Blood Bowl: Preseason Goals

One of the FumBBL leagues I'm in runs a 4 week preseason before the 14 week regular season. The league has a salary cap which applies before the preseason so the preseason is a way to let teams build back up a little after potentially having made some brutal cuts. (There's one dark elf team currently running with 1 reroll!) They also build the divisions for the season based on the standings of the swiss preseason in a snake format. Last season my division had the 3, 14, 19, and 30th teams from the preseason standings for example.

I've been thinking about what I should be trying to accomplish in the preseason. My team doesn't have any glaring weaknesses from the salary cap but I do have a couple of no-skill players who could use a cheap level. I've been thinking about buying a minotaur to level him in the preseason but since I had to light most of my cash on fire doing so would risk not playing with some positionals if I actually start having people die. Should I be trying to win the preseason? Should I be trying to kill my opposition? Should I just be trying to keep my own guys alive and screw winning?

Last season I went the protect my own guys route by inducing extra apothecaries whenever I had inducement money to spend. The idea being that while I like winning I wanted to be able to win in the regular season and that meant keeping people alive as I built up the money and skills to have a reasonable team. Apothecaries are not very good at winning games, certainly not compared to picking up star players, but the star player can steal the MVP experience and the apothecary can save someone's career. Not guaranteed to, of course, but Blood Bowl is a game of small edges and those felt like good edges to pick up.

I still tried to win, of course, since scoring is worth experience and winning is worth extra money. I went 1-2-1 which seemed like a decent result and made me #14. I also tried to hurt people because that's how Blood Bowl works. My last preseason game included 6 serious injuries on my opponent which set him way, way back. But doing so wasn't really to my advantage, especially since so many of the injuries weren't even worth experience (failed leaps mostly)! I did get to play that team in the season but I wasn't one of the first couple who got to take real advantage of the damage I did. So while doing damage is fun it isn't really profitable for the season.

Winning does have a tangible benefit in a salary cap boost for the next season for the top three teams. I didn't think anything of that last season but ended up well over the cap due to the great luck I had avoiding injuries all season long. My team this season is already at the cap for next season so any cap bonuses I could pick up would seem to be pretty relevant.

How about division seeding? Is that relevant? Winning the preseason would mean getting into a division with the teams that came 16, 17, and 32nd. If everyone is playing all out to win then getting two games against the worst team and having no one in the top 15 sounds awesome! But maybe with new teams every season and the randomness of swiss pairings in a 32 team pod the seedings won't actually have much meaning? Well... What happened last season? Did the preseason standings have much predictive power towards the final standings?

I plugged the preseason ranking from last season into Excel along with the points earned during the season by those teams. The two sets of data were moderately negatively correlated with an r value of -.594. So certainly not a guarantee but it does seem like it would be a decent predictor. All the teams that had really bad regular seasons also had a bad preseason. It looks like the teams in the 12-21 range all did better than would be expected and the teams in the 5-11 range did worse. I wonder if that has anything to do with the snake factor? Or if this is just a really small sample size? I couldn't find the final standings from previous seasons because the images look to have been removed or something so I couldn't check for prior results. I tried replacing preseason ranking with preseason points (avoiding tiebreakers) and r became .527. It still shows that the preseason and the regular season are correlated, but not a super lot. It's almost like Blood Bowl teams can change significantly over time!

Anyway, it's a big enough thing that at least getting into the top 8 seems like it could be a good thing? And getting all the way to first is probably really good. I do want the cap bonus and I'm becoming convinced that division seeding is at least a little relevant. But I don't think going super crazy to win is going to make sense. I'm still going to save my apothecary for a serious injury I think. Or maybe I won't! I am a bit of a wild man...

I've already played one game this preseason and my opponent induced up a claw star player and used him to blitz almost every turn. It seemed like a good way to damage my team and a questionable way to skill up his own team. But he did get 14 SPP on the rest of his team so I guess it worked out pretty well. I don't think I would have taken the risk of 2 star players getting the MVP but he didn't get dinged. And I actually ended up permanently injuring one of them, so maybe having a bomber as a lightning rod made sense. I won 2-0, which is good for me, but I suffered a stat loss which is bad for me. Well, quasi-bad. Now one of my dwarves has only 1 agility. It probably won't matter and certainly isn't worth retiring a 28 SPP dude over but I wish it hadn't happened. Poor Mrs White.

