FelicityR

I hazard a guess it's some form of entry shifting squeeze but I usually guess wrong :(

I agree it's difficult to avoid the ♠ slam. However, once you have set the trump suit with 2♠ - (3♣) I hardly think that 3♠ is the most informative bid available. It does suggest better than ♠9xx. I would plump for 3NT here. Tell partner you are an about minimum 2/1 force as responder and that you have a balanced hand and a ♥ guard. Maybe later in the bidding North - and where it goes from there is open to interpretation - may realise that the ♠ raise is based on preference in the suit as opposed strength, and settle for the NT slam instead. But, as I said at the beginning, except if you are in an experienced partnership with a lot of control bidding available (such as Precision, etc) it may still be difficult to avoid the ♠ slam.

Except if there is an obvious action you can take but you didn't, then it's unlikely you can do better. I don't see anything obvious here except South opening 1♥ which if you are playing Acol is unlikely to happen. The East/West bidding is strange to say the least. One you have to take on the chin, unfortunately, is my humble opinion.

All I have to say is that you need to discuss with your partner what 2♠ means here when she has passed in first seat, too, otherwise you are losing a bid completely. A 3♥ raise looks overtly pre-emptive once the opposition have mentioned ♠s.

If there are insufficient HCPs for a reverse, then you don't reverse: simple. Sometimes opening 1♠ will be the right thing to do, sometimes opening 1♥ will be. Though when you have a hand with like this 6♥/5♠ I would open 1♥ here as the suit is longer and better than the ♠ suit. In a ♥ contract you have two quick tricks, and in a ♠ contract just one. If you miss a ♠ fit then that's unlucky, but if you don't have a fit then it's going to be awkward to convince your partner that your ♥ are better than your ♠. Would you prefer to end up in a game, even possibly a slam, in a 5-2 fit rather than a 6-2 one?

I see this frequently at the bridge table. People who have good card sense and can play and defend reasonably accurately, but are less accomplished in the bidding stakes. You are perhaps wrong in saying that the best way to learn is by playing: the best way to learn is to play and read books or research online these days. Having a one-size-fits-all bidding sheet won't get you far as you have found out. If you are newbie to the game, even with some practice time behind you, you cannot expect to be in the optimum contract on every board. Some consolation is that this also applies to advanced/expert players, too, but percentage-wise they are more likely to be more accurate finding the right contract as their bidding skills and knowledge have been honed over many years. Enjoy the game for what is. There will be plenty of other players who have played for years and be in the same boat, so to speak, arriving in part score contracts when they should be in game, and missing slams too. It's part of the learning process. And good luck!

One of my golden rules with my partner - any partner! - is never to pre-empt them. Opening 4♥ with two outside aces is doing just that, especially when partner hasn't bid yet. The bidding might well turn into a dogfight by opening at the one level if the opponents intervene in ♠s, but what good bridge player doesn't like a dogfight and a constructive post mortem after :) Only with a passed partner would I consider 4♥ as an opener.

I couldn't agree more. An experienced partnership would have more understanding, more technique, probably a lot more bidding agreements and arrangements to cope with a hand like this. Especially when a bid is made third in hand with the opponents silent on the first round which suggests that your partner has a better than minimum hand when you have ♠109xxx ♥Qxxx ♦xx ♣Kx and 5 card support for his suit. (If you have a good fit in one suit, then the opponents should have a good fit elsewhere. And why haven't they come into the bidding? Lack of HCPs obviously. That's logical) I think this hand is more awkward to deal with if partner is opening the bidding first in hand as one opponent hasn't entered the bidding yet. Third in hand lends itself to possibly the Drury and Bergen conventions, albeit in modified forms, and as miamijd indicates a strong club opening system may handle this type of hand better but as none of these technical bidding options are available to you then there's no point in discussing them further. Irrespective of the losing trick count, my bridge grounding taught me to bid pre-emptively to a major suit game when you hold good trump support but little else outside. You are not pre-empting partner as the bid sequence 1♠ - 4♠ suggests the hand you have but I am not totally keen on the balanced(ish) 5422 shape as others have indicated. The raise is pre-emptive by its nature. I particularly like the 1♠ - 4♠ - 6♠ sequence miamijd suggested. It's a bit point blank, but it gives nothing away. But I am not apportioning blame for missing the slam, because as others have indicated your partner was unimaginative just raising your 2♠ support bid to 4♠ without investigating the possibility of slam. And, also, the question that needs to be asked is what exactly does your 2♠ bid show? Three card support with up to a poor 10 HCPs - for many - or five card support with 5 HCPs and a balanced hand for you on this specific hand. You made a decision adjusting your values accordingly.

Mildly optimistic that slam could be on, but partner has to turn up with plenty of controls in his/her hand. Partnering an inexperienced player I'll settle for 4♥ to 4♠ (as long as they understood that). With an experienced one I'll go via 2♥ - 2♠ - 3♣. It's not beyond the realms of possibility that partner has ♠Ax ♥Qxx ♦Axx ♣AKxxx where 7♣ is on. (Though personally I would open 1♣ with that hand and rebid 2NT.)

3♦ non-vulnerable; pass vulnerable. Quite happy to open the West hand with 2♦ weak either non-vulnerable or vulnerable, but for making a vulnerable overcall I (personally) need a bit more than a solid suit.

Only a robot could find the ♣Q with that hand, anyone human would have started with a small ♠ :)

Well done, Gordon.

A guess. Flower Howell is also called an Endless Howell movement, as far as I know, and 'flower' - and this is complete speculation - doesn't refer to anyone or anybody - usually women who were born at the start of the 20th century were named after a flower, and the any surname is usually Flowers. The term 'flower' is a generalised reference to the movement that goes in a predominantly circular motion, like petals of a flower. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but the Wikipedia entry for Edwin C. Howell is brief, so a hypothetical guess is better than no guess at all.

