Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Bridge Match 3 - Board 45

Board 45 - Dealer North - All Vul

Opponents convention card: Dutch Doubleton
Opponents playing strength: Good

My hand: 8 7 Q 3 A J 7 4 3 A 9 7 2

Partner opens 1 spade and East passes. My hand is good enough for a bid at the two level so I bust out 2 diamonds. Partner jumps to 4 clubs. I think this has to be a splinter setting diamonds as the trump suit. Ideally I should cuebid my cheapest control. I guess having Axxx of clubs is actually pretty good opposite partner's singleton, and passing the other suits should let partner know I can't help in those. So I bid 5 clubs. Partner retreats to 5 diamonds and I have no reason to go against his judgment.

West leads the T of hearts.
NORTH
A K 9 4 3
K J 5 4
K Q T 2
WEST
T
SOUTH
8 7
Q 3
A J 7 4 3
A 9 7 2
WestNorthEastSouth
1Pass2
Pass41Pass52
Pass5PassPass
Pass
1Splinter
2Control in clubs for diamonds

Well, 6 sure is cold as ice. I feel like partner was probably too timid. I'm almost guaranteed to have the A of diamonds on this auction (I don't have the A of hearts and I have 10+ points. I guess I could have AKQ of clubs and the J of spades which sure would suck.

Anyway, they play 2 rounds of hearts and no one ruffs so I am up. Making 6.
NORTH
A K 9 4 3
K J 5 4
K Q T 2
WEST
T 6 5
T 8
9 5
K Q T 5 4 3
EAST
Q J 2
A 9 7 6 2
8 6
J 8 6
SOUTH
8 7
Q 3
A J 7 4 3
A 9 7 2
5 of the tables bid and made 6 diamonds. The remaining 2 tables played 5 diamonds with one making 7 and one making 5. So we get 2 MPs. *sigh*


Jack doesn't like my 5 clubs bid. He wants me to bid 4 diamonds. He then doesn't like my pass of 5 diamonds and wants me to go to 6. You can't have it both ways, Jack. You think my hand is so bad I have to retreat to diamonds but good enough to push for slam after partner has screamed that we have 2 losers in the majors? I don't think so. Even if I had bid 4 diamonds he'd show a spade control, I'd show a club control, and then he signs off in 5 diamonds anyway. We're off 2 heart tricks on that auction! We should be in a 33 point hand where we can't make slam. That's why we cuebid!

There's a concept I've read that talks about how you should picture partner as having a 'perfect minimum' hand and see where that leads you. If Jack had done that he'd have imagined something like Axxx of diamonds, Axx of clubs, and the Q of hearts. 6 is cold with that hand! And you also have to keep in mind the fact that I thought my hand was good enough to cuebid so I really can't have a terrible minimum. 4 small diamonds with 9 points in clubs is not worth a slam going bid opposite a club splinter.

I thought maybe Jack plays 'fast arrival is bad' and therefore 4 diamonds would have been a slam try with extras in diamonds (while 5 diamonds would be signoff) but no. If I jump to 5 diamonds partner raises to 6. Yes, that's right... If I make a slam going bid Jack will sign off. If I show a minimum with no interest i slam he'll bid slam. (Looking at what he thinks the bids mean, 5 diamonds is 10-11 points, 4 diamonds is 10-13 points, and 5 clubs is 10+. So he does know that 5 diamonds should be bad and 5 clubs should be good. He just didn't put that information into action.

On some of the more recent hands we've got bad scores because I've made mistakes or have made 'interesting' bids. But this hand I really like what I did and we still get a terrible result because Jack is bad. Which is a little frustrating. Jack would be getting an earful from me on the bus ride home from the club!

Ranking after board 45/60: 12/16 with 47.46%

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Bridge Match 3 - Board 44

Board 44 - Dealer West - NS Vul

Opponents convention card: Jack
Opponents playing strength: Advanced

My hand: A T 8 6 4 Q 6 K Q J 6 3 2

East opens 1 club in third seat. It is alerted because it could be short. Given that I have a nice 6 card suit I'm betting it is! 2 clubs would show the majors, so I'm not sure I have a good bid? This would be a fine hand for RAPTOR! Maybe? I don't know if it can show clubs when they open a potentially short club. I think my best bet to get across my hand is to jump to 3 clubs. That should be preemptive I would think, and I do have a hand better than a preempt opener. I'm worried Jack will misinterpret this bid, but what can you do? He'll surely misinterpret any other option! 3 clubs gets passed out, so I guess not!

West leads the T of clubs.
NORTH
K J T 4
J
T 9 5 4 3 2
8 7
WEST
T
SOUTH
A
T 8 6 4
Q 6
K Q J 6 3 2
WestNorthEastSouth
PassPass113
PassPassPass
1Could be short

Interesting. I have a club loser, 4 heart losers, and 2 diamond losers. I have no entries to board so even if I could establish the long diamonds I have no way to reach them. I could ruff a heart, but not if they draw the trump off board which looks to be their plan. I can't even use dummy's K of spades since I have no way to get to it unless the opponents do it for me. I guess I need to give them that chance. I win the first club trick (why didn't East take his A?) cash the A of spades, and then run out a heart. 4-5-J-Q. East draws more trump and West shows out. So East started with Axxx in clubs. This hand is going swimmingly.

What can I do now? If I have to lead clubs I will lose 2 of them (East has A7 left to my K6). I guess I have plenty of exits... The rest of my hand! I can't even try to run East out of exits to make him lead a spade to me since I have no winners to cash! I decide to throw out a diamond since those are sure losers. (I might be able to score my T of hearts if I don't lead them.) East wins with the J and draws 1 round of trump for me. He then cashes the A of hearts and plays a low one.

The K and 9 are outstanding. So I need to make a guess here. If East has the 9 and I play the 8 I gain a trick. If East has the K and I play the T I gain a trick. If East has both then it doesn't matter which I play. If West has both it doesn't matter which I play. Do I have any reason to expect one of them to have one or the other of these? Well, East has already shown up with 11 points, and they have 23 left between them. But with 9 points left in diamonds and spades it isn't like I can play the points in either hand. They both should have some of the remaining points. If East had AKQ3 would he really run out the 3 on the 3rd round? I decide no. So I play the 8. West wins the 9. Then he cashes the K so it really didn't matter. West then returns a spade for me. I win it and all the trump in my hand. Down 2.
NORTH
K J T 4
J
T 9 5 4 3 2
8 7
WEST
9 8 6 2
K 9 7 5
A K 8 7
T
EAST
Q 7 5 3
A Q 3 2
J
A 9 5 4
SOUTH
A
T 8 6 4
Q 6
K Q J 6 3 2
Every other table played hearts from the other side, with 6 of them going down. The last table made 3 hearts which is still better than our vulnerable down 2. So we get another flat bottom. We're on quite the downward spiral!


Jack wants me to pass. He also wants me to play the T of hearts when I have that choice. I tried passing and the opponents end up bidding their way to 4 hearts where we put them down 2. Which would have been worth 8 MPs in the 7 way tie for first. Though I will point out that we get to the same score if partner opens his hand the way he should with a 2 diamond preempt!

Ranking after board 44/60: 11/16 with 48.21%

Monday, December 29, 2014

Bridge Match 3 - Board 43

Board 43 - Dealer South - None Vul

Opponents convention card: Jack
Opponents playing strength: Advanced

My hand: K 7 5 3 6 5 3 2 9 3 9 4 3

Well, no danger of me confusing Jack with my bids on this hand! West opens 1 spade, partner overcalls 2 clubs, and East makes a negative double. I do have 3 card support for partner, terrible as it is. Ok, I can do this. I bid 3 clubs. It gets passed around to East who doubles again, this time competitive. West pulls to 3 spades.

Partner leads the K of clubs.
NORTH
K
EAST
9
K J 8 7
K Q J T 4
T 7 6
SOUTH
K 7 5 3
6 5 3 2
9 3
9 4 3
WestNorthEastSouth
Pass
12Double13
PassPassDouble2Pass
3PassPassPass
1Negative
2Competitive

K-6-3-2. A-7-4-8. Partner should know now that declarer is out of clubs. He decides to make declarer ruff which is probably a good choice on this misfit of a hand. Declarer then draws some trump. 4-8-9-K.

