Developments of the versions 10 and 11

Version 10

• about 1000 additional tournament deals, 600 of them pair tournament deals;
• new useful functions like
  - the calculation of the expected tricks for each cards,
  - the direct access to the comparative results,
  - the option to save a match and continue it at the next start;
• the support of additional screen formats, including high resolution HD screens.

Version 11

• more tournament data: a further 600 pair tournament deals
  and (among others) the final of the Venice Cup (USA vs. England) in Bali 2013;
• enhanced options for entering deals,
  allowing the specification of actions for the program and the human user.

Development of the algorithms (playing strength)

This is to be understood: With an average auction of 10 bids the 4 players issue 1000 bids and play 5200 cards on 100 deals. The majority of these actions are semi-automatic and do not require a decision. However, one decision in the bidding, two decisions in declarer play and one decision in defence can be assumed on average for a deal, resulting in 400 decisions on 100 deals. (There is additionally a grey area between "big" decisions and actions without alternative, which can be labelled "small" decisions, e.g. if and with which card a signal is given when following suit, or which of equivalent honours of the hidden hand of declarer takes a trick.)

The annual improvement is that about 20 of these decisions are made differently and on average better, even though not every better decision leads to an immediate IMP gain.

The improvement of one year is not dramatic, but the sum of several years (e.g. the five years between version 9.1 of the year 2008 and version 11.1 of the year 2013) results in a noticeable progress on many deals.

Q-plus Software GmbH, Heisenbergweg 44, 85540 Haar/München, Germany. e-mail: info@q-plus.com