Bridge Match 2 - Board 41

Board 41 - Dealer North - EW Vul

Opponents convention card: Jack
Opponents playing strength: Intermediate

My hand: ♠ 9 6 2 ♥ 4 ♦ Q J 8 5 4 ♣ J T 4 2

Partner opens 1 spade and East overcalls 1NT showing a strong NT without a huge heart suit. My hand is trash but I can at least eat up some bidding room by supporting partner's suit. I bid 2 spades. West jumps to 4NT which is apparently asking for aces for NT which seems really odd to me. That should be a quantitative slam invite. Anyway, East bids 5 clubs to show 1 or 4 and West signs off in 6 hearts of all things.

Partner leads the A of spades.

	NORTH ♠ A
		EAST ♠ Q 8 5 ♥ K 2 ♦ K 9 6 3 2 ♣ A K 5
	SOUTH ♠ 9 6 2 ♥ 4 ♦ Q J 8 5 4 ♣ J T 4 2

West	North	East	South
	1♠	1NT	2♠
4NT1	Pass	5♣2	Pass
6♥	Pass	Pass	Pass
1Ace asking for NT
21 or 4 aces

A-5-2-T. Partner keeps playing spades, presumably hoping I have the K for my supporting bid. Sorry partner. I played the 2 to try to discourage! 3-8-9-K. West now draws trump. 3-8-K-4. 2-6 of spades-5-J. What? Partner won with the J of hearts! Woo!

They play some spades and now I'm going to have to find some pitches. East and I both have 5 diamonds and East has 2 entries in clubs. So I may well need all my diamonds to protect against those getting set up. On the other hand I also have clubs stopped in case West has Qxxx. Is that even possible? He probably had 6 hearts and 2 spades? So yes, he could well have plenty of clubs since he probably doesn't have many diamonds. I don't know what to do. I'll start with a diamond pitch and hope that isn't terrible.

West ruffs the spade and draws trump. Dummy pitches a diamond from board. Ok, pitching diamonds is probably fine then so I'll pitch another too. More trump with partner pitching a low club and dummy pitching another diamond. If partner is pitching count then I can safely pitch a club. Ok, let's hope that's what is happening. Declarer then plays club to board and ruffs a club to hand. Guess he only had 1 club! In fact he only had 4 minor suit cards and he had AK of both suits so it didn't matter what he did. He could have claimed if the game allowed the AI to do that. Oh well. Down one!

	NORTH ♠ A J 7 4 3 ♥ Q J 8 ♦ ♣ Q 9 8 6 3
WEST ♠ K T ♥ A T 9 7 6 5 3 ♦ A T 7 ♣ 7		EAST ♠ Q 8 5 ♥ K 2 ♦ K 9 6 3 2 ♣ A K 5
	SOUTH ♠ 9 6 2 ♥ 4 ♦ Q J 8 5 4 ♣ J T 4 2

Three tables made their way to 6 hearts and all of them went down 1. So we get 12MPs for a shared top board. The other five tables played in a heart game and took 11 or 12 tricks. This result pushes us back into first! Yay partner!


Professor Jack agrees with me all the way!

Ranking after board 41/60: 1/16 with 56.97%

Final Fantasy IX: Stealing

One of the things I found myself doing obsessively in a jRPG is trying to get all of the things just in case I happen to need one of the things in the future. This means running around to get all of the treasures, buying all of the stuff in a store, doing all the side quests, and stealing all of the things from all of the enemies. Stealing tends to be rather slow, especially since often my best offensive character is also the one who can steal. Certainly Locke and Zidane were heavy hitters as well as the only people who could steal. I guess Rikku didn't do much damage? So for the most part taking the time to steal from enemies can drastically increase the amount of time it takes to get through a given fight. Especially some boss fights with a low percentage chance for steal to succeed where I'll just stop attacking with anyone else until it works!

With those factors taken into account I'd think stealing would be something that wouldn't happen in a speedrun but I've been seeing a lot of runs where people have been stealing stuff. They don't steal all of the things by any stretch of the imagination but they definitely know of a few things that are worth the time invested in stealing. I think the guy who I was watching play the start of FFIX was stealing things from bosses in order to sell them! I imagine skipping every treasure and running from every fight can leave you a little tight on cash.

