simplification
“The harder I work the luckier I get,” MGM’s Samuel Goldwyn is often quoted as having said. I’m banking on it being true for me, too. This morning I’ve been studying Rubens again, Chapter 4 (Probability Relationships) is exactly the sort of thing I for which I was hoping when I first sent away for the book.
If I can stick with it and read each paragraph carefully, I am hopeful that I’ll become one of those bridge players who can figure out the odds and be able to speak up like Bob when novices like me suggest bidding 20% slams. In addition to teaching us how to calculate the odds of, say, finding one of two finesses working, Rubens also reinforces something I can’t believe I didn’t know before age 40: “Generally, approaching a problem from the complementary point of view is advisable when the chance of failure is easier to calculate directly than the chance of success.”
Probably I’m just a freakishly late adopter on this — maybe I was a math student the year they didn’t teach the hints and shortcuts unit, because it rarely occurs to me to subtract when I want to find out “how many” of something. Better late than never, eh?
January 12th, 2010 at 10:27 am
Everything is 50% – they make or go down
January 12th, 2010 at 10:35 am
But keep working hard – the more you work, the “luckier” you will be.
January 13th, 2010 at 11:41 pm
i’ve been practicing and every once in a while a hand comes along and i remember how to count where everything is and what’s missing and where it probably is…every once in a great while!