О неполной информации

[bouzyges]

"If we look at the introduction of bidding, of conventional leads, of exposed hands, of Stud at Poker, of the dummy feature of Bridge, and so on, we find that the evolution of card games has tended to increase the amount of information available at start of play. The logical conclusion would appear to be a game of perfect information, in which everyone plays with hands exposed. Yet although such games have been invented, none has ever become widely popular. Then why increase the initial information at all? Evidently, because so many different combinations of cards may be dealt from a shuffled pack that there is not enough strategic space in which to make and act upon deductions before the hand is over. The more information provided at start of play, the more rapidly and accurately can further information be acquired once play begins; but to reveal all at the outset would then leave nothing to be achieved.

We may therefore conclude that card games are, by nature, not so much games of imperfect information as games about imperfect information, and about its acquisition or perfectibility, and that this character derives directly from the basic two-faced nature of the cards themselves — mysterious on one side and self-evident on the other, and therefore 'played from ambush, because they are concealed'".

From The Oxford Guide to Card Games by David Parlett