AyunuS

Pass. Your team has at most 21 HCP, possibly fewer, and thus you could reasonably fail a bid at level 3, and if you bid, your partner might overestimate what you have and raise or something like that, which you don't want with that weak of a hand.

They're probably just getting lucky, or were good players. In free bingo tourneys, I usually take 10-15 minutes, and I usually win, but it wouldn't surprise me if there were noticeably better players in the pay ones to where that average time for the winner is probably about right. If you know some players are really good you can see that they're in the tourney before it starts, and you can just try to play ones that don't have that good of players in them, but that would be a big pain. If you think you don't get very good hands, and you fail contracts often, keep in mind it's okay to underbid hands. In Bingo, if you want those level 2 bids, you can open 1NT with 20 pts and hope for a transfer or that kind of thing. Often it won't have enough pts to bid anything else. You don't really need all that good of hands to make most of the bids, just try to avoid most of the ones above level 4. I do agree it would be nice to be able to see the times of each of the players that did get a Bingo.

I agree that that is not a good part of the system. If you jump to 2NT so you have 18-19 HCP balanced, you shouldn't possibly be able to have 22 total points. You shouldn't need 22 to go up to 4 diamonds anyway, IMO. If your partner has 6 or more diamonds, it probably figures you only need 2 in order to bid diamonds, and being able to show more wouldn't really be all that important, so that's probably why it wasn't included. No good idea about number 3, unless they're some cuebid you can make to show essentially the same thing except with more 8421 pts in spades.

No, you're fine with my scheme on clubs since south has the J and only has 3, he'd have to drop it when you lead the Q and then the 10 would be good. There'd be no easy way you would know to do that without seeing the hands though.

Probably neither robot would double 4H as neither has all that much strength, and even their high trump cards they don't really value as much as most players would when considering if they should double. You'd probably be okay on 4H. Anyway, the passing of the double with that kind of hand is pretty much a known feature of GIB, but I agree that I wish it would bid something more often with that kind of hand.

But takeout double really could be useful here. Imagine if you have 3 clubs, and you want to see if your partner has 4 and your 3 were AKQ or something and you'd rather play clubs than some weak spade suit of J8742 or something like that if your partner has 4+ clubs, but you wouldn't dare risk bidding clubs with a 3-card suit. So it could be useful.

You can do it using a finesse guaranteed. Cash all the clubs, while dropping the 3 9s. This lets you keep a finesse ready on 3 different suits. Now, cash the spade K and diamond K. They each have 7 cards left, and they still need a guard in each suit, or it's yours. To have a guard in each suit, the remaining spades much be 3/0, and they can't be anything else because they must start 4/1 or else you'll see the void upon cashing the K and be able to finesse the other side. The diamonds can't be 4/3/3/3, or else you'll just be able to take with the last one. Therefore, you will be guaranteed to notice someone out of diamonds the 3rd time you play it. Assume the player that does NOT have diamonds has the spade and draw the big spade you don't need in order to finesse that opponent. If the person without diamonds is indeed the one with the spades, just finesse that player. If not, then the same person has the diamonds and spades, and in fact, every single diamond and spade left that you don't have, and thus can't have the hearts. Draw the rest of the big cards you have on spades, then draw the big heart from the side not needed to finesse the heart, then finesse the heart. You only need the 1 extra trick from this finesse, and then it's all locked up and you make it. Edit: I realized a flaw. Do the diamonds before the clubs and then drop the 9 of diamonds when you saw the diamonds were not 4/3/3/3, and if they were, then you just take with the 9 and it's easy from there.

If you have no agreed upon way to show a void, I don't even see how anything other than 5 spades is an option here. Yes, I know there is the fear that he could pass 5 spades when he sees you're missing a control, when you might have a very easy slam, but I still don't see any other options you have.

