omarsh10

That happened at a club game of some very average level: Opps were biding S W N E 1♥-P-2♥-P 3♥-4♣- ? At this point North bid, 3NT insufficient bid. The director was called, and ruled that North must correct to 4NT without any penalty (that was passed by South after some serious hesitation). I argued, that South had unauthorized information about his partner having no interest in slam, and therefore South should answer the North's Blackwood inquiry. They'd end up in 5♥ going down instead of making 4NT. Director sharply insisted on his ruling letting 4NT making by North to stand. What do you think about that?

Partner doubles with an ace and a heart trick: ♥Kx or ♥Q10x or so ... Lead ♥J

NORTH must show spades

After 3H, South knows about game in hearts South MUST bid 4H, he is to blame...

100% !

Please help about rulings on this case. Playing at a club, my partner (West) over-called South’s opening "strong" 2♣ with 3♥ having 2 surplus cards (AK of ♥) from previous deal. Please, see below. [hv=pc=n&s=sak632hkj9dkcakq5&w=st7hq76542djt983c&n=sqj94h83d7642cj73&e=s85hatdaq5ct98642&d=s&v=b&b=7&a=2c3hppdp3sp4sppp]399|300|After 1st pass by N the irregularity was discovered and corrected.[/hv] North went down one after my ♥A opening lead, ♣4, West ruffs, diamond return, second club ruff. The director was called and ruled: A+ for N/S and 4SN-1 for E/W. I've talked to several people and still am not sure what the correct ruling should be. Experts have suggested: 1) The table result should stand. Laws 13F and 21A were cited. 2) One side have bid with an incorrect number of cards. Therefore, no result is possible for either side. A+ for the non-offenders and A- for the offenders. No reference to any Law was offered. Please, what do you think the ruling should be? Thanks.

The D discards for LHO are the must. The holder of the K of spades would have tried to inform his p about it unless he has both 4-hearts and K of spades. LHO failure to discard spades first or second time points to RHO as likely K-of-s holder so I would play LHO for having 4 hearts

Interesting ?: how did you infer that RHO had 5 spades?

Last THREE issues of the Bridge Bulletin featured notes about Losing Trick Count (LTC). I felt that intelligence of faithful readers of the Bulletin had been insulted by the levels of publications. The notes in question lacked any logical consideration of the LTC approach or explanation of the LTC “formula”. LTC algorithm is as good as any other seemingly reasonable approach/mnemonic-rule, and one could come up with dozens of them. Let us talk only about LTC “formula”: 24-LT. Why 24? Personally, I like number 23, for it’s a very cool Prime number. Or it can be 25, yes, that’s a nice round number! Now, where did LTC come from? LTC came from WTC - Winning Trick Count. Indeed, if both partners have all winning cards then one has 13 winners and the other has 13 totaling to 26. In case, if they have losers, then WT=26-LT. Now we do a verbal hocus-pocus with maximum losers in each suit being 3. Thus, we get max 12 losers per hand totaling to 24. As for the set aside 2 cards to be a winners... we just forget them. Let us now imagine games with 48 or 56 cards decks. In these cases that hocus-pocus with max number of losers in each suit dose not work and we get LTC formulae 24-LT and 28-LT respectively. Easy to see the problem here. So, LTC (24-LT for 52 cards deck) is just a mnemonic rule, nothing more. The examples given in the articles are also quite silly. :) Well, enough about LTC.