I'm in, for probably the only time ever. I can throw declarer back in with a trump if I want, or I can lead something juicy for dummy. His diamonds are super solid so leading them can't hurt and I may be able to cut communication for declarer by doing so. Run it. 9-A-2-4. Declarer draws all my trump and still has a diamond left to lead to dummy, so he is up.

Making 4.
NORTH
8 2
A Q 4
7 6 2
A K Q J 5
WEST
A Q J T 6 4
T 9
A 8 5
8 2
EAST
9
K J 8 7
K Q J T 4
T 7 6
SOUTH
K 7 5 3
6 5 3 2
9 3
9 4 3
We are the only table to let them take 10 tricks in spades, so we get a flat bottom. 5 tables played in diamonds which is worth less being a minor and all, and the other 2 tables in spades took their A of h earts.


Jack doesn't like my club bid. I think it should be a weak to very weak bid. I'm a passed hand and can redouble with relevant values. We're not trying to find a game at this point, we're trying to make them play in the wrong spot. We made them play in the right spot, it turns out, but you can't always win. Taking away the 2 level rates to put them in the wrong spot more often than it puts them out of the wrong spot I would think.

Ranking after board 43/60: 10/16 with 49.34%

Sunday, December 28, 2014

Bridge Match 3 - Board 42

Board 42 - Dealer East - All Vul

Opponents convention card: Jack
Opponents playing strength: Advanced

My hand: A K 8 2 J 9 6 5 Q J T 9 4

I open 1 club in second seat. Partner responds 1 heart, Walsh. So if he has 4+ diamonds he also has a good hand. Hmm. I think 1NT here is probably a strong NT since we're playing weak NT? Man, that sure makes Walsh a bad convention to run... And I'm stuck for a bid here. Rebid clubs? I think I need to just bid 1NT and then if it gets treated as strong I'll need to fiddle with the card. Partner then jumps to 3 spades. So his hand should be really, really good? Why wouldn't he bid 2 spades? What use is eating up all the bidding room? I don't know. I don't know what he wants me to bid. So I try 3NT. He bids 4NT. I think this should be qualitative (and therefore I should pass) but I bet he thinks it's Blackwood. We haven't set a trump suit though. It would have to be clubs I would think? Anyway, I have 1 ace and we're playing 1430 so I can just bid 5 clubs. Maybe he'll pass. Nope. He jumps to 6NT. This should be interesting...

W can hardly contain himself as he leads the A of clubs.
NORTH
J T 8 7
A K Q J 5
A 2
6 5
WEST
A
SOUTH
A K
8 2
J 9 6 5
Q J T 9 4
WestNorthEastSouth
Pass1
Pass11Pass1NT
Pass32Pass3NT
Pass4NT3Pass54
Pass6NTPassPass
Pass
1Walsh
2Strong second suit
3Ace asking for hearts
41 or 4 aces

There's not a whole lot to say here... I have 7 tricks. I probably have an 8th in hearts. And that's pretty much it. Unless they cash the K of clubs too, in which case I get 3 more clubs. I could actually get out of this with down 1 if they guarantee setting me!

They try to do so, but the second club trick goes 2-6-3-9. Hmm. Why aren't they setting me? And if they aren't cashing out why are they setting up my tricks? I don't see a way to sneak 12 tricks. Even if the Q of spades drops I only get to 11. (1 club, 1 diamond, 5 hearts, 4 spades)

So I force them to win their club. West takes it and leads a heart. I take 2 hearts to check if they split 5-1. They don't, so I am up. Down one.
NORTH
J T 8 7
A K Q J 5
A 2
6 5
WEST
Q 9 4 2
9 3
Q 7 4
A K 8 2
EAST
6 5 3
T 7 6 4
K T 8 3
7 3
SOUTH
A K
8 2
J 9 6 5
Q J T 9 4
Unfortunately 6 of the tables played sane numbers of NT (2NT making, 3NT making 4 times, 3NT up 2). One pair tried for 4 hearts and went down one. So we get 1 MP.


Jack disagrees with my 1NT bid. Shocking, I know. He wants me to bid 2 clubs. Now, let's think about this... I didn't open a weak 1NT here because I had a 2-2-4-5 distribution. Most of the other hands where I'd want to rebid a weaker 1NT after Walsh are covered by just opening it in the first place. I was thinking of lying and opening 1NT anyway. Ok... I think the system is fine. I just screwed up here. I should have bid 2 clubs. We easily get to 3NT where I proceed to make 5 which would have been 13MPs instead of 1. Sorry Jack.

Ranking after board 42/60: 9/16 with 50.51%

Friday, December 26, 2014

Bridge Match 3 - Board 41

Board 41 - Dealer North - EW Vul

Opponents convention card: Jack
Opponents playing strength: Advanced

My hand: K 5 3 T 6 2 A Q T 9 5 A T

I open 1NT in 3rd seat. West immediately overcalls 2 spades which shows 5 spades, a 4+ card minor, and less than 4 hearts. I'm pretty sure that minor is clubs and I wonder if bidding 3 diamonds here, while insane, might not be the right call. I can't bring myself to do it.

Partner leads the Q of hearts.
NORTH
Q
EAST
Q T 9
8 5 3
8 6
Q 9 8 7 4
SOUTH
K 5 3
T 6 2
A Q T 9 5
A T
WestNorthEastSouth
PassPass1NT
21PassPassPass
1Multi Landy

Q-3-2-A. Declarer decides to draw trump. A-7-9-3. 2-6-T-K. I'm in. I can try drawing dummy's last trump but I don't know what he's ruffing. If it's a diamond I get in again anyway and can draw it later. I probably just want to pound a heart through for partner. T-4-7-5. I'm still in. One more heart. 6-9-J-8. That's 12 hearts and partner has the Q left. Partner decides to shift to a club. 5-4-A-3. I send one back. T-K-2-7. Declarer draws my last trump and then runs clubs since it turns out both partner and I are out.

I get my high diamond ruffed at the end. We could have held them to 2, but instead they make 3.
NORTH
7 6
K Q J 7
J 7 4 3 2
5 2
WEST
A J 8 4 2
A 9 4
K
K J 6 3
EAST
Q T 9
8 5 3
8 6
Q 9 8 7 4
SOUTH
K 5 3
T 6 2
A Q T 9 5
A T
My side made 3 or 4 diamonds at 4 of the tables. Guess that wasn't such an insane bid after all? They all likely opened 1 diamond though. One poor pair tried for 3NT and went down 3. The remaining 3 tables played in spades. 2 were in 2 spades making 3, one was in 3 spades making 2. So we get 3 MPs on the hand.


Jack disagrees with my pass over 2 spades. He wants me to bid 2NT! I guess I have a spade stopper, but if partner wanted me to take action he should have said something. Unilaterally trying to play 2NT on my 13 count feels crazy. He then disagrees with my signal on the opening lead. Jack wants me to encourage with Txx. This also feels crazy. Especially since I'd rather he played any other suit when he gets in! Finally Jack would have cashed the A of diamonds at the end before returning that last club. I figured partner had to have a reason for choosing clubs over diamonds and was actually shocked when he showed out. Oh well.

Ranking after board 41/60: 8/16 with 51.57%

Thursday, December 25, 2014

Bridge Match 3 - Board 40

Board 40 - Dealer West - None Vul

Opponents convention card: Majeure Cinquième
Opponents playing strength: Good

My hand: 9 6 J 3 J 9 4 J T 8 5 3 2

Parter opens 1 spade in 2nd seat. East overcalls 2 hearts. My hand is really, really bad. I do have 6 clubs, but I have no possible entry to my hand. My hand does not help partner out. So I pass. West jumps to 4 hearts. They shouldn't be able to make game after we opened, but then again I have a 3 count. Take it away, opponents!

I lead the 6 of spades.
WEST
A Q 5
Q 8 7 4 2
K 5 3
9 6
SOUTH
9 6
J 3
J 9 4
J T 8 5 3 2
WestNorthEastSouth

6-5-T-K. Well, looks like they have spades locked up! Declarer decides to draw some trump. A-3-2-K. 5-J-Q-8 of diamonds. Things are looking very good for the other team. They switch to clubs. 6-4-A-8. Cash a spade, cash a club, finesse diamonds. 6-4-K-A. Partner finally took a trick! Woo!