Anyway, I am getting all the treasures and fighting all the fights and stealing all the things and I'm still tight on cash! But most of my stealing has boiled down to getting potions and debuff removers and not anything of actual value. I'd really prefer to start actually attacking most fights and keep the stealing for things that actually matter. So, how does stealing work and when should I really care?

Stealing in FFIX works under a two roll system. First you make a check to see if you succeed in your steal attempt. This check is based on your level, the enemy level, and your spirit. It's also a check that gets skipped if you have a certain passive ability equipped and I do have that ability so I get to skip this check entirely. Then if you succeed you roll a d256 to see what you steal. Each enemy can have up to 4 items, one in each of 4 categories of difficulty. If you rolled a 1 then you get the rarest item. 2-16 is the next rarest. 17-64 is the next rarest. Any other number gets you the common item. On the plus side you're allowed to steal multiple items from each enemy. On the minus side that means I feel the need to try to hit the 1 in 256 lottery over and over and over and over again. On the plus side there is a second stealing related passive that turns the 1/256 and 16/256 slots into 32/256 slots and has empty slots get passed over. I don't yet have that ability but I wants it so badly!

One other ability that's interesting is thievery which does damage equal to the number of successful steals over the course of the game time half of Zidane's speed. I don't have this ability yet either, but it's not inconceivable that this could be a really high damage ability if I keep stealing from all of the monsters.

How about stuff that's particularly important to steal? From what I can tell pretty much every boss has something worth stealing in a rarer slot, but worth is pretty subjective. For the first 3 disks it's all stuff you're going to be able to buy in a town or two. So having it will get you better stats and abilities a little faster, and it will save you the money of needing to buy it yourself, but you aren't really missing out on anything if you leave it behind. Trash mobs all suck. I read something that indicate this would no longer be the case on disk 4 but I just went through a list of every single item in the game and they all had alternate ways to get them other than stealing them. Maybe it was the 'all the things' guide that said something about stealing on disk 4 since it looked like a few of the items were only stolen or obtained from the chocobo mini game so to have n+1 for 'all the things' you probably need the stolen ones.

What does this mean? Well, I should probably stop worrying about stealing. Either that or I should keep stealing non-stop in an attempt to really max out that one attack whenever it shows up. I think I'm going to stop stealing from the random encounters but I'll keep giving it a few goes on the bosses just to pick up some gear on the cheap. I do like cheap...

Final Fantasy IX: Tetra Master

The card game in Final Fantasy VIII was a pretty huge success I think which caused Square to stick a card game into Final Fantasy IX as well. But they didn't want to just do the same old thing so they added all kinds of crazy things to the mini game. Rather than have 4 directions of influence they added in diagonals to make it 8 directional. They made it so each card didn't necessarily work in every direction, instead it would have some combination of the 8 directions. They gave cards an attack value, a physical defense value, and a magic attack value. They made different cards attack physical or magical based on what the card represents. They added in a random component so even a weak card could sometimes beat a strong card. And they let the cards level up and get more powerful as you used them. They also removed pretty much any benefit you could get from playing the game. FFVIII had tons of powerful stuff you could make out of cards. FFIX has pretty much no reason to play the game other than the fun of playing it or the OCD need to 'catch them all'.

For the most part from the things I've read and the people I talked to about these games back in the day the changes were, by and large, a flop. The FFVIII card game was awesome and I can't remember talking to someone who hated it. But the changes in FFIX tended to remove player control from the game. You can't see your opponent's hand and sometimes you just lose to random chance. This is bad for the player because games are played for ante and while the computer can just restock and doesn't mind losing something leveled up the player can't just restock and certainly minds losing a card they've invested a lot of time into leveling. The computer will tend to use the cards they win so you can win them back, but you did lose with your best card... Your odds have to be worse with your opponent having it instead of you.

The randomness can be frustrating, so I don't know if I'm going to stick it out, but I'm going to try to build a maxxed out collection. There's a collector level in the game that awards you points based on owning cards with certain criteria and there is an absolute maximum level you can reach. It involves owning exactly one copy of each of the 100 cards in the game. Each of those cards needs to have a unique combination of the 8 possible directions (there are 2^8=256 such combinations and you can save/reload before earning a card to cause it to spawn with a new random combination) and each of them also needs to be leveled up to the maximum attack type. Each card has a 1.56% chance after each fight of upgrading from the starting attack type to attack type X and each X card has a .56% chance after each fight of upgrading from X to A. That's a lot of card battles... Especially since you'll need to be winning fights with some low level cards in order to level them up. But I think I'm up for the task! Maybe!

