Recently in Bridge Category

The date is 07/08/2008

The players are:

This game has been calling out for a F.S.M. to me for far too long. I have been trying to get Nick to create a FSM for the bidding convention, but he has been unmotivated. We are currently using this convention (but I don't know what its parts are called). So, this holiday weekend, I wrote a FSM in Python that reads in a recording of the cards that everyone had and their bids. It came out pretty nice. Although, since it is a character driven FSM, it can get a little ugly when it process words like 'double' or 'pass'. It has to have a state for each character transition. And, when its finished processing, it spits out html below. The players were (N: Stephanie, E: Wayne, S: Mark, W: JohnH).

Another night of bridge. For my only hand, bidding was as follows (with my partner opening the bid):

My partner shows support for clubs. I don't have any hearts for defense. So I decide to go for it. When the dummy shows his hand, I realize that there is only one remaining club out there! I believe that the Ace of diamonds was lead. And I lost that one. I was able to cross ruff between my hands and make my bid.

We played bridge again. This time, I played 4 out of the 5 hands. Woot! Sometimes I was wild and crazy. Sometimes my partner (Nick) was wild and crazy. We had one amusing moment. The dummy has AQJxx in diamonds and I have matching low diamonds. I tried finessing my Queen. I led a low diamond. Wayne ducked it. The dummy played a Queen and John ducked it as well. I knew where the King lay. I transferred control back to my hand again and led another low diamond. Finally, after the third diamond play goes around and my dummy's Ace is still sitting on the table, Wayne gets frustrated and throws his King down. We all had a good laugh.

In the hand above, I went a little crazy and overbid four hearts. How often do you get a hand containing seven hearts and void in one suit? My partner made it easy by showing a strong supporting hand.

Still don't know about the score keeping...

We had another session of bridge tonight. And it was quite boring. Wayne played 5 hands. Nick played one hand. Stephanie played two. And I played one hand. Well, I would have played another hand if I would have remembered the "Rule of Twenty."

I definitely like Tichu much better than bridge. You are more involved. You don't have to sit out on hands. And good hands don't necessarily mean good cards. For example, my hand could make Tichu if the opposing team had got down in cards and I was able to play a single 8 (then bomb, play a jack high straight and then the 4).

Out of curiosity, how should I keep and present the bridge score?

Nick, Wayne and I played bridge. Well, at least practiced somewhat. Nick was kind enough to give me a placemat that had a bidding convention on it. But that convention is different than what Nick uses.

What I would like to see is for Nick to create a Finite State Machine that gives all possible outcomes of the system. That would appeal to my inner nerd.