Partner cashes another diamond and then tries for a third but declarer ruffs. Dummy is up. Making 5.
NORTH
J T 7 3 2
K
A Q 8 7 2
Q 4
WEST
A Q 5
Q 8 7 4 2
K 5 3
9 6
EAST
K 8 4
A T 8 6 5
T 6
A K 7
SOUTH
9 6
J 3
J 9 4
J T 8 5 3 2
6 tables played 4 hearts making 5. 2 tables played 4 hearts making 6. So we get 9 MPs on this hand.


Jack disagrees with my spade lead because I lead low. I was thinking that we're playing Rusinow leads and therefore the 9 would show the T. But since it was partner's bid suit of course that wouldn't be the case. Oops. It sure didn't change the outcome of the hand though!

Ranking after board 40/60: 8/16 with 52.32%

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Some Cheap Steam Games

I've recently played a couple of games on Steam that I got pretty cheap. One was 16 cents, another was free as long as I traded one of the cards from the game away. Deal! I could have installed the games and left them running to earn the cards but it seemed like I should at least give them a try while they were generating cards. Maybe they'd be really good!

One of the games was Dead Bits, a first person shooter. To be honest it felt less like a game and more like a tech demo for the Oculus Rift. It did have three different weapons, a few different enemies, and some jumping to do. So it was really a game. Just not a terribly interesting one. It was pretty mediocre most of the time, and every now and then it would go into a 'bullet time from the Matrix' mode that sucked. It also doesn't seem like it actually has OR support, so it just felt like it would be cool to wander around in virtual reality wise. It isn't actually cool.

The other was Gun Monkeys. This is a one on one deathmatch game where you're jumping around trying to shoot the other monkey with your gun, or you're trying to pick up little cubes and carry them to your base to earn points. Get enough points from cubes or kills and you win. An interesting enough idea, but it failed on several levels. It played a lot like Awesomenauts, except you had no abilities instead of a huge variety of possible abilities. You only had one hero option instead of a dozen. And you couldn't play it single player against the AI. This was a particularly big deal when I tried to play because there were 3 people total logged into the North American servers. Two other people playing against each other and me, sitting around wishing I could play. I did eventually find an opponent after waiting around for a while. Killing each other seemed almost impossible with the way the guns fired so I just collected orbs. I was better at collecting orbs than the other guy so I won.

Really, both games were not very good. But they both came with Steam cards and I'm not unhappy to have tried them out. I won't be playing either one again. I have other games of those genres that eclipse these ones.

Hmm... I wonder if that's a real problem with games these days. There are so many games to play now, so a game has to have some interesting hook to justify spending time on it. A good story, or being a good implementation of a genre, or a good community. Just being mediocre and existing isn't good enough anymore. Not like it was when I was a kid... I played 'Where In Time Is Carmen Sandiego?' not because it was a good game, but because it was the one new game in the house. Novelty and convenience were big selling points. Now? With the number of options that are out there? It has to do _something_ special. Dead Bits and Gun Monkeys had Steam cards as the something special, but I have all those earned and the games themselves don't have anything else special to me.

Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Done With Blood Bowl?

Lately I've been finding myself getting more and more frustrated with playing Blood Bowl on FumBBL. Scheduling league games has always been a little tricky but lately it's felt a lot like pulling teeth. I mean, I'm at my computer for 16 hours a day and can play at any point in time when I'm awake. You'd think it would be easy to get the other person to pick a time and stick with it. But no, people won't pick a time. Or if they do they won't show up on time. And I have problems when I want to be asleep during the evenings because two of my three leagues use the evening as the primary time to play.

It's also getting pretty old having people complain about having to play me. Apparently I lucked into an overpowered race in my primary league or something, but there's no end of people complaining about it to me. It's one thing to have people complain about their dice when they've been significantly above expected value. It's another to have people not want to play me at all, and not being quiet about it. My opponent today was complaining about how skilled my bull centaurs are. I don't know what he wanted me to do about it? Retire my good players to make things more even?

I do think the league has an issue with teams spiraling out of control on the power curve compared to new teams. And as people leave the league new people have to come in with fresh teams. Fresh teams with no boost in power in any way. And often without a good choice of what team they can play because the league has weird racial restrictions. My first team in the league had to be a 7 AV team! Those Amazons got destroyed and that let me draft the race I wanted from the small pool of options the next time around. A Chaos Dwarf team had just quit, so that's what I went with. Anyway, the league has a salary cap to ostensibly keep powerful teams down but if anything it just serves to create obscene teams. I could cut down to 1430 TV pretty easily by fielding a team with one brutal killer, one awesome ball carrier, and rookies the rest of the way. That team would really ruin new teams! They wouldn't get large inducements and I'd skill up my blockers in a few games.

So maybe the people complaining really do just want my whole team to retire. There's really no other option to give new teams a good chance against my team regardless of what TV I'm forced to cut to.

Anyway... If most of the people in the league don't want to play with me, and if I'm getting annoyed by scheduling concerns, maybe I just shouldn't play anymore. This season is almost over so I'll stick it out to try to win a third championship in a row, but after that I think I'm done. There are plenty of other games for me to play, after all, that don't involve getting yelled at or screwing with my sleep schedule.

Monday, December 22, 2014

Bridge Match 3 - Board 39

Board 39 - Dealer South - All Vul

Opponents convention card: Majeure Cinquième
Opponents playing strength: Good

My hand: J T 2 Q T 9 8 4 Q 7 K 5 2

I get to kick things off with a pass. West bids 1 spade which then gets passed around to me. My team is likely to have more points, but only by a little, and we don't know if we have a fit or not. We don't know if they do either. So leaving them in 1 spade might be the optimal thing to do, especially red on red. I kinda want to double here to give partner the option of converting to penalty if he has 4 or 5 spades but I doubt Jack has that ability and I worry we'll end up playing 4 diamonds in a 3-2 fit or something silly like that. But I want to bid! I feel like 2 hearts should show more hearts than this... Eh, double is probably right with a real partner so I'll give Jack the benefit of the doubt. I double, West bids 2 diamonds, and everyone passes to me again. Ok, well, we got them up a level and into West's second suit. Take it away!

Partner leads the 2 of diamonds.
NORTH
2
EAST
9
J 7 3
A 6 3
9 8 7 6 4 3
SOUTH
J T 2
Q T 9 8 4
Q 7
K 5 2
WestNorthEastSouth
Pass
1PassPassDouble
2PassPassPass

Well, looks like partner has 4 spades. And we're drawing trump so he can score them without just having them ruffed. I like it. 2-3-Q-K. Declarer also wants to draw trump. T-5-6-7. Then he switches to spades. K-3-9-2. 4-5-A of diamonds-T. And now a low club off of dummy. 3-2-T-J. Partner decides clubs is as good a suit as any to play. Q-4-5-A. Partner and declarer are now both out of clubs. Partner played low on the first spade trick so he should have an odd number of spades. This means declarer has 6 spades and partner has 3. Declarer is probably 6-1-5-1.

Anyway, declarer now draws some more trump. I have some low hearts to spare! J-4-6 of clubs-4 of hearts. If declarer was 6-1-5-1 he has all the remaining spades and diamonds after he plays the A of spades, which he does. But then he plays a low spade to partner's Q. I guess partner had 4 spades after all. I pitch my extraneous K of clubs and have no more decisions to make. All my hearts are equal since I can cover dummy's J with my Q.

Partner cashes a couple of tricks and then declarer is up. I suspect he had a play to get an extra trick by not cashing his A of hearts. Oh well. They make 3.
NORTH
Q 8 5 3
A 6 5
9 5 4 2
Q J
WEST
A K 7 6 4
K 2
K J T 8
A T
EAST
9
J 7 3
A 6 3
9 8 7 6 4 3
SOUTH
J T 2
Q T 9 8 4
Q 7
K 5 2
Two West's went down 1 in 3 diamonds. Two West's made 3 diamonds. A West made 2 spades up 1. One West made 1 spade doubled just in. And one North went down 1 in 2 hearts. Pushing them out of spades into diamonds was therefore with 3 MPs! Unfortunately that means we only get 6 MPs on the hand. And if we could have held them to 2 diamonds? That would have been 10 MPs. *sigh*


Jack disagrees with my double because it's supposed to be for takeout. He wants me to bid 2 hearts instead. I feel like that's probably a disaster too often to be a good play. And I can pull to hearts after I double if partner bids a minor. This only really works because I'm already a passed hand. But it does work. And the double isn't really takeout anyway. I replayed the hand and partner couldn't have stopped the heart trick at the end because he was nicely endplayed by declarer. And there was never a time when he could have played differently I don't think.

