetings, robot battlers!

I would like to illustrate some hands which feature either opening 2NT on 19 or opening 1NT on 14. In my opinion, this is winning tactics when playing against robots.

Charles Collins gave me this first hand. He opened 2NT with 19 HCP and got raised to 7. Robot partner had 16 with five spades. But with normal splits it was cold. Opening a heart will make it a little difficult to get to the grand slam.
http://tinyurl.com/yc9nnwpn

I played the other hands myself. If you have any interesting hands to submit, please do so. I need the material. Jeff Kroll has submitted a ton of hands and I am very thankful. All you have to do is send me the handviewer link, it is easy, just contact me if you need help.

https://tinyurl.com/ybsl9b65
https://tinyurl.com/y9uyd3s7
https://tinyurl.com/ybya2lqk
https://tinyurl.com/ydc7hc8m
https://tinyurl.com/ycdhshlf

I stream every day at 6:00 am so if you are up that early and want to watch me play robot bridge, tune into http://www.twitch.tv/bbo_cake_eater

Twitch
Twitch is the world’s leading video platform and community for gamers.
www.twitch.tv

Lastly, here are a couple of videos where I had fun against the robots:
https://youtu.be/evfqn3ZSOx4
https://youtu.be/47lDVUIJvdc

The next ACBL robot championship will be held November 19 to 21, so keep practicing against those bots.

Cheers,
Daniel