winkle

I googled "bridge card combination" and looking through the top links here are some I would recommend: 1. http://www.rpbridge.net/rppl.htm Everything by Richard Pavlicek is awesome. He has some lessons on card combinations. 2. http://bridgewinners.com/article/view/how-to-solve-a-suit-combination/ An example on how to solve card combinations from an expert professional bridge player. 3. http://www.paloaltobridge.com/players/misc/suitcombos.pdf A short card combination quiz supposedly from the bridge encyclopedia. 4. http://www.bridgehands.com/S/Suit_Combinations.htm This appears to be a library of suit combinations, organized by HCP, if you want to look up a specific one.

I don't like the pop up profiles. 1. They pop up too easily. Too frequently they would pop up when I don't want them do, just from normal cursor movements. 2. They are too big and too distracting. They pop up within the confines of the handviewer, covering 1/4 of cards/auctions in the deal. It's also irritating that I have to explicitly click them away. 3. Even if (1) and (2) are fixed I still don't see when I would find the profile information useful. IMO there is very little useful information in the profile anyways, and most of the time I already know the people who are playing the deals I'm using the handviewer for.

Try clearing your web browser cache.

deleted wrong analysis.

There is a trump squeeze. Unblock spade before exiting club. South has to exit diamond to break up the simple squeeze. Win ace, 1 more trump, diamond to dummy, and last spade. The end position is below and north is trump squeezed: - A xx - / - xx - x

Curiously, though Meckwell is aggressive in many ways I don't think aggressive preempts were ever a part of their style.

Do intermediate real-life defensive problems exist? I'd switch to a spade. The heart duck suggests declarer is afraid of a spade switch from partner's side. And the way he killed the heart suit suggests that his sources of tricks are elsewhere -- looking at my hand it must mean he's loaded in the minors. And his heart duck wouldn't make sense to me if he has as much as KJx in spades, so I think partner has the spade jack. However, a spade switch is only necessary if declarer can set up 8 minor suit tricks, which means either six clubs or five clubs and KQTx of diamonds. Normally those are not the most likely layouts but it seems the clues above are strong enough for me to play for that. I don't understand question 2 so I won't attempt to answer it.

I said *my* methods, not yours or someone else's. In any case I misspoke. 2S does not show five spades in my methods but it does show extra values and is non-forcing. To me east's double is automatic, but the continuations after that are judgement calls.

I think if east bids 2S he is masterminding. If we have the values for game and we're missing the HK it's not going to be off side. IMO if there is downgrading to be done, it should be done by west who has a poorly placed CK. Over the X my methods allow me to bid 2 non-forcing spades by west, showing 5 spades, some values, non-forcing, so that works pretty well here. I know too much to comment on what happens after that, but that's how my auction should start.

Pitching the ♦A would be a good play, which I missed, but to me that does not absolve north of any blame. Give east or west the ♦T and now south cannot pitch the ace, but the position from north's view is still the same. I guess defense can also blame lady luck for dealing this exact club position where the play was relevant (swaping the ♣8 and ♣9 would yield the same position also).

I must be missing something because I only see one error, by north, for not flying the DQ to return a club, so I would blame north 100%. I see north signals diamonds and south signals neutral sp in the trump suit which suggests this minor suit holding. South lied about the diamond count but I don't think south needs to give honest count that late in the hand, and declarer's diamond pitch suggests this layout. Even if there were errors earlier in the play, I think north had enough information to fly Q, so that's a clear, 100% blame type error even if there were 100% errors elsewhere. And on defense the last error usually gets the most blame, since that's usually when one is armed with the most information, unless partner has flat out lied to me.

IMO that would be a better way of describing it, but that's not how Love does it. His orientation is all relative to the single threat hand. For B squeezes they are equivalent but for R squeezes they would become opposite. Now of course the R squeezes are easy and you don't need to remember anything to execute that. So if the RFL was explained to me that way I'd have a better chance of remembering it. At this point I've moved on to some other way.

Yet another god awful column? Poor deal analysis accompanying by baseless comment; seems par for the course for that column.

I'd guess that an average club game in our area (Draper, Newton) is about 3-4% harder than an ACBL robot tournament. A flight A regional pairs would be about 6-8% harder, but New England tends to crappy regional pairs so maybe it's a little worse.

Hmm... I guess I have the editor wrong. It's not Barry Rigal it's Linda Lee and Julian Pottage.