[snowbirdie]

I find that in tournament play (I only play in ACBL MP tourneys), the finesses are statistically and disproportionately off-sides. It is an absolute certainty that finesses and suit distribution are off maybe 90% of the time, which indicates that the deals are not random and are skewed against the potential declarer. Not fair.

[NickRW]

Quite apart from the fact that you could have had a run of bad luck in that regard, you could try taking fewer finesses - seriously. The finesse is one of the first things that people learn and then spend much of the rest of their bridge career learning to find better ways of increasing the number of tricks they can take.

[gwnn]

https://www.youtube....h?v=cKUvKE3bQlY

[barmar]

We've been through this countless times.
There is absolutely, positively, no cooking of the deals in human tournaments. It's totally random. The algorithm we use might not be statistically perfect, but that wouldn't cause it to create disproportionate offside finesses. The only hand tweaking we do in any tournament are in the Best Hand robot tourneys. They deal the hands randomly, then swap the human's hand with the one with the highest HCP. This shouldn't bias finesses, either.

It's selective memory -- you remember all the failing finesses more strongly than the winning ones. It's a well known psychological effect.

[inquiry]

Welcome to the BBO Forums, snowbirdie. I hope you don't take previous replies negatively, or this one for that matter, and that you do come back to the forum in the future. Claims like yours are Easy to prove or disprove with just a little bit of work on your part. All the hands you play are stored online so the hand record can be reviewed and published to support or disprove any hypothesis (like all the finesses are off). Below are the 12 of the 14 hands you declared in tourneys with GIB on the 15th and so far on the 16th (today) of this month (through 8:16 AM EDT). The other two hands had no possible finesses. On the 12 hands, there were by my count 17 possible finesse's (leading up to unsupported king counted as a finesse as well). Out of the 17, 8 finesses "worked" and 9 finesses failed. This does not support the view suggested in your post. This is essentially half working and half not working. Perhaps data from earlier evens would prove your point, but so far, the data does not support your hypothesis Why don't you keep track with a piece of paper marking each that works and each that fails test your own theory.

I apologize for the time it takes to load this reply, but with 12 hands, it does take a while.

Heart finesse off, on auction to be expected, -1 out of one

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Club finesse off, running -2 out of 2 possible

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Spade finesse off, club finesse on, running -2 out of 4 possible

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Diamond and heart finesse off, club finesse double minus 4 out of 6 possible

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spade finesse off, minus 5 out of seven possible

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you got diamond and heart finesses right, -3 out of possible 9

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Diamond T finesse works, spade finesse works but not needed -1 out of possible 11

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Club ruffing finesse on, best way to win 3 club tricks even out of 12 possible

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Heart finesse for queen "off" -1 out of 13

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Club finesse off, running -2 out of 14

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Diamond finesse on, net -1 out of 15

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Club finesse on, heart finessee off net minus 1 out of 17

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[fwdfwr]

 NickRW, on 2014-May-16, 06:44, said:

Quite apart from the fact that you could have had a run of bad luck in that regard, you could try taking fewer finesses - seriously. The finesse is one of the first things that people learn and then spend much of the rest of their bridge career learning to find better ways of increasing the number of tricks they can take.

So true...