I'm the only one that says 1NT? It's the overall best. 1S could go down with a bad spade split. Clubs aren't worth as much. 1NT is an easy make when you probably take with at least 4 of the clubs, 2 spades, and at least 1 on some other suit that they try to lead to mess you up on. Since it's matchpoints the extra 10 points from play NT is significant, meaning you'd beat out anyone that took the same number of tricks on spades. Opps hands are most likely balanced though. You can't count having singletons towards them being unbalanced. All that matters if you have a perfectly balanced hand if you combined your team's 2 hands, and they haven't bid anything, meaning the opps hands are actually at their maximum possible expected balance. Therefore, you can probably run most of the clubs, but if the spades are really unbalanced and it's on spades, it might end up being to hard to take with the clubs. And don't bid game. If the red cards are offsides you're pretty much doomed.

Pass. Points are not necessarily 20/20 as you could easily have 18 or 19, but you might as well assume you have no more than 20. The rule of 15 overrates spades and still advises us to pass, even though we have a good number of spades. Why does it overrate spades? Because it considers a 4/3/3/3 hand worse than a 7/6/0/0 hand, or any other unbalanced distribution without many spades, when clearly the second one is the better hand. If you open, then there are 2 possibilities. Your partner has spades and raises to 3S and you go down, or your partner doesn't have spades and then the opponents will probably be able to outbid you. Either way, you usually lose.

These bids by GIB do not match their descriptions very well. http://tinyurl.com/7s7u3b6 East has at best a partial stop in spades? Wouldn't 2NT or maybe even 3NT after the double have been a better representation of its hand than 2S? West has 5-6 points and 6+ clubs? And if east should have thought west had 5-6 points, why wouldn't it try for 3NT? Don't tell me it's because it would contradict it having at best a partial stop in spades, and then it's partner didn't show a stop in spades, so it thought it couldn't stop spades? Or did it just know the system did not have an option for its partner to show fewer than 5 points with any bid, meaning it thought its partner really could have none? Can someone please explain it to me?

Yeah, GIB seems to lead from suits it doesn't have anything big in, so as soon as there was the spade lead I'd just assume the other side has the Q. This was definitely not the best play when another heart could have been played and it could see what the opps drop, and try to use that information to help decide the best finesse. Or it could just assume that since east led a spade the Q must be offsides, meaning the club finesse must be the best chance. Clubs are also it's longer suit so it's more likely to force the Q on it before it even has to finesse, which it should at least have checked before it went for the spade finesse.

You know, I didn't think about 7!C but it does make with a spade ruff, draw K!C, pass it to east with a heart, draw 3 clubs, the top 2 spades, the other hearts, and then the diamonds from there. Also, yes I know there are standards but a lot of players you randomly play online with on BBO don't know them and there are a lot of noobies that make bids like a 3NT response to Stayman when the had a 4-card major. I just find it rather unlikely that most of them would know anything that advanced. Even if you think it's simple, it amazes me how many people mess up simpler bids so I always consider the possibility that they could mess up the more complicated ones.

Again, it was just with some random player, so attempting to make bids to show solid suits seem to not generally be understood by most players, so I don't like attempting to make those kinds of bids. No one on any table made 7NT, but on one table they got really lucky and made 7D, since the opps lead a diamond and then the rest was easy.

We failed 6S by 1. But on other peoples, people found out they had all the aces and just bid 7NT and failed it by 1. Very easy hand to make bad bids on.

Ok, problem is it wasn't a usual partner or anything. We didn't have any agreements as to what stuff meant, so anything like 5NT would really just leave things up to guessing, and I didn't know which version of blackwood he wanted, so I worried that whatever I bid could mislead him. Also 6NT makes regardless of who is the declarer, since there's only 1 loss in diamonds and then the suit can be run, as long as they don't manage to win any tricks in spades, but they probably wouldn't lead spades since it was one of our suits. I think 2♣ 2♠ 3♦ 3♠ 3NT 4♣ 4♦ is a good start, but after that I have no idea. Probably 6NT is the best bet once this much information is known. Edit: P.S.: I wouldn't have bid the 6♦ with a regular partner. I only did since I was worried in this case that I could really tell he was going to try to bid spades, but now that I think about it, I was wrong. If he knew we had all the keycards, then at least he would have a lot more safely been willing to bid NT.

