Deriving Optimum Suit Plays
Within the simplified setting, declarer's optimal play of a suit combination may be derived using well-established game theory, namely the theory of two-person zero-sum games. Crowhurst generally covers two alternative objective functions for every suit combination in the catalog. One is the (maximum) expected number of tricks won, or tricks expectation. Another is the (maximum) probability of winning a salient specific number of tricks such as three for a combination with four cards in each hand.
This means that an objective function to be maximised is specified. For suit play purposes, this objective function (or goal) is usually taken to be the likelihood of making a specified minimum number of tricks.
Given this objective, all lines of play are checked against all possible defenses for each distribution of opponent's cards, and the objective function is determined for each of these cases. Each line of play combined with each distribution of opponent's cards can then be assigned a minimum value of the objective function resulting from the best defense for that layout. The optimum line of play is selected as the line that maximises the minimum value of the objective function averaged over all possible layouts. As a result, the optimum solution to the suit combination takes into account all lines of defense (including all forms of falsecarding), and guards against the best lines of defense, but is not necessarily optimal in terms of exploiting errors made by the defense.
Read more about this topic: Suit Combination
Other articles related to "deriving optimum suit plays, play, suit, suit play":
... Within the simplified setting, declarer's optimal play of a suit combination may be derived using well-established game theory, namely the theory of two-person zero-sum games ... generally covers two alternative objective functions for every suit combination in the catalog ... For suit play purposes, this objective function (or goal) is usually taken to be the likelihood of making a specified minimum number of tricks ...
Famous quotes containing the words plays, suit, deriving and/or optimum:
“The verbal poetical texture of Shakespeare is the greatest the world has known, and is immensely superior to the structure of his plays as plays. With Shakespeare it is the metaphor that is the thing, not the play.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“Martin, a woman hasn’t got any political opinions. I run this farm to suit myself. I’ll shoot the daylights out of anybody—British, Indian or American—that thinks he can come around here monkeyin’ in my business. That satisfy ya?”
—Lamar Trotti (1898–1952)
“Today’s pressures on middle-class children to grow up fast begin in early childhood. Chief among them is the pressure for early intellectual attainment, deriving from a changed perception of precocity. Several decades ago precocity was looked upon with great suspicion. The child prodigy, it was thought, turned out to be a neurotic adult; thus the phrase “early ripe, early rot!””
—David Elkind (20th century)
“Everywhere—all over Africa and South America ... you see these suburbs springing up. They represent the optimum of what people want. There’s a certain sort of logic leading towards these immaculate suburbs. And they’re terrifying, because they are the death of the soul.... This is the prison this planet is being turned into.”
—J.G. (James Graham)