[snooze24]

While playing online Bridge with a partner there are many hours of playing where the opponent's hands are considerably stronger than ours. We may play 30 to 40 hands and we bid game maybe 3-4 times and their hands are strong enough to bid game 20-25 times. This causes to wonder if the hands are truly dealt in a random manner. Does anyone know if there is some other element to the dealing of hands.

[shyams]

Yes, they are truly random.

[smerriman]

 snooze24, on 2023-December-15, 11:09, said:

We may play 30 to 40 hands and we bid game maybe 3-4 times and their hands are strong enough to bid game 20-25 times.

You exaggerate greatly. All of your hands played in the Main Bridge Club are available at MyHands:

      date hands partnership hcp declared defended passout dec game+ def game+
2023-11-18    39           19.72       15       22       2         6        10 
2023-11-23    41           19.80       15       26       0         5        13 
2023-11-30    39           21.64       21       17       1        11        12 
2023-12-02    39           19.10       19       20       0        10        13 
2023-12-06    28           19.96       14       14       0         9         6 
2023-12-11    43           20.30       24       19       0         9        10 
2023-12-14    36           19.47       12       23       1         6        12 
2023-12-16    38           18.37       15       23       0         8        12 

There wasn't a single day where you bid only 3-4 games, nor a single day where your opponents bid anywhere remotely close to 20-25 games.

It is true that you have defended in general more than you have declared, despite your partnership averaging 19.8 points per deal over this entire range - this may be due to your opponents being overly aggressive (nobody likes to pass in the main bridge club), or your competitive bidding being overly timid, but it's nothing to do with the randomness of the deals. In the second to last row, where you declared 12 times and defended 24 times, you partnership had 20 or more points on 20 occasions.

[smerriman]

Two more bits of info for reference:

- over all of the above 303 hands, your partnership had exactly 25 or 26 HCP on 24 separate occasions. You declared on all but one, but 10 times in a partscore - that's contributing a lot to your low game count.

hcp hands declared defended passout imps/hand
 18    18        5       13       0     -0.93 
 19    17        3       13       1     -1.81 
 20    27        9       17       1     -1.24 
 21    21       10       10       1     -0.03 
 22    23       15        8       0     -0.60

You're defending on a very high proportion of hands when the points are pretty evenly split (and losing a lot of IMPs on them), so that's heavily contributing to the higher defensive figures.

If you can get past the mental barrier of feeling like the hands are against you (they're not ) doing a full analysis of your hands with your partner can help you find areas of improvement.