http://tinyurl.com/742t2oo I came across an unusual hand where a lot of players had trouble bidding it very well. I tried to bid it the same way GIB would, since that often seems like a reasonably good way to do things with uncommon hands, but I wanted to know how an expert would bid this hand. I had 20 HCP and a void, which is worth 3 points, giving me 23 total points, which is enough to open 2C by GIB's system. I don't count a doubleton with a K as worth any extra or fewer. Partner responds 2S so of course I want to show my diamonds. Then partner jumps to Blackwood, which I didn't really like, since he could have bid 3S and I wouldn't pass, but that's what he did. I was worried we didn't really have an agreed upon trump yet, but I went with the last suit bid, which was my diamonds. So, I responded 6D to try to show an odd number of keycards with a void above the trump suit, which I don't know if my partner understood, but I was trying to dissuade him from bidding spades. He was bidding in amounts of time where he seemed confident, so I felt I could tell spades was really where he wanted to go. Then he puts it on 6S. Now here I don't respond like GIB because I know most people try to make this kind of bid to play, and after a long amount of thinking, I decided to pass, since he'd only bid that with really good spades and I should trust him, but I really wasn't sure what to do. Also, an interesting puzzle for anyone interested is, can you find any way that making any grand slam is possible with these hands? And assume opponent's don't lead a diamond because then it's just all locked up. I don't think it's otherwise possible, unless south happens to drop a spade or diamond on the 4th round of clubs.

A: It all depends on your opponents. If they choose, they can take the first trick, but some players will choose not to if you do it the right way, but there is no way to get a guarantee. Try to lead so that the opponent that has shown more strength from the bidding has to go second, and lead a low card. Hope that he has the A and doesn't play it, and then you take the trick. You could also try to get them to lead the suit and hope they don't use the A, but that's not very likely to work, either. In any case, there is no percentage anyone can give you for this. B: It can't be done unless they drop the A offsuit. This is nearly impossible unless they somehow really get tricked into thinking they need to guard another suit or something like that, or get squeezed really bad, but that's also almost impossible from other suits when you have this big 9-card suit.

You should pass. It's very unlikely it'll pass out when others probably have good distribution, too, and then you won't end up in over your head. Even if it does pass out, it's not all that big of a loss. If you open and your partner ends up bidding a slam, you're probably screwed, and you're also screwed in some cases on anything 3NT or higher since he/she'll overrate how many points your team has.

Manudude, I think you'd end up throwing a book at him when you found out he only had 4 hearts and 9 HCP.

I also say pass. You don't have enough for 5H to be all that likely to make, and your team appears to have a good amount of defense, too.

Way back when I was first starting out, I was trying out a lot of new things all the time. As such, I once tried a system where I didn't have any strong openings except if I opened 3NT or something bigger. Then, guess, what, I got a really strong hand. I had A, AKJx, AKxx, Axxx. But, seeing as I didn't have any strong openings, I opened 1 diamond. The successive bids were 5 clubs, 5 hearts, and then 6 clubs, and then it was my turn to finally make my second bid. We were vul, but they were not. What would you bid in this situation?

I thought negative double wasn't an option seeing as t/o double is so I thought a double in this situation couldn't be negative, which left 3S as the best option.

You'd just have to bid 3NT. If you want a slam, you'd have to hope your partner made a different opening. 1NT is nice in that it can preempt the opponents from being able to bid a lot of things they could probably make. But with that hand that opened 2NT, it can probably easily outbid whatever the opponents would be willing to bid, and you're more likely to find a slam with a level 1 opening, which is a big gain, but there's no real big loss.

I would pass. I don't like the wasted cards in clubs that you'd need to get rid of most, if not all of in order to make a slam. If your minor were diamonds it'd be a lot more worth investigating.