eyhung

Unfortunately, good defense usually requires taxing the brain cells. There's another important check you need to make. Playing the ♣K would be disastrous if partner had the singleton ♣A. Here is how I reasoned while watching quiddity defend the hand: Declarer is known to have specifically K8xx of spades, the KQ of hearts, and specifically Jxx of diamonds, so 9 HCP so far. Given that he responded 1S and invited with 3S, he does not have the club ace, that would give him 13 HCP and would be inconsistent with his bidding. What do we know about declarer's shape? Declarer is either 4531, 4432, 4333, or 4234. If declarer is 4531 or 4432. then he would have responded 1♥, not 1♠, to the opening bid. If declarer is 4234, partner is 1561 holding 9 Jxxxx QT8xxx A. Favorable, she would certainly have shown her two suits in some fashion over 1♠, so this is not a reasonable layout. Therefore declarer is 4333 without the club ace, and partner is 1462 (and partner probably did not open 2D because she did not like to do so with a 4-card major.) Therefore ♣K and a low club cannot cost and forces partner to do the right thing (return a red card).

Personally, I think playing a game with graphic displays of a bloodthirsty King capturing a shrieking Queen, or Jacks uppercutting Kings, would be fun marketing. Anyone remember Battle Chess in the 1980s, the computer program that had the chess pieces come alive and fight?

Personally, I don't understand why everyone is earnestly trying to teach Aaron what's right since he's clearly not interested in others' feedback -- he didn't even post this on the BI forum where I'd give him some leeway. I'm reminded of the timeless advice about not trying to teach a pig to sing -- it wastes your time and annoys the pig. From a Machiavellian perspective, maybe we should let him carry on in his misguided beliefs so that we can get some good scores playing against him. I already know enough not to ever want to partner him, that's good enough for me.

I would pass for exactly the reasons awm described. Qxx of hearts is the death holding that strongly encourages me to pass and see if partner wants to defend. I do realize the spades have an incredible offense/defense ratio that may make bidding work out (partner may be reluctant to reopen with short spades). I could be convinced that 2♠ is right but my instinct seeing ♥ Qxx is to pass and see what partner does. Perhaps my instinct to bid 2♠ with QJT98xx of spades should be stronger. But I don't think it's a slam dunk decision as Josh implies. Certainly I would never dream of bidding 2♠ here with an old-fashioned partner, I expect those partners to hang me.

I kibitzed you defending this hand. My recollection was that your side was completely silent, which makes it easier to figure out the other two hands. The auction was simply: LHO RHO -- 1♣ 1♠ 2♠ 3♠ 4♠ Pass

If you're going to focus on options, I much prefer to give the unpassed opener the option to bid 4M directly over 2♣, thus disclosing nothing extra to the defense, or the option to open light and not have to worry about playing 2M with a potential misfit, rather than to give the passed hand the option to completely destroy his partner's ability to judge both strain and level. Options are good, but some options are better than others.

you play a different form of ogust than I am familiar with. I very much doubt that Mr. Ogust envisaged frequent 5 card weak two bids as part of his structure....not saying it's a bad idea....I don't play it the way you appear to suggest, so I can't comment....but I think Ogust was traditionally: bad hand and suit, good suit, bad hand, good hand bad suit, good hand with good suit....I always tried to think of it as 'good hands bid hearts', so that I wouldn't mix up the 3♦/♥ pairing. The way I learned Ogust was MINors are MINimum, 12123 (# of top honors). Agree that Ogust originally didn't mean it as distinguishing between 5 vs 6 but with 4C Keycard over Weak Twos (01122) I think that's the best way to use Ogust. If you don't frequently open 5s I think feature-showing is a better treatment.

I always choose to play natural over cappelletti; I think natural is better technically and easier to remember. I do play DONT with some partners. And negative doubles do not obviate the need for Lebensohl. Negative doubles show hands with values but no clear direction (generally no 5-card suit), Lebensohl helps with hands with clear direction (a 5+ card suit) but no values.

That's exactly why I said ogust is harder to memorize than feature. Knowing whether your partner thinks it's 5566 or 5656 is important, and I've played with partners in both camps. With feature, all I need to remember is "feature". On an absolute scale, the memory component of ogust is not high, but on a relative scale, ogust is more work to remember than feature.

I'd double initially with 10 bad HCP and 4144. Double with hands like that and you won't need the delayed light takeouts. I used to be very aggressive doubling in a delayed fashion with light takeout hands, then I realized that partner almost always has 5+ hearts on this auction opposite my stiff, and the hand just doesn't play very well. Nowadays most experts play that 1NT is semi-forcing or forcing so this auction is rare and they are highly unlikely to have a fit, so you are also unlikely to have a fit. Much better to try to take 7 tricks against NT than 8 with a bad fit. So now I play penalty and haven't missed the light takeout.