Ranking after board 39/60: 7/16 with 52.26%

Sunday, December 21, 2014

Bridge Match 3 - Board 38

Board 38 - Dealer East - EW Vul

Opponents convention card: Majeure Cinquième
Opponents playing strength: Good

My hand: A T A K T 3 A T 7 K 9 8 2

I open 1 club with my moose of a hand. West jumps to 4 spades and it gets passed back to me. Way to put me to test! I have no idea what the right spot might be. 6 hearts? 7NT? 4 spades doubled? It really depends on what partner has and I have no real way of getting that info out of him. It's white on red so doubling is probably pretty good. I wonder if partner will take it as penalty or constructive or reopening. Partner pulls to 5 hearts and I gladly raise to 6.

East leads the 8 of spades.
NORTH
6 3
J 9 7 6 2
K Q 3
5 4 3
EAST
8
SOUTH
A T
A K T 3
A T 7
K 9 8 2
WestNorthEastSouth
Pass1
4PassPassDouble
Pass5Pass6
PassPassPass

Turns out Jack took my double as negative showing 4 hearts and 15+ points so I may not have had a good raise to 6? It's sure looking sketchy! I have a spade loser and all kinds of problems in clubs... I really think 4 spades doubled was a better place to be but I guess I can see why partner would pull? Anyway, there's not really going to be much to this hand I don't think. Win the ace of spades, diamond to board, finesse East for the Q of hearts, make them pitch a bunch on hearts and then hope I can get a club trick at the end for down 2.

I misplay and don't get my club. I needed to keep one trump in each hand so that when I threw West in with a spade he'd have to lead a club eventually or give me a ruff and sluff. Oh well.

Down 3 is good bridge?
NORTH
6 3
J 9 7 6 2
K Q 3
5 4 3
WEST
K Q J 8 7 5 4
4
8 6 4
A J
EAST
8 2
Q 8 5
J 9 5 2
Q T 7 6
SOUTH
A T
A K T 3
A T 7
K 9 8 2
That extra trick was completely irrelevant as we have a flat bottom with either score. Lots of people took 9 or 10 tricks in hearts. Others took 7 or 8 in spades. Only one contract made as one pair got to play 4 hearts. None of the spade contracts were doubled so if partner had passed my double we get a top. I don't know if he should pass my double, to be fair, but I think 543 of clubs is such a turnoff that I think I'd pass. But only if double actually is constructive and not negative.


Jack disagrees with my double and thinks I should have passed. Even though he thought my double showed 15+ points, exactly 4 hearts, 4+ clubs, and 4+ diamonds... I mean, I guess I only have 3 diamonds, but that hand construction is awfully narrow there Jack. Especially since I opened a club and not a diamond so I don't have the 1-4-4-4 or 0-4-5-4 distributions. He then disagrees with my 6 hearts bid. And if I know Jack thinks my double is takeout I agree. But if it's just showing cards? Any hand with few spades and many hearts is extra good with my hand. But Jack claims his bid only showed 3 hearts (how he could have 3 hearts and not prefer 5 clubs or 4 spades doubled is beyond me). He then disagrees with my finesse in hearts. I know, I know... 8 ever, 9 never. But I figured with West jumping to 4 spades he was less likely to have 3+ hearts and by extension less likely to have the Q then normal. He then doesn't like my drawing the last round of trump, which I actually agree with. I decided I should change what he thinks about a double of 4 spades in our convention card but it turns out all the options only have radio buttons up to 4 hearts so I have no way of modifying what that double meant.

Ranking after board 38/60: 7/16 with 52.26%

Friday, December 19, 2014

Back to Hearthstone

I somehow started watching Day[9]'s videos again and he's been playing a lot of Hearthstone lately. A new set came out and his constructed deck looked pretty fun so I figured I'd boot that game up again and take it for a spin. I can't actually play constructed since I have no cards but I had enough gold on hand to run a draft.

I started off as a paladin for my first draft. I took a lot of expensive things, but I had a decent amount of cheap stuff too. I think I was pretty well set up to win the late game. I just couldn't get there, because I didn't have any creatures with taunt in my deck. Not a single one. And it turns out when you're on the back foot it would be nice to control your opponent's attacks at least some of the time. To protect yourself, or to protect your creatures for a turn so you can make favourable trades for once. I ended up getting 3 wins before I picked up my 3rd loss which seemed like it was a pretty decent result for someone who really doesn't know what any of the cards are and who forgot how important an ability was. I had enough gold from the prizes and what I had on hand to draft again...

This time I was a warrior, and I kept seeing a card that looked really sweet. Execute, which kills off an injured enemy. My last draft had featured tons of injured enemies since paladins can make free 1/1 creatures and people kept getting to choose how fights went so they often ended up with partially injured dudes. I also went all in on taunt, pretty much taking every taunt card I could see. It turns out my deck was really bad at partially injuring enemies and my 4 executes often got stuck in my hand. And it turns out with that much taunt the opponents really get to choose their fights most of the time anyway. They couldn't punch me in the face, but punching me in the face is often the wrong thing to do anyway. Taunt creatures pay something from their power budget to get taunt I'm sure, and I was wasting that power by having so much of it. I couldn't scrounge up a single win here, going 0-3. And now I didn't have enough gold to draft again.

This was part of my problem with both SolForge and Hearthstone back when I was giving them both a try. I wanted to draft but the game was gating how often I could play the way I wanted to play. I could pay them money to get around it but I have a pretty firm stance against microtransactions. I'll often pay some money into a game because I feel like I should pay something for the game, but if I let myself spend money to keep drafting over and over I'd end up losing track of things and spending way too much money. The way I play games makes me a prime microtransaction whale and I need to do what I can to keep away from that.

Hearthstone does have a system of quests to earn gold, and I still had one of those open, so I decided to go play some ranked constructed games to try to pick up some wins. I assumed it would be hard slogging since I have no cards and don't know what my opponent could be doing to me, but that worry was actually unfounded. It turns out anyone who has a lot of cards or a lot of knowledge about the game has leveled up beyond the starting rank! When your opponents don't have a handle on strategic concepts like card advantage it's really easy to win even when you don't know any of the details. I was playing a priest deck with 2 copies of a 1 drop creature that lets you draw a card every time you heal something. The priest ability they can use is a heal. I had some other cards that healed too. But people kept attacking other things instead of killing off my piddly 1 power creature. I guess it didn't seem very threatening to their life total, but it was drawing me tons of cards. So I was able to do my quests and got barely enough gold for one more draft. I was tired, so I put that draft off until today.

This time I was drafting a hunter deck. The hunter special ability is to dome your opponent for 2 damage. You start with 30 life and it does take 2 mana to use it so it felt like a really weak ability. I'm a control player at heart... I want to make favourable trades, eek out card advantage, and then win with whatever is lying around. But the hunter ability really doesn't synergize with that at all, so I decided to try to build an aggressive deck, do some early damage, and hope I could dome my opponent out to finish the game after my cheap dudes got outclassed by my opponents. I ended up drafting 6 1-drops and mostly other cheap cards. I put a priority on drafting weapons with the idea being I'd clear a path for my little dudes by burning my own life total to kill their defenders. And then I took a few bigger things because sometimes the draft offers you a choice between 3 expensive cards.

