Justin Lall

Apparently Josh and I both suck, we are averaging just under 4,000 points per tournament. I consider part of this to be negative variance, and have backed that by betting a third party that I will average at least 4,500 in the next 30.  Another part of it is sometimes swinging when completely out of it to maximize my chance of making money while hurting my average score. That only happened twice though.

Probably the biggest part of it is not playing that well, and doing things like chatting and playing on a laptop. If I want to win I have to tighten up. Yesterday I made one huge error in a vul game. My trump suit was:

QT9

AJ75432

I was in 5 and had lost two tricks. RHO had overcalled 2. I led the queen of diamonds from dummy, and GIB played small. I should have realized that GIB would always cover with Kx, much like a human but even worse, and would play its spots randomly from K86. This makes it about 2:1 to go for the drop, and the bidding inference that RHO probably has the K is weighed against the fact that LHO would probably have bid with a void.

Of course when you’re playing 20 hands every 25 minutes it’s hard to analyze that fast, but this is clearly a situation I should have taken 5 seconds on since a lot of points were riding on it.

I did take down the first tournament we went first and second in, and in pretty dramatic fashion. Josh with about 1 minute left didn’t stall out and take his good but not winning score when the opps were making a NV game, he played it out and went for the win. He got a vul game on the last board and went into the lead, barely ahead of second. However, I managed to play a NV game in about 30 seconds to go ahead right at the end and win. This seemed like vindication from losing one earlier by 20 points at the very end.

Down by $1.70 but I still have faith. Wanna raise the stakes Josh?