2/2 Comments

Here are some comments from Memphis Mojo I'll include inline here, and reply to:

You can beat the experts if you deviate from the field in situations where your studies have shown you that better results can be obtained, on average, from doing something unusual compared to expert rote bidding.

And to carry this farther, unless you are one of the world's top players (and perhaps even then), shouldn't you gear your system to take adavantgage of this?

Example: play a weak 1NT (12 to 14)

Example: Don't play Jacoby 2NT over 1M. Use it as a natural bid to try and get the contract played from the other side with a different lead from the rest of the field.
Your thoughts?

Exactly - play something different that your studies show that works. For Karen & I it is 14 to 17 1NT (not all 17s and not all 14s), and 1M-2NT is the "Majority 2NT", about 10-14 with 3+ in M. Lots of good results for us, but certainly after opening 1NT with 14 we have been in 2NT down one when the field is in 1NT making.

"it's taken a long time for us just to get enough regular bridge blogs to have sufficient synergy."

For some reason, bridge players haven't "taken" to blogs and I'm not sure why.

When I started my blog, I decided to have both bridge and poker content. I like both games and it was my blog, afterall. At first I wrote mostly about bridge. Nobody commented, nobody linked to me at their blog, my traffic was low. When I started writing more about poker, my blog traffic increased, my number of comments increased, and poker bloggers linked to me.

I am not really sure why this is.

That was the case, but is now changing - we found the same thing when we moved our regional's tournament bulletin completely online: the bridge community tends to move slowly into the newer technology choices - but if you look at growth rates given by Fred G ("about 100K different people log in to BBO at least once per day, about 250K different people log in at least once per week, and about 500K different people log in at least once per year … All of the above numbers have been growing steadily throughout our 7-year history") and the new DoubleSqueeze site ("over 1k unique views" see http://www.doublesqueeze.com/) the general trend is clear.

For BridgeMatters the blog was a supposed to be a sideline, a place for odds & ends that didn't fit an article. However that has all changed as readership (or at least viewership - one doesn't know if viewers actually read something) has become focused on the blog - that's why the blog was moved to the top of the BridgeMatters home page, and content within the blog is now frequent - thanks everybody!

The best way for the BridgeMatters blog to improve would be to follow the approach of the big blogs and add more authors - different viewpoints, new ideas etc. - that is within the same blog itself (different posts), instead of the one blog-one author approach. Thus if Justin (http://squeezingthedummy.blogspot.com/) and Gavin (http://bridgepro.blogspot.com/) were to start blogging again (Gavin says he will), their best approach for max readership would be to have one blog, clever rock-bandish blog title, and each of them add to it. And thus if you want Just Sayin' (http://pokerandbridge.blogspot.com/) to be just sayin poker and photos (and I love the poker and photos btw), moving your bridge material to a group blog, or sending it to BridgeMatters, might work well.