Now, I don't have a very large sample size here, but I did play 13 games with the deck and it turns out rushing your opponent is a really fantastic idea. One of the games I won on turn 7 which seems really out of line! I did get very lucky in some of the games. I'd lost control of the board, and would die in one turn, but then I'd draw the one card that would win me the game instead. I had one card that gave me a 1/1 haste creature for every creature my opponent controller that filled this role multiple times. I actually found myself trying to neutralize my opponent's creatures without killing them in order to leave him with more dudes in play. 3 of my 1 drops were 1/1 creatures that give me a random beast when they die. RANDOM! A couple times it gave me a creature that gave my other beasts one extra power. Combine that with the release the hounds card and multiple times I'd swing in with 5+ 2 power haste creatures. To the dome!

I started off 7-0 and then made a really bad mistake. I hit the button to play another game and then got distracted talking about Agricola on Facebook. So my opponent in that game had to wait for my timer to expire each turn, but they got a free win so they might have been ok with it. Oops. Then I lost my next game to a shaman deck that had enough cheap stuff (especially a totem that gave 2 of his other totems +2 power) to trade off with my dorks. Now I was really beating myself up for taking a stupid loss. One more and I was toast. But I left the mental beatings for between games and pulled off 5 more wins to get the maximum 12. Woo! I have to imagine going back to back drafts with 0 wins then 12 wins is a pretty rare occurrence! And now I have enough gold to draft a couple more times. Huzzah!

I don't know if the super aggro hunter deck is a thing that can happen frequently or if I just got lucky over and over again in the draft and the games. But I'm probably going to try it again. Here are some cards that seemed especially good to me this time around...

4/3 for 4 that silences something when it comes into play. Being able to silence a creature with taunt is a really big deal when you're just trying to race the opponent. My army of 1/1s and 3/2s was in really trouble against a 3/6 taunt creature if I couldn't silence it.

4/4 for 5 that gets +1/+1 for every creature you control when you play him. This guy was a monster! Playing so many 1 and 2 drops meant I would frequently have multiple creatures in play. I'd say he averaged being a 7/7, which was really good at closing out a game.

Freezing trap. Wow, was freezing trap ever good. It's a 2 cost secret (card you play face down and then reveal it when a certain condition is met) that bounced the first creature to attack and made it cost extra mana to replay. I took it mostly because I had another card that cared about secrets, but it was clutch in several games. The key is it triggers on any attack, not any attack against your hero. So it would save one of my creatures! And adding an extra cost to the creature meant it rarely saw play again with how fast the games were ending. My opponent couldn't play all their cards most of the time anyway, so bouncing a creature was a lot like killing it. I had to be careful to only play it when I thought I wouldn't get attacked by a creature with a strong comes into play ability.

Weapons. Weapons were even better than I thought they would be and I took 3 of them as it was. I took them mostly so I could kill creatures but several times I would just use them to dome my opponent. There was a 2 drop weapon that gave one of my dudes +1 power and gave my hero 2 attack twice. That thing was fantastic. Play a 1 drop, play a 2 drop, play a 1 drop and the weapon and kill the blocker with my hero was such a great feeling.

Having 1 drops that did something useful was nice. The 1/1 that gave me a random beast when it died was great. Then I had a couple copies of a 1/2 that got +1/+1 when I played a creature that did something when they died. Like, say, the 1/1 above. I also had a 2/1 that gave me a spare part when it died. Spare parts seemed pretty bad, but one time I got to give a huge dude 1 extra toughness and pull it just out of range of being killed, and that won me that game I think.

There was a spell that killed a random creature my opponent controlled. I didn't think it was going to be very good because it would just hit a 1/1 or something but it turned out my opponents never had small creatures in play for very long. I always had something for them to trade with. This meant the kill spell would often kill his one big dude and was awesome. I don't know that you want a lot of them though? Or maybe you do and assert you just lose the shaman match?

Anyway... Hearthstone is back in my game rotation. For now.

Thursday, December 18, 2014

Steam Auction Conclusion

The Steam winter auction thing ended this morning. They ended up putting gems back in the marketplace, and they inflated way above what I thought they were worth based on building packs or buying Civ. The end price was $1.35 to buy a bag of gems (or $1.19 to sell one after Steam took their share). I was thinking gems would be worth more like 40 cents, so that's a pretty substantial price increase.

The first couple auctions of Civ actually went for a little over 100000 gems. Which means a couple people ended up paying between $119 and $135 for a game currently on sale for 40% off ($30). I actually can't comprehend how that would happen. I guess those people just drastically underestimated where the market would settle on gems. When gems were put back into the marketplace they debuted around 80 cents and stayed there for about a day before spiking up to 90 cents. And then a day after that they were up to almost $1.50 for a brief period of time.

I'm just estimating here based on the little graph but it seems like Steam pocketed around $115k in brokerage fees over the course of the event. Sthenno was certainly right that Steam was going to be the ones making out like bandits. But if you got in at the 80 cent mark and were confident enough you could have earned almost 50% profit even after paying Steam's cut.

Civ never went lower than 50k gems that I saw, which means all 100 copies went for way more than they were worth. Those people could have liquidated those gems for cash and bought the game from Steam and made extra money for themselves in the process. And while the first few people got snookered by the price ramping up (especially since if the marketplace entry hadn't come back for gems I doubt it would have gone up in value nearly as much as it did because it would have been more difficult for people to buy and sell) I can't understand the people who were stilling winning auctions for the last half of the event when the gems were already obviously worth more than a dollar! It doesn't bode well for these people's Civs...

That isn't to say there weren't deals to be had if you looked around. Actually going through the list of games was a huge undertaking. I never actually looked at them all. But I did find one game on my wishlist that normally sells for $44 and it was being auctioned off for less than 8k gems. Which means that game was going for $9-$10 when it's normally $44. That's a good deal, even if you expect it to go on sale for a pretty significant discount during the sale. It actually did go on sale for 66% off, which puts it at $15. So if you were going to buy that game you were better off buying gems and bidding on the auction than you would have been buying it the normal way. I decided to pick it up and bought the gems to make up the difference between what I got from disenchanting stuff and what I thought it would cost. I ended up winning it for 6600 gems, which put it at a little under $9. Huzzah!

The end result of the auction for me is I put $10 into my Steam wallet and now I have $21.52 and a $44 (or $15) game. I think Steam deleted all the packs I'd snuck from the gem exploit incident that I hadn't already opened or sold so I wasn't up as much as I thought I would be. But still... Not too bad at all.

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Final Fantasy II: More Progress

Yesterday I finally felt up to using a controller and set about continuing on in my FFII learning run. I leveled my unarmed skill to max and proceeded to actually beat the game without leveling my health very high at all. I did wipe a couple times though. Anyway, here's my current new thoughts...

Most enemies simply couldn't hurt me, but once enemies could hit me they did a ton of damage. Like, in the 200-600 damage range when I had 735 max health. Getting ambushed by 2 of those guys meant I could be dead before taking an action, and that happened once. The final dungeon had some guys who cast level 16 drain or poison spells which were hitting for enough to also kill me in 2 hits if they rolled high. My solution this time was actually to use the 4th character who joins the party with 1053 max health. I was able to get his evasion chance up to 99% and stuck him in the front row to reduce the odds of the enemies killing off Firion in one round. Firion was attacking with a blood sword and healing to full every action so they needed to burst him down in one round, and that got a lot less likely when the enemies could hit Leon instead. Anyway, the way I see it there are 3 solutions to this problem. I can level my max health higher (around 1500 should be safe), or I can level my evasion chances up a little more to make it so the enemies can't hit me at all, though I could still be in trouble against the casters. Or I can make more use of the 4th character. The second to last dungeon was where I started getting killed, but I could easily have stuck Rickard in the front row and used his ~570 health to absorb some of the punishment.

I could run from lots of enemies all the way through the end of the game. For the most part the things I couldn't run from were undead, slimes, wererats, or giants. Undead came in groups of up to 8, and were all immune to toad. So I need to take a lot of time punching them down slowly or I need to level a damage spell. Level 10 fire was actually able to kill all of them but the two highest level ones, and even there they'd come with a bunch of dorks so I still wanted to open with fire. Slimes are also immune to toad and they also have stupid high armour. I couldn't punch them for damage, though I did forget to take my shield off to see if I could hurt them with full on punching. Fire also took care of them. The rats and giants were handled by toad. I think there was only one enemy that wasn't handled by fire or toad, and I could just punch that one.

