PhilKing

Deleted nonsense.

Partner is the one who knows whether he has the diamond queen and a club control for 6NT. I know the hand, obviously, but you have given us the wrong hand with which to do anything. In practice, redoubling would stop partner bidding 6NT, even if there is an argument that it should not.

Last train - preferably an old-fashioned steam train.

East is not squeezed in spades. To demonstrate this we can just duck a spade now before cashing the heart. There is no stepping stone, unless one thinks that every time you lose a trick you have brought off some sort of coup. :P The play we have made appears on about page two of all squeeze books - we are simply rectifying the count.

Yep - pard dropped the ball. Any hand missing 2 aces (eg ♠Qx ♥KQTx ♦Jxxx ♣KJx or ♠xx ♥KQTx ♦Jxxx ♣KQJ) would surely have signed off in 4♠ or 4NT.

It's not a bad idea - with genuine penalty doubles, you can pass then double. You may miss some penalties, but it is sound to look after basics first. Oh, and it should not be limit+ - it should start at about 8 points. Why should we be shut out with ♠Axx ♥xxx ♦xx ♣Kxxxx or similar.

More to the point what kind of idiots stump up £500 without finding out the payout structure?

It looks like the hand will probably end in a (non-positional) simple squeeze to me, though you have to know what you are doing to produce the ending. And if West exits with a club when in with the spade, it becomes a criss-cross squeeze.

Mike Lawrence coined the phrase card placing by assumption (CPA), but he is American, which obviously does not count.

Really? Quote your source.

5♦. With a grand total of zero points in my partner's suits, I will discourage any slam ambition. Cue bidding, even if understood, is far too aggressive IMO.

I would overcall 1♥ and never lead the ♥A. Obviously one should lead a diamond - you have simply misread the bidding, or at least overestimated the chances of a diamond costing by about 5000% (this figure is not intended as hyperbole). One could argue that cashing the ace avoids the strip-squeeze, but that is not sufficient reason to prematurely ejaculate.

Why would I not bid 5♥ to make? I might be being a bit thick, but partner has show a good hand, and I do not expect to get that rich on defence. The bidding does not stack up, but I trust partner. Anyway, worst case scenario for bidding is not that bad. However, if I play 2NT in this sequence as a good four-card raise, I would just smack them. It should be our hand, but even then the decision is close, since I expect they have stretched on the basis of shape, so it rates to be a double fit hand. FWIW, I think the world has it wrong regarding 2NT as a good four-card raise and cue as three cards (ie the English :blink: ). This happens to correlate reasonably well with hands we should take the dive (2NT) and take the money (cue), but I feel the way forward is to play 2NT as offensive and cue as stodge. Playing thes methods, I would have an easy double opposite a cue and an easy Five Hearts opposite 2NT. We should play 2NT as showing our hand type rather than just a bean count as to how many trumps we hold.

This is my favourite part.

Well it's not a majorless no trump, which appears to be the topic. You may as well ask, would the structure work if 1NT contained 4 and 5 card majors.

This brings us back to the unpopular take-out double over 1♦ with 4-5M. I am in the minority camp that does this, and it makes partner's decisions here much easier, since he knows we almost never have four spades.

We made it almost impossible for them by passing throughout. They bid 1♥-1♠-2♠, which was completely normal. The diamond opening and preemptive raise tends to make diagnosing a perfect fit much easier.

On a related topic, should I alert an opening bid of 1♥? I play it as natural and non-forcing with at least a five-card suit. However, it can lead to many conventional situations. Perhaps a description such as "natural, but may lead to Kaplan inversion, Jacoby, two-over-one relay auction or some coded splinter situations." Perhaps through laziness, I have been letting it slide and I am feeling a bit guilty.

It may seem a bit weird, but I would have responded 3♦ showing an invitational one-suiter, and my second choice is 5♦. These hands almost never play well in a 5-3 spade fit. As bid, I have a problem - if I bid 5♦ and pard has enough useful cards to make it, he will often raise to six, expecting me to have my bid. Perhaps I should bid it slowly ... B-)

Unanimous.

1NT would now contain hearts, which seems at odds with the ethos.

My methodology was somewhat simpler - I cast the net much wider in terms of East's potential hands and then decided whether it was likely that someone would preempt on the hand the generator produced. My feeling is that your hand, although classic and the most attractive, is outnumbered by non-classic preempts (when East has more than one heart and/or no entry, 3NT does a lot better). In a recent European, most players opened 3♠ at game all on ♠KJ98754♥2♦8♣JT43. And the fact that we hold the AQ is a mild Baysian indicator that East does not bid according to Hoyle, but that is difficult to prove. Anyway, whilst perusing my database for parallels, this hand caught my eye:[hv=pc=n&s=sa2hkqj75dqt6c953&w=sqt97543hdaj2cjt6&n=skj86ha92dk5cq872&e=sht8643d98743cak4&d=w&v=b&b=4&a=3spp3nppp]399|300[/hv] It's a little different, since we are in the so-called protective seat, but our hand is significantly weaker. So who was the clown who balanced with 3NT? World number two, Claudio Nunes. If only he could cut out the wild overcalls, he might get somewhere. The point is that there are some decent players out there who have noticed that, if we have a trick source and a good chance of shutting out the long suit, traditional yardsticks of when to punt 3NT are far too rigid.

I spoke to East and this is what really happened (see above). :unsure:

Double. Punish them!

I think you can reverse-engineer the process by just converting them to pbn and rotating the hand using the, er, rotate button in bridge composer. Then open the file in netvu, which automatically creates a new lin file. Bingo!