It's not quite my style :) I'm just reading - again! - at the moment Peter Fredin's excellent book, Master of Bridge Psychology. It's made me, even as a non-expert, think about our beautiful game in a different way. The not-so-obvious becomes a possibility in both the realms of bidding and play. Throughout the book, which is an easy read and well set out, some of the bids and plays are made with the intention of deceiving the opponents and encouraging them to make their own mistakes. I actually had the pleasure of seeing Peter Fredin play live on BBO with his Scandinavian friends some weeks ago and saw him make one of his deceptive plays at the table. How would you play the following suit to try to gain the maximum number of tricks (I can't remember if it was a suit contract or no-trumps). He held QJxxxx and dummy A9x. Without batting an eyelid he led small and inserted the 9. I'm sure most of us would have led the Q here. When the 9 held, one of his opponents, a Swedish world-class player with KTx over him remarked "Cute".

I bid 3♠ here. The hand feels distributional as the opponents at adverse vulnerability have supported to 3♥. Double might be the right bid, but if West now bids 4♥ both your partner and yourself are going to be in a fix. Admittedly, 3♠ feels a very slight overbid but you're at the right vulnerability. Pass doesn't even enter into the equation here, in my opinion.

Quite frankly, no. You found partner with a very good 1NT maximum rebid in Acol, with good controls, and the contract still made. High card points do not necessarily translate (as Cyberyeti says above) into defensive tricks. The other consideration to take into account is do you have enough to double if the opponents run to 2♠ which could possibly happen on a hand similar to this? I have to give credit to West for believing his partner's bid and not running with a void in his partner's suit after you double.

I found this yesterday evening and it made both my husband and myself thoroughly chuckle. A little light relief from everything that is happening in the world at the moment. 125 cartoons. Hope you enjoy as much as us :) https://www.standard.co.uk/comment/the-evening-standard-political-cartoon-by-christian-adams-a3530851.html

I am making a psychological, or perhaps in my case a psycho-illogical (:)) bid, by redoubling here. Yes, I know that it shows about 9-10 HCPs and no support for partner with a remit to punish the opponents, but as we have the top suit ♠s, I hope that partner will get the message when I bid 3♠ later in the auction. My thinking behind this is that this semi-psychic call may put the opponents off from competing further beyond rescuing the XX at the two level, and it will give partner a better idea of the strength of my hand here. Given all the increasing comments posted previously about the way to show this hand, it's not that straightforward except if you are in an experienced partnership that can show a mixed raise in the bidding, a la Bergen.

I prefer 3♠ even with a singleton honour to 4♥ (but as you said you forgot partner has a minor, too for the 2♥ opener.) 4♥ is clumsy. Whether partner will understand 3♠ as a splinter or as looking for a potential stopper for 3NT is another matter, but you're not going to stop the opponents bidding 4♠ whatever happens on this hand except if you bid an equally clumsy 4NT instead of 3♠/4♥ here.

I prefer 3♠ even with a singleton honour to 4♥. 4♥ - but as you said you forgot partner has a minor, too for the 2♥ opener) - is clumsy. Whether partner will understand 3♠ as a splinter or as looking for a potential stopper for 3NT is another matter, but you're not going to stop the opponents bidding 4♠ whatever happens on this hand except if you bid an equally clumsy 4NT instead of 3♠/4♥ here.

The big advantage of opening 1NT, whether weak or strong, is that your hand strength (12-14 or 15-17) and its shape (4333, 4432, 5332 usually) is quickly defined in one bid. Occasionally, it is necessary to open 1NT with 5422 shape, too. What players seem to forget is that 1NT, especially when played weak, is a semi-pre-emptive bid, too. I don't think I would be wrong in saying that the consensus among most, perhaps all, advanced/expert players is that opening 1NT with a five card major is de rigueur now. The advantages outweigh the disadvantages.

I'm guessing here that instead of ending up with 9 tricks assuming West led from a doubleton ♦ you ended up with 11 tricks when East fails to cash the ♦K later in the play and you get a discard on one of dummy's ♣ honours? Now that would be stupid, but given how stupid GIB was at trick two I imagine that it is not beyond the realms of possibility. I'm still trying to work out what it has to do with 'Towns in Belgium' though...

Very difficult in my humble opinion. With so few extra tricks available, and a guess in ♠s needed, too, I would play low from dummy at trick one which automatically guarantees me one trick in the ♦ suit whatever the distribution. If the defenders can clear the ♦s quickly on the first few tricks, it might give you a small indication where the honour cards in the other suits are likely to be.

Taboo. It was on Netflix and BBC iPlayer. Starring one of Britain's best current actors, Tom Hardy. Eight episodes. One of the executive producers, none other than Ridley Scott (Alien). Think Conrad's Heart of Darkness by way of a Dickensian Nordic Noir but even darker. I loved it! (But that's only a personal opinion.) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3647998/

You are right saying that the R-value has nothing to do with deaths per se, but the data used to calculate the R-value includes deaths. https://publichealthmatters.blog.gov.uk/2020/05/15/coronavirus-covid-19-real-time-tracking-of-the-virus/ As the link says, the R-value is also only one component of the transmissibility of the disease. And you also right saying the disease is more dangerous than appears due to the number of people who have mild symptoms and never get tested. Which proves that widescale testing, as that was practised in Germany in the early days of the pandemic and throughout it's development, seems one of the best ways of determining whether the disease is spreading controllably or uncontrollably.