My rating of these conventions's usefulness : Lebensohl: Useful and frequent. Fairly complicated so you won't see it in kitchen bridge but a staple of expert bidding. Ogust: very useful with often 5 card weak-two style, not as good as feature with consistent weak-two style. More complicated to remember than feature. Sandwich 1NT: Terrible convention unless passed hand, natural is necessary against opponents who respond light in the modern fashion. I've needed the natural 1NT to reach our normal 3NT at least 3 times in the past year. I can't remember the last time I needed a sandwich 1NT to compete as UPH, usually I can just double or bid 2NT instead. Cappelletti : Terrible convention. Uses 2D for majors (no room to ask), uses 2C to show an ambiguous one-suiter (so partner will be unable to effectively compete if the opponents respond), uses double as penalty (which comes up once in a blue moon and then you won't be on firm ground with continuations). Worst convention of the 8 by far. DONT: Acceptable but not best since it focuses on the minors. Biggest advantage is simplicity (easy to remember) and efficiency (you can play all your fits at the 2-level) Gambling 3NT: I don't like it, I can't remember when I needed it to get a good board, but there is no other acceptable common standard. Smolen: Fills a nice hole in the NT structure and allows the strong hand to declare. Not necessary but nice to have. Texas: Useful, common, and fairly frequent. Namyats: Never played it, no opinion.

As elianna stated in a later post which was available at the time I replied to Dirk, the purpose of the post was not to determine what "your call is", but whether bidding 2♥ was "crazy" (i.e., not in accordance with conventional wisdom), because her partner was unhappy with the opening. That sounds like an attempt to determine what is standard and what isn't. Dirk then posted his approach. I then replied to dirk in my experience, requiring defensive strength for a weak two is non-standard (and in my opinion, sub-optimal), so his approach was unlikely to be of interest to the OP. We then get derailed into yet another nitpicky discussion. Note I'm not opposed to weak twos which DO require significant defensive strength -- I myself play them with one regular partner. But to sit down opposite a generic 2/1 (as specified in the OP) partner and to expect enough defensive strength to make non-solo penalty doubles based on that assumption seems crazier to me than opening 2♥ with this hand.

What part of "What's your call?" implies that? Ah, the pedant again. It's true that the literal interpretation of "What's your call?" = "do me the favor of telling me your specific style"? But I don't see the need for the diplomatic pretense that everyone's style is equally valid. If I were to respond saying I would open 1♥ because I play that opening 1-bids don't promise any defense or I would open 4♥ because partnership style says it's ok to overbid by 5 playing tricks vulnerable, I doubt the OP would be terribly interested.

While you are certainly correct that this is not a 2♥ bid in your style, I doubt the OP is interested in your specific style, but more the style of a standard partner. As you can see, many people seem to think that a standard 2♥ does not promise significant defensive strength vs. 3NT. I think making a statement on the offensive potential of the hand in hearts is far more important, unless you frequently double the opponents after partner's weak twos.

2♥ here. We are vulnerable at matchpoints, the worst format for being aggressive, and it's not even clear the opponents will be bidding (they are vulnerable too!). Too many bad things can happen: 1) All pass, -200 or more against no game, or losing to all the people in the room playing in 2♥. 2) Getting doubled for -200/500 vs. partial or -800 vs. game 3) Having partner bid 4H with 3 playing tricks and going down against nothing all seem much too risky to me for the gain of wiping out most of the 3-level. I am of course assuming a good partner. If partner is hopeless a more destructive approach may yield more dividends (as well as more variance). Assuming that partner is good, I prefer to show my hand as roughly 5-6 playing tricks and let him take it from there. Opening 3♥ with this hand as well as the same hand with a side ace seems too much for my vulnerable partner to field. (And opening 4♥ with the latter is too much of an overbid for me.)

Recent Bridge World had a letter about this issue. The writer thinks that the general rule should be : suit preference should apply when 3rd hand is known to have 5+ cards in the suit. Otherwise attitude/count applies.

85% seems too high for a 32 vs. a 65 in the Spingold (where the hopeless teams are the mini-spingolds) -- it might be ok in the Vanderbilt, but the last Spingold I played in, the Vegas spingold, was noted for its very strong 60-seeds. Also, see the very last post by rogerclee of this thread : http://forums.bridgebase.com/index.php?showtopic=37625&hl= This formula results in a ~75% chance for a team with a 0.5 IMP/bd advantage to win in a 64-board match. A 1 vs a 65 seems like a 1.0 IMP/bd advantage, but I am not certain a 32 is really 0.5 better than a 65.

A team was added to the 0-1500 Spingold bracket after they carelessly forgot to pre-register. So 12 were eliminated.

The question becomes: would you rather be the 32 seed and face a 3-way with one survivor with the 64 and 65 seeds, or would you want to be the 31 seed and face the 33 seed in a head-to-head match? My intuition tells me that the 32 seed would have a (much) easier path to round two. And, that seems counter to the objective of seeding. Not clear to me that it's better to be 32 than 31. Even if you were known to be exactly a 65% favorite to win a match against each of the other teams in your 3-way, the probability of winning both matches as a 65-35 favorite is just 42%. I don't feel a 32 is more than 65% likely to beat a 64/65 -- the mini-Spingold takes out a lot of chaff. Adding in the greater chance of winning on IMP quotient makes it better than 42%, but it hardly seems significantly better than the roughly 50% chance you have as the 31 seed vs. the 33. Anyway, even if there were some inequity in being 31 vs. 32, it doesn't really matter when you consider that nobody really cares about round 1 victories, but about who wins the event. 32 plays 1 and 31 plays 2 in round 2, and both are likely to lose, so it's good to put the 3-way in a place where it's unlikely to matter. I would say that a slight inequity in having a mid-seed advance to day 2 is far better than having an inequity with a top seed advancing to day 2.