The most important thing to start with is making sure I can actually get my hand on one copy of every card. I certainly remember from playing before that some cards can only be found in one spot or in ante from one opponent and I need to make sure I don't miss any of them. I couldn't find an immediate list of cards that might be missed but I did find a list of locations for every card in the game. So I decided to go through that list and make note of anything I need to make sure I don't miss. Lots of cards, especially the low level stuff, can be won in random encounters or can be trivially won in a card battle so I don't need to worry about them at all.

It looks from the list like a lot of stuff can actually be won from guys in the card arena on disk 4. I'm going to assert that guys like Beast Master Gilbert is actually able to be fought many times to pay out the large number of seemingly rare cards he owns and therefore not worry about them. If that turns out to not be true, oh well, and I will learn for next time!

Here's what I do need to worry about:

Namingway card is the only one that can't be won in a card battle on disk 4. You can win it from Mario in the card tournament on disk 3, or you can find it in the desert palace/sanctum on disk 3.

Wow. I hope this card list is right. It feels so strange that you can just go and card battle dudes to win basically every card in the game. This certainly wasn't the case in FFVIII! I guess that's probably because the unique cards in that game could be converted into powerful items and here they're not worth anything at all except having them?

I'm a little worried there's something wrong with this card list but it would explain why I couldn't find a list of missable cards anywhere and why the only card really called out in the 'do absolutely everything' FAQ was Namingwary.


Oh, and on a side note... Apparently some German company actually made a board game version of Tetra Master! The BGG comments make it sound pretty bad, but I still have this urge to try to track it down...

Final Fantasy IX: Plan

Ok, time to play some Final Fantasy IX! The question I've been mulling over the last couple days is how do I want to play it. There are all kinds of different options for how to play this game in particular. There's the standard stuff like trying to play with one character, or trying to play at low level. Given my recent obsession with watching speed runs I could try to win as fast as possible. (Not even a stretch for my Final Fantasy marathon since that's how I approached FFII. My time of 15 hours and 44 minutes pales a 'little' in comparison to the record on SDA of 2 hours and 32 minutes, though...)

Final Fantasy IX follows well in the footsteps of VII and VIII in that it has a ton of mini games like FFVII and a super extensive card game like FFVIII. A true speed run would skip these things and I don't know that I want to do that. On the other hand I know that every time I've played the game thus far I've done all of that stuff. Do I need to do it again? Do I want to do it again?

There's also the concept of a 'perfect' save file which I've been reading about on gamefaqs. FFIX has one item that is only available if you make it to disk 4 in under 12 hours. It has another item that is only available if you open practically every treasure chest in the game, many of which you have to open as you pass them on previous disks. On top of that people obsess about getting everything anyway, and getting max stats, and all sorts of other things. One group of people worked out a way to actually get everything you could miss while still getting to the end in under 12 hours, and then pick up all the other stuff you can still get. It sounds interesting and tedious and fun and boring which seems to be right up my alley... Except they then estimate it took them probably 800 hours to do. Not that I wouldn't spend 800 hours on a game, but I have the HD versions of FFX and FFX-2 showing up at my door in a month and a half and I don't want to still be on FFIX when that happens!

My biggest problem with watching speedruns of the Final Fantasy games has been that one of the things I really like about the games are the stories and the side quests. And while I am intrigued by eeking out small gains of time and pushing to be the best at something I don't think I want to do that on a game when it's the first time I'm playing it in 8 years. I also really don't think FFIX would be my game of choice for a FF speedrun... In fact it might be near the bottom of the list.

I think the answer is to just play the game straight up. I remember it has lots of little throwbacks to previous games and I'd like to have the chance to find those and enjoy them without worrying that I need to skip the dialogue or the cutscenes or whatever. I could do low level but it sounds like low level is actually pretty easy in this game so it wouldn't be adding too much challenge. If I want added challenge I want lots of added challenge, not just piddly bits. So it's going to just be a nice, casual playthrough.

Maybe I'll put a special focus on the card game this time around, make sure I don't miss anything in it and see if I can't max it out...