I timed out how long it took to level punching from 1 to 16. It took 36 minutes, and then 34 minutes, and both times I made big mistakes. I'm pretty sure 30 minutes to max a weapon skill is where I'm going to end up. Spells take longer because there's an extra menu command to move down, and it's 4 buttons instead of 3 per skill, and because of the weirdness where I didn't seem to be able to level all in one fight. Probably more like 40-45 minutes for a spell. So I guess the question is if fire saves 40 minutes of punching in random encounters over the rest of the game. Well, I don't need to send it all the way level 16. 10 did most of what I wanted this time. There's also the question on if I need to level fists and swords. Maybe if I level fire and swords instead I can burn down the bosses before I get a blood sword. Even if it takes two rounds to kill every boss, if it saves 30 minutes that has to be good. Especially since I had to punch a few of them multiple times anyway.

I found a lot of steps in the walkthrough I was using that could be skipped. Lots of 'go talk to this person' when I could just go straight to the dungeon. I have a little more of that to test at the start of the game too.

I definitely need to get the second blood sword, but I think it will be for Leon, not so Firion can dual wield them. I also want two life spells, so they can each bring the other back to life in combat. I don't need osmose at all. I'd rather buy extra elixirs if I need more mana. (In my real play I ran into huge mana problems, but that's because I wasn't running from every fight!)

I'm not sure if I need to grind up the ribbon/aegis shield from the toad spell or not. I did get hit with some instant death attacks in random encounters that ambushed me. They all missed because of the ribbon. Would they have missed from my spell resistance? Not sure. But it's nice when I'm using 2 people to have cheesed up one copy so I can just open the chest in the final dungeon to suit up the second guy. I may even want to just get a second ribbon from the toad puzzle so Leon can use it the whole time I have him... I guess the big thing is I want a way to kill many enemies that aren't weak to fire anyway, and toad hooks me up with both the ribbons and the AE kill spell.

I think for my next run I'm going to try dropping punching again, maxing out fire instead, and just grinding health with Mindu. I'm going to also look up some rank numbers for enemies near the start of the game to see if I can find a better place to grind than right in front of the first town.

Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Bridge Match 3 - Board 37

Board 37 - Dealer North - NS Vul

Opponents convention card: Majeure Cinquième
Opponents playing strength: Good

My hand: J 9 7 5 K 6 3 K 9 J T 6 3

West opens 1NT in 4th chair. East bids 2NT which is a transfer to diamonds. West completes the transfer and that is that.

Partner leads the K of clubs.
NORTH
K
EAST
Q 4 2
Q J 7
Q J T 6 4 2
2
SOUTH
J 9 7 5
K 6 3
K 9
J T 6 3
WestNorthEastSouth
PassPassPass
1NTPass2NT1Pass
32PassPassPass
1Transfer to diamonds
2No support

K-2-6-4. Partner continues clubs despite dummy having none left. A-2 of diamonds-3-5. Declarer then decides to draw trump. T-9-8-3. 4-K-A-5. Now a spade to board. 3-8-Q-7. And now draw the last trump. J-J of clubs-5 of hearts-7. Back to spades. 2-5-A-6. K-2 of hearts-4-9. Ruff a club, then a heart to his T finessing me out of my king. But then he has to give it to me at the end anyway. Making 5.
NORTH
8 6
9 8 4 2
7 5 3
A K Q 8
WEST
A K T 3
A T 5
A 8
9 7 5 4
EAST
Q 4 2
Q J 7
Q J T 6 4 2
2
SOUTH
J 9 7 5
K 6 3
K 9
J T 6 3
We actually get a (tied) top board on this one, reversing our terrible trend of bottoming out. 4 tables bid 3NT and made (one made 6!) and one table actually made it to 6 diamonds and made 6. The remaining tables played 3 diamonds with one table making 5 and one making 6. So declarer pitching badly in hearts and not taking the spade finesse cost him a couple MPs. I'll take it!


Jack disagrees with my spade signal. He wants me to play high to signal event. I played the 7 from J975! I thought I was playing high! I guess since he'd played the 8 already my 7 and 9 were equivalent so I should have used the 9, but I know he'd be yelling at me if the 8 was outstanding even if it would later cost us a trick to lose a potentially high card in the 9.

Ranking after board 37/60: 5/16 with 53.67%

Monday, December 15, 2014

Final Fantasy II: Raising Max Health

My left hand/arm has gotten worse the last few days so I haven't actually been able to put any more actual work in on routing a Final Fantasy II speedrun. But I have been doing a lot of thinking about it. I'm trying to figure out how I really want to go about raising my maximum health. I still don't know how high I want it to go, but the way I see it there are 4 possible ways to go about it.

The first is the organic method. If I need more maximum health I could just fight things a little weaker than that and level up my health as they hit me. Easy! And entirely unreasonable. I'm not convinced the difficulty gradients in the game are such that this would even be plausible on a normal run. Even if it could work it would be slow! I want to run from all the fights if I can, and kill all the enemies in one round if I can't. And since I'll have max evasion the enemies won't get a turn.

The second is to beat myself up. It's certainly possible that every fight I can't run from I could first hit myself for half my health before taking a round to kill the enemies. The tricky part is keeping a way to hurt myself for enough to get a health up without risking death, even after I significantly increase my maximum health. My damage is never going to get any better (or worse) so unless I'm in a position where punching myself is in that right window I'll need a different source of damage too. Like leveling up a fire spell or something, but that will add even more time.

Next up is to stay in the early game with Windu longer. He has the swap spell, and the life spell, so he has a safe way to knock me low (kill me then use life) and then as long as I manipulate our health totals to be different I can swap on every fight to get a health up every other fight. This has the advantage of also giving chances at mana ups. It has the disadvantage that Windu doesn't stick around for terrible long and all the fights he is around for can be run from. So while I could level up health in the first couple dungeons I'm not sure it would be terribly fast. I can certainly just stick around the starting town too and grind health, like I grind weapon skills and evasion and the like. The problem is that while I can guarantee I get max weapon skill in 16 fights I'm going to need way, way more fights than that to grind health really high.

The fourth option is to grind some cash, run to Mysidia, and buy my own swap spell. Then I can do the above option over the course of the entire game, swapping on every fight I can't run from. Swap actually levels the health/mana of two characters at the same time if they started with comparable health/mana levels. Which I guess opens up the option of using two characters, not just one character, for at least part of the game. I was really liking the idea of only having to input one command each fight but if I need to grind health over a long period of time then it should be faster to input two commands each round instead of grinding around the starting town. And if I'm using toad to kill enemies, actually, then having my fastest person use swap and my slower person killing everything with toad I'll still end a fight in one round and get a chance at a health/mana up. Also, getting to Mysidia early is non-trivial and probably requires grinding health in some other way first.

So it's going to come down to how much health I need, and how many fights I won't be able to run from later on. If I can get by with just a couple hundred then I should just use Mindu. Otherwise I probably want to punch myself a little at the very start and then head to Mysidia and run a 2 person party. Maria can have toad and maybe a damage spell too?

Sunday, December 14, 2014

Bridge Match 3 - Board 36

Board 36 - Dealer West - All Vul

Opponents convention card: Standard American Yellow Card
Opponents playing strength: Advanced

My hand: 9 6 3 2 7 4 Q T 5 4 3 T 4

Partner opens 1 heart and East doubles. My hand is garbage, so I pass. West bids 2 clubs, partner bids 2 diamonds, and East bids 3 clubs. That diamond bid changes things a little. Queen fifth is a real thing when partner is willing to bid diamonds on his own. So I bid 3 diamonds. West bids 3 no trump and partner thinks for a while and decides to bid 4 diamonds. This feels like it has to be wrong... If our diamonds are as solid as they need to be to play 4 diamonds vulnerable then we should be able to destroy 3 no trump. East and I pass and West goes really crazy and bids 5 clubs. Partner doubles and that's that.