MFA, I definitely agree with your philosophy to ignore the field when you have a clear judgement advantage. For example, I almost never bid Stayman with 4333 pattern, even though that might be slightly anti-field. However, I am convinced that it is a significant advantage to bypass Stayman with 4333. There are far more hands where you get a better score from avoiding the 4-4 fit/not telling the defense about opener's pattern/not letting them double Stayman for a lead-director than by finding a 4-4/5-4 fit which plays a trick better than notrump. For this situation, though, it's not clear at all that Stayman is best here. You're essentially gambling that opener has a fit (around 50-60%), and if you are wrong, you are going to get a bad board. In that case, if your expectation from passing is 65-70% from good declarer play / worse balancing decisions by opponents, it seems poor to risk a bad board 40-50% of the time. You seem to agree with this. I just wanted to clarify that we are not sheep -- we can and will deviate if we think it's significantly +EV -- but here, I just don't think our advantage is significant enough to deviate.

So you are using a somewhat stronger range to overcall 3♥ than I am at MP. You get to more of the games than I do when overcaller is strong, responder is weaker (I get to some games you don't when you pass instead of overcall, responder has top of opening pass range and raises). I get more 170s/140s/-50s to beat the -110s than you do when I go ahead and overcall on the lesser hands that you pass with. At MP I feel the latter category is more frequent. Your opinion may differ. Probably 90+% hands we'd agree on, the only difference is at the boundaries of our range. I'm using common sense. As intruder, I don't see the need to stick my neck out with a 3-over-3 when my partner is limited to at most a bad 12. The hand you cited is a minimum to me because it has a bunch of very poor cards that could easily be valueless -- doubleton QJ, JTx of spades. When the hand verges towards unbalanced, losers seem to be a better metric than points in this situation, and the hand you cited has 7 losers. Just changing the QJ of clubs to a more normal black king in either suit would increase the offensive strength significantly. (Obviously partner can't have a black king because we have them, but you get the idea -- he could easily have a single ace instead of all the quack crap, and now we have 9 top tricks and a hook against the non-preemptor for 10.) Also, just because I may pass 3D on a hand you'd overcall, doesn't mean I am forced to accept -110. First, sometimes they are plain overbidding and I get +200 the hard way, or +100 vs nothing. Partner can sometimes balance back in, and we can still reach a part score. And, sometimes, partner balances with double and I may even get +200 where you get only +140. So I don't agree you beat me on frequency in terms of results. You certainly get to declare more often, but that's not necessarily a win.

Moving the 6 of clubs to the 6 of diamonds is not as minor a change as it would seem. JTx AKJxxx A6 QJ looks pretty gross to me. Opposite a passed hand, a 3H overcall can't get much worse. So I don't think that's a very representative hand that you should be using for your argument to pass. Even if partner could very well have some horrible piece of tripe that doesn't fit, I feel game is percentage. Almost any reasonable hand with 6 hearts (the above is definitely on the bottom end, with potentially no working black suit cards and the biggest side value in the enemy suit), most minimum primish hands with 5 hearts make game at least playable. And if partner has a max? You're likely cold. Not every game you bid has to make. I think it's ok to reach a no-play game some of the time if, by doing so, you avoid missing a cold game more of the time. And you even have some vig : sometimes you reach a bad game, but they misdefend.

I'm not trying to determine whether it's easier or harder to bid the game at my table or yours. (Although, some Souths might not have made a mixed raise because "I had too few points".) Saying it's okay to miss a cold game because "you don't have enough points" is like saying it's okay not to bid game because "you don't have enough heffalumps'. Last I checked, we were being scored upon how many tricks we take, not about how many heffalumps or ZARs or whatzits we had. At some point, people have to stop thinking about "points" and start thinking about tricks. The South hand can take tricks with hearts as trump. So what if it's not so good for 3NT?

Not getting to game with 22 of the 34 relevant HCP and a 10-card trump fit is the end of the world in a good event. This hand shows the importance of not thinking in terms of points when hands are unbalanced. You need to think about playing tricks, fit, and honor location. To borrow a phrase, talking about high-card points in an auction where there is a big fit and shape is like dancing about architecture. Kxxx xxx Kxxx xx is not even close to the same hand as Kxx xxxx xx Kxxx, but point-counters will say both are 6 HCP, 7 support point hands. FWIW, my partner and I had to deal with a 1D opener and a 1-over-1 responder. Despite the unfavorable opponents showing around half the deck in "points", we bid : P P 1D 1H 1S 3D* = mixed P 4H AP making 5.

I had the same hand, same auction. I thought 2H was auto, and bid appropriately.