Chocobo Racing

Chocobo Racing, to be blunt, is Mario Kart with cute Final Fantasy characters instead of Mario characters. Everyone gets their own cute little mode of transportation instead of just riding in a go-kart, though. Chocobo himself has rocket roller skates. White Mage rides a flying carpet. The goblin thing is in a mine cart, Mog is riding a powered scooter that Cid made for him. You do 3 laps of a track picking up question blocks to use to attack the other racers. It is very much a poorly implemented Mario Kart with a Final Fantasy theme pasted on.

Ok, calling it poorly implemented might not be completely fair, but it's not far off the mark. The controls are definitely worse than the controls in any Mario Kart game I've played. The attack items are certainly badly balanced in terms of making a fun game. One of the best things about Mario Kart is how the person in last place would get stronger power ups. It added a catch up mechanism to the game without being super blunt about it by having the guys in last just go faster or something. Chocobo Racing has no such concept. Each of the question spheres (they aren't really blocks) gives a random spell, or some of them just have the spell icon from the start so you know what you're about to drive over. You can hold up to 3 items at a time, and there's an added twist. Pick up the same thing you just picked up and instead of giving you a second copy of it they power up your first copy instead. One fire spell gives you a hard to aim green turtle shell. Two fire spells gives you a red turtle shell. Three fire spells gives you a red turtle shell for each of your opponents.

The problems here are three fold. First, everyone gets the same power ups so the person in first is apt to get a strangle hold on their lead. Next, they take some time to respawn, so while the person in first is guaranteed to get a power up from each section it's entirely possible other people won't get one and therefore the person in first actually gets more powerful stuff than the losers. The last problem is that the powered up attacks hit all players equally so the person in last place will get spun out just as often as the person in first. More often, even, since the guy in first is throwing out more attacks than the others!

One small mistake at the start of a race was the only difference between winning by a mile or getting stuck at the back. Front running is the only way to play this game, and that's unfortunate. Especially since the goal of every race is to win. If you don't come first you have to play it again. And again. And again. I actually gave up last night on an annoying castle that had a layout that punished the losers even more. (There was a cage that would go up and down blocking the road from time to time, but it seemed to get triggered when the first person got close to it. The timing was such that the first person would get under it, and maybe anyone really close to them, but everyone else would get stuck.) I played a little this morning to get a screenshot and beat that race in two tries because I managed to get into the lead heading into that section on the first lap and never looked back.

The other interesting thing about the game is each character can assign a super power. Mog can fly over attacks on the ground. Chocobo can dash fast. Goblin can mug items from other people. So on top of getting special abilities out of the question spheres you also get our own special ability that recharges with time. It adds more variety to the characters than just looks, which is nice.

The game has tons of modes. Story mode, which I was playing, was introducing the characters and tracks one at a time and had a cute little narration by Cid (who built the rocket skates and powered scooter). Mog sure is a jerk! Mog kept breaking kafabe by talking about other video games and once even talked about Squaresoft directly. (He was talking about how if he beat Chocobo in a race they'd have to name their next game Mog's Mysterious Dungeon 2. Apparently the games came out in a different order than I thought, or this release got delayed and there wasn't a chance to edit the text.) There are also grand prix and time trial modes as well.

I donno... This was an interesting enough game, but I feel like being set up to punish the losers and reward the winners actually makes for a terrible kart game. The whole point of variable powers is to let the losers think they can catch up. If only I get lucky and get that lightning bolt, I can win! That star man will give me a shot at 3rd place! It also makes multi player with people of different skill levels plausible. This game, not so much. I can't imagine playing this as a kid with a friend who was better than me, or worse than me. The better player would simply never lose. And maybe that's realistic, but it isn't what a kart game should be I don't think.

I'm not going to complete story mode, because learning the tracks enough to be able to jump out to an early unassailable lead without then ever making a mistake just doesn't appeal to me. Sorry Chocobo Racing. You are not good. In fact... You get to go right to the bottom of the pile thus far. Ehrgeiz was a poorly implemented fighting game, but at least it made decent fighting game design decisions. You did not make decent kart racer decisions.

Next up... Final Fantasy IX!

Chocobo's Abandoned Dungeon

It's been almost 6 months since I've made any progress in my Final Fantasy marathon. I keep thinking I'm going to start playing Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon 2 again, but it's been so long I feel like I'd need to start over entirely. It was actually a fairly interesting game, and I did a bunch of playing and reading about it since my intro post on the subject, but I never got around to posting what else I'd done or what I'd learned.

