[blml] ACBL LC Detroit minutes

[Jerry Fusselman]

On Wed, Apr 9, 2008 at 1:25 PM, Eric Landau <ehaa at starpower.net> wrote:
>
> Good bridge players, when "hesitat[ing] between two or more
> possibilities", do not "guess".  What they do is choose the action
> that maximizes the expected value of the eventual outcome given the
> uncertainty.  They may choose an (optimal) action that is different
> from any that they would have chosen had they been certain that one
> of the possibilities was the correct one.

Eric has made this particular point several times before, and he is
100% correct up to here.

>
> One of the (many) flaws in the "DWS" approach is that it assumes that
> a player who is unsure of the meaning of his partner's call can only
> either "guess wrong" or "guess right", when he in fact need not --
> and, if he's a decent player, normally will not -- guess at all.
>

I don't want to get into DWS now, but I have a question for Eric:
Would you be happy if the player in this case said something like, "I
estimate an 80% chance that it was natural, and a 20% chance that it
is basically Lebensohl" (said to opponents who understand Lebensohl).
After all, the alerter has these probabilities in mind, because only
with these numbers can he estimatge an expected value of the eventual
outcome.  I.e., are you asking the player in this case to specify at
the table exactly (probabilistically) how he is going to treat that
call that has more than one possible meaning?

Jerry Fusselman