Partner leads the A of diamonds.
NORTH
A
EAST
A K J T 7
K 8
7 2
A K J 5
SOUTH
9 6 3 2
7 4
Q T 5 4 3
T 4
WestNorthEastSouth
Pass1DoublePass
2233
3NT4PassPass
5Double1PassPass
Pass
1Penalty

With dummy having 2 diamonds I guess I need to hope partner made all those bids with AKxx. He tries to cash the K but West ruffs in. Now they draw trump. 6-3-J-4. 5-T-Q-9 of diamonds. Ok, so West started with 6 clubs and 1 diamond. And with that spade suit on board being 5 sure tricks we have no hope here. Unless West attacks hearts, I guess, which he does. 3-A-8-4. No, we still have no hope. Dummy is pretty much up here. Declarer cashes 2 spades, partner drops the Q, and they are up. Making 5, doubled.
NORTH
Q 8
A Q 6 5 2
A K J 9 8
3
WEST
5 4
J T 9 3
6
Q 9 8 7 6 2
EAST
A K J T 7
K 8
7 2
A K J 5
SOUTH
9 6 3 2
7 4
Q T 5 4 3
T 4
This result is a flat bottom. Other results were 5 clubs making 6, 5 clubs making 5 (x3), 2 spades making 6, 3 spades making 6, and our side going down one in 4 diamonds doubled.


Jack disagrees with my 3 diamond bid because it promises 6 to 9 fit points. In what world does that make sense? I passed over 1 heart doubled! He then gets bitter at my signal in diamonds on the first trick. Yeah, fair. And then I missignaled in hearts too, after it was obvious the enemies were taking all the tricks. I don't care. And then I missignaled in spades. Still don't care. And for the record, if partner passes the 3NT East passes as well. And we get to take 6 tricks off the top for a clear top board. (Well, actually not, because partner doesn't cash diamonds. Instead he cashes one diamond, doesn't think the 5 of diamonds is high, and then leads his stiff club giving them 11 tricks.) Oh, and that double of 5 clubs? Possibly the worst bid of this hand. There is NOTHING about partner's hand that should make him think we have 3 tricks. I actually think he should bid 5 diamonds (if he isn't willing to let them play 3NT he shouldn't let them play 5 clubs either) but passing and giving me the decision would also be a reasonable thing to do. But doubling has to indicate that partner thinks 5 clubs doubled is a better place then 5 diamonds doubled and there's no reason for him to think that with his hand.

Ranking after board 36/60: 8/16 with 52.58%

Friday, December 12, 2014

Steam's Solution

I woke up to find Steam had gone and implemented their fix to the problem that occurred when people duped up billions of event gems. They basically undid everything except pack creations. They accomplished this by deleting all gems, then giving people gems for everything they'd disenchanted yesterday, then refunding every purchase of gems through the marketplace. All gems, no matter what you ended up doing with them. They didn't say what they did about the people who did the duping, but that's not terribly surprising.

This means I was refunded the entirety of my gem purchase, and got to keep the 67 packs I generated through the make a pack feature. Which basically means Steam's exploitable event launch has earned me a free copy of Final Fantasy XIII-2. I'll take it!

But now, what about the event itself? What are gems actually worth? Well, there are already some pretty high bids up in the silent auction and there's still over two days before the first auction round ends. Have people bid close to the final bids now or are people saving up their bids to try to snipe in right before the auction round procs? For now I'm going to assume the winning bids are going to end up at 150% of their current bids. This gives room for the bids to go up without having them get too out of hand? I actually think this is probably lowballing if anything actually.

Take Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth, which is one of the games that I'd probably bid on if I had tons of gems. The current bid is 70100 gems. 50% more is 105150. Call it an even 100k. The game would cost $50 to buy, though presumably it will go on sale during the winter sale for at least 20% off. So call it $40. So to break even on value I'd want to get 2500 gems per dollar. This auction thing is variable with no guarantee you'd even get the game you want so you'd really want to do better than break even to make it worth looking at. So it's more like I want to get 3500 gems per dollar.

What about the escape hatch of buying packs? Well, I'm estimating a card at being worth 10 cents and a pack costing 750 gems. So I could turn those 3500 gems into $1.40.

Hold the phone. The fallback is better than the auction. If I could buy 3500 gems for a dollar I'd be better off buying packs, not buying Civ for 100k gems.

Ok, so that means the current bids, or at least the one on Civ, is actually about where it needs to be. If I remove that 50% more multiplier the auction is 3500 gems being worth $1.50 while buying packs would be worth $1.40. Still very close in value. Getting Civ has the advantage of not taking any extra time. Getting the packs has the advantage that I can build my own badges or I can do a lot of research to find a better card value to pack cost ratio. So Civ is really probably too expensive as it is.

Oh, and you can't buy gems.

Yeah, they disabled putting gems on the marketplace. Maybe they didn't actually fix the exploit and just decided to pour cement on the cellar door rather than put a lock on it. Your only way to get gems is to disenchant stuff. You can buy stuff on the marketplace and then disenchant them as a roundabout way of making gems. And using the pack generation option we know breaking even will sit at about 2500 gems per dollar. Looking at some stuff in my inventory a CS:GO emoticon goes for 10 cents and is worth 100 gems. So I can get 1000 gems per dollar by disenchanting these emoticons, and that's nowhere near the 2500 gems per dollar I need to just break even. In fact, 3 cents is the lowest you can pay for an item in the marketplace and that only gets you up to 3333 gems per dollar.

At that price point you can gain about one extra pack of cards for every dollar you invest. So you can make 30 cents per dollar you invest. If you get an emoticon worth 100 gems (some only disenchant for 10), and you get it for the minimum possible cost, it's a profitable and time consuming thing to do. Otherwise buying stuff to disenchant is bad.

What about selling stuff to other people and letting them disenchant it? Well, Steam takes 2 cents off of every sale and if you're selling things worth 10 cents that means you're losing 20% value. It works out that you're only getting a ratio of 2000 gems per dollar in this manner. Which is pretty close to our breakeven point for cashing in on packs.

What does this mean? Well... At least for the CS:GO emoticons it isn't worth buying them, and it isn't really worth selling them either. Just blow them up yourself.

There are going to be market inefficiencies that can be exploited. Maybe there's a game with a better dollar per gem ratio that you want than Civ is. Maybe you can find packs to buy with gems that are really valuable. Maybe you can actually find those emoticons worth 100 gems for 3 cents. All the power to you if you want to do that. Me? I'm going to try to sell the emoticons worth a lot of money (>.10) or worth low gems (getting even 1 cent for a 10 gem card is fine) and disenchant the rest. I can't imagine I'll have enough gems to bid on games so I'll just get some card packs and move on with my life.

Thursday, December 11, 2014

Steam Has A Problem

Steam rolled out a new holiday event this evening, and it looked interesting. I was musing with Lino and Snuggles and my sister about how things would shake out, and if there was profit to be made in the margins. Ultimately I concluded that yes, there was profit to be made, possible a lot of it, and it would be worth my while to get involved. At the very least I found thinking about it to be a good mental exercise and it made me happy, so it was a pretty good game regardless.

I was going to write a post about what I thought would happen after playing around a bit with it, but things went way off the rails. The basic idea of the event was you could disenchant items in your inventory to get gems, and then you could use gems in 200000 silent auctions to win games. Left over gems could be traded in for Steam cards. But it turned out there was a 'better' way to generate gems than disenchanting your extra emoticons and backgrounds. Put some gems up for sale, cancel the sale, and get more gems back than you listed. I have no idea the exact ratios or how it really worked but there was definitely a gem duping exploit.

So now Steam has a problem. They were probably expecting something like 50 million gems to be created over the course of the entire event but 3 hours into the event there were over a billion gems for sale. People who were duping gems had an infinite source of gems and a market of people willing to pay for them at low prices. The market bottomed out at 3 cents for 1000 gems, with 2 of those cents going to Steam and 1 of those cents going to the duper. Now, the 'consolation prize' of extra packs of cards were priced in a way to make them not likely to be an efficient plan, just something to do with extra gems. Instead you could get 6 cards for 3 cents. Cards that routinely sell for something in the range of 6-15 cents each (depending on the game).

Not knowing that there was anything weird going on with the generation of gems and not thinking too much about the supply part I saw cheap gems and knew they had to be a good deal. My initial idea was the gems would rebound in price once the initial rush of generating them went down, so I bought ~$7 worth to sit on and resell in the future. But then Lino did the math on the whole packs thing so I went and bought 67 packs of cards and have set about selling those cards at a mad profit. Well, except lots of other people were doing the same thing so the price of cards has cratered. Still profit to be had though, so no regrets thus far...