It turns out the game has a bit of a crafting system to it. You can throw stuff in a pot and new stuff comes out. It turns out the new stuff is entirely random and isn't based on what you throw in at all and none of it is useful so it's just kind of an annoying thing that exists but shouldn't be used. Then there's crafting weapons and armour and it turns out to be really intricate and require doing all kinds of crazy things. The game has one shot spell books but you get better at casting those spells the more you use them and there's ways to craft things that make the spells better.

Getting killed also isn't a game over in this game. Instead you respawn back in town with an empty inventory but you keep your levels. In some ways this was very good (it was the only way I found to unequip my cursed claw) but in other ways it meant it didn't really matter what I was doing. One of the key features on a roguelike to me is the fear of permanent death should you make a mistake. You died? Time to start over! Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon 2 seems a lot longer than something like FTL though. And it has a lot more RPG elements that build up over longer periods of time.

Was the game fun? Yeah, it was fun. But watching all these people shoot for world record times in games like Final Fantasy IV, Final Fantasy IX, and Final Fantasy X has made me really want to play more Final Fantasy. Not more random passable roguelike with Final Fantasy monsters. So in the interest of spurring things along I'm just going to call this one quits and move on to the next game in the marathon. Chocobo Racing. At least that sounds short. And then it's FFIX!

Finally, I need to rank this game among the rest of them. Well, I didn't finish it. So I think that means it has to go way near the end. It was definitely better than Ehrgeiz and I was so mad at FFLIII for letting me skip a mandatory item that this gets put above that one too. But I think it's got to go below FFL. Sorry Chocobo. Maybe your racing game will fare better.

Bridge Match 2 - Board 40

Board 40 - Dealer West - None Vul

Opponents convention card: Majeure cinquième
Opponents playing strength: Fair

My hand: ♠ A Q 4 ♥ J 8 2 ♦ J 7 6 ♣ Q 9 5 2

East opens 1 spade in 3rd chair. I can't bid with this hand. West raises to 2 spades and East moves on to 3 hearts which must show a pretty darn good hand. I still can't bid, but I hope they get out of hand. West settles into 4 spades. I don't think I can double.

I lead the 6 of diamonds.

WEST ♠ T 9 5 ♥ 5 ♦ T 9 8 5 4 3 ♣ A J 7
	SOUTH ♠ A Q 4 ♥ J 8 2 ♦ J 7 6 ♣ Q 9 5 2

West	North	East	South
Pass	Pass	1♠	Pass
2♠	Pass	3♥	Pass
4♠	Pass	Pass	Pass

6-3-Q-A. Declarer returns a club. 4-5-7-T. Partner decides to draw trump, presumably meaning he has heart tricks that he doesn't want ruffed out. Ok partner, I'm in. I draw 3 round of trump. Partner pitches the 3 of hearts on the third round. Declarer pounds out a diamond. 2-7-8-K. Partner returns a club. I hope he has the K of clubs or he's just given declarer an entry to the long diamonds. 3-8-Q-A. Looks like he does because declarer leads a heart, not a diamond. 5-7-T-J.

Ok, I'm in. I can force declarer to ruff by cashing a diamond, but then he's up if he has the high club. The other option is to play a club myself. I think my goal here is to not finesse partner out of his presumptive heart trick so I play the club. 2-J-K-8 of spades.

Declarer is eventually forced to lose a heart to partner. Down 3!

	NORTH ♠ 7 2 ♥ Q 7 6 4 3 ♦ K Q ♣ K T 6 3
WEST ♠ T 9 5 ♥ 5 ♦ T 9 8 5 4 3 ♣ A J 7		EAST ♠ K J 8 6 3 ♥ A K T 9 ♦ A 2 ♣ 8 4
	SOUTH ♠ A Q 4 ♥ J 8 2 ♦ J 7 6 ♣ Q 9 5 2

4 spades down 3 is a solo top board. Everyone did play in spades but they varied between 2, 3, and 4. 3 boards made 10 tricks, 3 made 9 tricks, 1 made 8 tricks, and ours only made 7. Declarer misplay maybe? Or did we just defend way better than everyone else? I feel like we did play it well.


Professor Jack agrees with me all the way!

Ranking after board 40/60: 2/16 with 56.25%