But now that I know the gems were duped and not just from some people who had a huge stash of unwanted emotes. Steam has to do something about it or their event is ruined and their trading card system is destroyed. They started by making gems untradeable and unsellable, which was certainly the right first step. But now the question is... What are they to do with the current situation to resolve things.

This stuff is so hard to track... I bought (almost certainly) duped gems. I used those gems to generate packs of cards. I opened those packs of cards and sold some of them to other people. I also bought a couple from other people (possibly obtained from packs bought with duped games) and made a badge. Said badge gave me a holiday card which I am trying to sell.

NOTE: Steam actually makes 2 cents off of every single transaction in the marketplace.

How do you fix the current situation? The guy who buys my holiday card will have an item generated pretty much entirely from duped gems, but almost certainly isn't tagged as such. But even if they did know that card is not legit, what could they do? Remove it from the other guy's inventory? What if he's turned it into a badge?

Do you punish everyone who duped gems? Do you let 'innocent' people keep their ill gotten gains? Do you delete all gems but leave cards and packs generated from them alone?

For perspective... If they just fix the exploit, punish the dupers, and let people keep what they have on hand... If the gem price rebounds to where it probably should be (~30c/1000) I'll be up $50 and 150 cards. And I only put in ~$7. Imagine someone who went whole hog! They could be up thousand of dollars. And Steam itself would be up 2 cents off of every sale along the way...

It really feels like the only way to salvage the system is to roll all inventories back to before the event started. But then what do you do about purchases in the meantime? Would rolling back inventories impact games that people bought? Games they may well have already installed?

So Steam has a problem. It will be very interesting to see what they decide to do. Will I be up $60? Will my inventory be reset? Will I be banned in some way for having used duped gems?

I'm really hoping for door #2. I'd certainly take door #1. I am actually worried that door #3 will be on the table.

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Missions

Two of the games I've been trying to play recently have both featured a mechanic where you send off party members on missions. In World of Warcraft the sole purpose of most followers is to go on these missions; in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance it's something you do with characters you can use in your actual fighting party. In both cases it works pretty much the same way. You get given a description of the mission and the rewards for succeeding and have to pick a number of characters to send away. After an amount of time (real life time in WoW, world map movements in FFTA) the characters come back and tell you if they succeeded or not.

In FFTA the odds of succeeding on a mission are based on the level and jobs of the characters you send. You're supposed to use the description to figure out who to send. (Fighter type characters should probably go work in a mine while a mage should go help a librarian.) It's really not an exact science though, and I haven't read up about it but I feel like you need to use the mission system to get the really good items. It may even gate beating the game in some way? In WoW it tells you straight up what your chances of succeeding will be for any given combination of characters. It also tells you explicitly which abilities are going to help increase your odds.

I like the WoW system more than the FFTA system because it actually gives me the information I need to make informed decisions. Maybe that word should be in air quotes though... When you know exactly what you need to maximize your odds you should just do that and move on with your life. It can be a little interesting to make sure you have the right mix of followers with a spread of abilities to always have access to what you need, but once you finish that stage of the process it's just doing the obvious best thing.

In short... The system is pretty cool to explore in the short term but becomes a tedious grind in the long term.

It's even worse in FFTA where I'm pretty sure the grind really is the long term. Chains of missions, no idea what will let you succeed, and limited time when the missions are available. Maybe I would have found it interesting to work out what was best for each mission by playing the game over and over and trying different things. But actually, I bought this game the day it was released and started playing it right away... But I didn't end up playing it enough to beat the game once, let alone play it many times to work out who I want to send on what missions.

I'm not really sure what to do with FFTA. I'm not terribly interested in playing it. I am at least a little interested in moving my marathon along, especially if I can play a game I can stream. Like, say, Final Fantasy XII which I believe is next among the games I actually own. I'll dig into more when I get to that point to see if I can easily acquire things like Kingdom Hearts 2.

But for now, I should really give FFTA more of a chance. But I don't want to worry about the stupid mission system. So I think I'm going to do some reading about missions to see what ones I actually need to worry about and see what I can do about doing just those ones. 

Tuesday, December 09, 2014

Final Fantasy II: Trial Start

I went and spent 5 hours tonight streaming the start of a Final Fantasy II run. It didn't exactly go according to plan but I learned some things. I also talked a bit about Final Fantasy games with a 13 year old who randomly decided to watch me because he played FFII on the GBA. Anyway, here's what I learned...

- Even with 16 sword skill you actually need a good sword to do any damage. The enemy's armour applies to each hit so the fact I'm swinging with a 8 attack sword means any enemy with something like 20 armour is immune to my damage. For the record, the Captain I need to grind for a toad book has 50 armour.

- I leveled a fire spell to 10 in order to kill the Captain, but it really didn't do a whole lot of damage. Something like 280 to a single target. I also tried using it against some powerful undead I ran into near Mysidia and it was hitting them all for about 120 each. The ghost had 540 health so it was taking 5 casts to kill them off. That is not fast. Even if I leveled fire all the way to 16 it would be doing less than 200 on average to all enemies. So 3 casts to take out the ghosts. And there are other undead with even more health than ghosts. The damage from my fire is pretty much capped, too, unless I put even more time and effort into grinding my int stat.

- Toad actually took out some enemies despite casting it with a sword and shield on. This confused me. It hit some and missed others of the same type so it isn't that they're vulnerable to the element. I was able to land it despite having 120% accuracy penalty from my sword and shield. It just doesn't make sense. My chance to hit while naked should only be around 50%! (Though toad 16 does try to hit 16 times which means it really will hit everything when I have 50% chance to hit.) My best guess is that the accuracy penalty was removed in this version of the game. Possibly drastically reduced? And that the enemies I didn't hit with toad rolled high on their magic resist checks and I rolled abysmally low on my toad checks? That doesn't feel very good, but it feels better than hitting with a spell that has a -70% chance to hit. Or maybe there's some underflow error going on?

- Toad 16 and the snowcraft did combine to get me an aegis shield and a ribbon pretty early on. No enemies that I would legitimately encounter on the way to this point in the game cast dangerous debuffs so the ribbon here doesn't come too late.

- I had serious money trouble. Especially when I got Mindu and started grinding up magic points. But I was able to kill some enemies near Mysidia for a lot of cash, and that's not very far from the starting town. So if I have a way to kill them I might try grinding down there instead.

- I wanted to get toad on my first trip to the castle but I really only see one way to make that happen, and that's to level unarmed skill. You get 8 damage for each level in unarmed, so if I grind that up to level 16 I'd get to swing 16 times for something close to 200 per swing. 50 armour doesn't do anything relevant against that! It adds another thing to grind, which sucks, but since fire really isn't cutting it for killing undead I can just skip grinding that? Alternatively the Fynn castle isn't very far from the starting town so I can just go get toad after I do some plot and level up organically along the way?

- I got my evade chance up to 99% pretty easily, but I only had 1 chance to evade. This wasn't good since the Captain swings 6 times per attack. I can deal with that by taking the time to grind up my evade chance though. (Equip 2 shields and just mash X to spam attack against a large group of enemies willing to attack you.) This is probably worth my while to do regardless.

- It was weird, but I couldn't get a full level in a spell in one combat. I could take sword skill up a full 100 experience and gain a level in one fight but the spells were all capping out in the high 90s. eventually I resorted to doing half a level in each fight to level up my toad spell.

- Counting to 100 is easy if I focus on it. Counting to 100 while reading chat and responding is tricky.

- It felt like I was still getting ambushed more often than I thought I should. It's possible I want 99% evade on all my characters, even the dead ones. This wouldn't actually take very long. Level 10 shield skill and two of the second shield would do it. Assuming I had the money to buy them!

I'm now torn on if I should continue from my saved game to see what other issues I run into or if I should start a new plan from the beginning since this start really isn't great. I guess I could just grind unarmed skill in my current game to emulate what I'll probably want to do? That way I can see problems that crop up later while having unarmed skill to actually kill enemies with armour.

I'm also torn on if I want one character to grind unarmed for early game and swords for late game or if I want two different characters to grind each one. Only having one character taking actions felt really good... So I think I want to stick with that for now.