paulhar

Sorry everybody, this was me posting without engaging my brain. Clearly if the teacher wants the students to be able to scroll down and see expert opinions, he'll post them himself. If he doesn't do that, the rest of the experts should stay away because the teacher will answer the question himself when he's ready. After he has posted the answer, if somebody (an expert) disagrees with it or thinks something was left out, I think the best way to handle this is to E-mail the teacher privately rather than to post it. Post only if the teacher ignores your E-mail. Of course, the beginners & intermediates should feel free to post anyway since this is their forum and the teacher should be more than happy to clear up any misconceptions. Opinions?

Edited: forgot to mention one of the club ruffs! Typed too fast. :) I don't even want to think about a 4-1 trump split! You need to ruff clubs to just use the diamonds, and you also have to ruff a dimaond, so I think you're committed to playing for 3-2 trumps. Win the CA at trick 1, play DA, DK (pitch spade), D ruff. If diamonds are good, ruff a club, heart to the board to ruff another club, heart to the board to draw trump, pitching the losing spade from hand. If diamonds are not good, but are 4-2, ruff another diamond, lead dummy's trumps, and lead the spade Queen. If it wins, spade to ace, draw the last trump, claim. This line needs: Trumps 3-2, diamonds no worse than 4-2, and one of the following: D3-3, DQ doubleton, or spade King onside.

Actually, I love your play problems when I have time to work on them. Play problems with only a couple of solutions where you have to compute all the percentages for all the possibilities are far less interesting. Both of the problems you presented today (Nearly hopeless & don't get engaged) offer a myriad of possibilities and it's possible that someone that doesn't find the best line just never thought of that particular possibility. Eventually, people do answer, so I don't think they're too esoteric. 3NT certainly is a lot more interesting to play than 4H! Actually, I was probably wrong about the Flannery players because in my experience (I play it) the opponents hardly ever lead a spade, fearing ruffs in the short hand. I guess, unlike the brave intermediate on the B/I forum, I don't have any problem posting the first response. I know in advance that I am quite unlikely to find the best possible line. (Now everybody else knows it too :) ) In essence, the people responding to my post are giving me a high-level free lesson! :D With luck, you can collect all these posted hands, verify that some of the answers you get are really the best solution and come out with your own Adventures in Card Play! :)

This one seemed harder than 'nearly hopeless!' I think I have to hope that West is 0-5-4-4 without the ten of clubs. I lead the CK off the board. If a club or a heart comes back, I eventually or immediately ruff a heart and lead a trump. East must split, but I have him outnumbered and with the C10 falling, can just force out his last trump. If West returns DQ, I have to use the diamonds to pull trump. Ruff it (I guess with the 10 is better technique, although it's hard for me to see that it matters), cash a club (if LHO didn't duck the first one), ruff the heart, and lead diamonds, throwing clubs. If RHO ruffs high, I overruff, and trump a club with the nine, intending to lead more diamonds. Other plans seem not to work. Leading diamonds early lets East pitch clubs and get a club ruff in some scenarios. Let's try D ruff, run C8, CK to LHO's A. LHO leads a heart and I don't think you can pick up the trumps anymore (Diamonds aren't good yet.) Leading another trump - East splits and it seemed to me that on most lines now East could either get a club ruff or effectively tap you with a heart after West ducks a club.

Seems like people are not posting to your play problems! OK, I'll take a chance... (I had to make sure I was in the right forum to be allowed to post first :) ) It doesn't seem so hopeless to me. Duck the spade (maybe opening leader has the SK and is hoping partner has the jack.) If the jack wins, promote diamonds for 9 tricks. (I'm probably used to weaker defense than you are.) When this doesn't work, win the next spade (or whatever) and promote diamonds. If they duck this once, I realize I'm in a heap o' trouble if they duck it again, so I play ace and a heart hoping that I can take 3H, 3C, 1D, 2S before they untangle their five tricks. If they win the diamond and cash the fourth spade, I have to hope that they don't break up the entries for a heart-club squeeze. (I'm throwing a heart and a club on the 3rd and 4th spades. I think only a club breaks it up.) If they lead a heart, I can win the Ace, cash diamonds ending on the board, and hopefully take the last four clubs when the other heart doesn't show up. If they win the ace of diamonds and don't cash the fourth spade, I can guess which rounded suit to play to try to set up my ninth trick (if they didn't cash the fourth spade, I'll still have 5 clubs.) Yes, I might have started with a heart. But I support with support and I like the eventual 4H contract which rates to lose two hearts and a diamond. On a good day, all the spade losers will go on clubs (after forcing out the DA, ducking a heart, and winning the HA. - possibly with a club ruff interloped.) If the opponents are awesome enough to duck two diamonds in 4H I might need the spade finesse. This hand is a disaster for Flannery players who are wrongsided.

OK, I was one of the ones who answered this poll with the auction as it was before it was edited, i.e. 4s p p ?. Here, I pass. Please subtract 1 vote from 6C and add 1 vote to pass.

Maybe this poll needs a redo - the auction implies 4S was by LHO but the initial thread name implies that partner bid 4S. I'll bet that some people voted as if partner opened 4S and others voted with the auction in the text which has LHO bidding 4S. I know my answer would be different!

Does your double show 4 spades? Being law followers, we like to bid 1S on this hand and bid 2S on all minimums with 4S. I'm not sure how common this treatment is, but it has saved us on more than one occasion (which is pretty good when we play twice a year) I might have bid 1S even without the agreement, hoping not to be raised to game :( If it denies spades, partner has to have clubs and I'd just bite the bullet and bid 'em again over 2H. What else can you do? Partner has to realize that you could hold this hand. A perfect example of your post on another thread that passing when you have no good bid isn't always wise.

BBO seems like a good spot too :(

If you didn't play GB (Good/Bad I presume) 2NT, I presume 2NT would be for the minors in a competitive auction where an opponent's major has been bid and raised. Having opened 1C with 6C and 4D, 2NT showing the minors is perfect! (P.S. is this the Scambling 2NT? ;) Maybe I should read the guide and find out.)

Wow! I was going to write a post that said just what you said, Ben, but I couldn't have said it nearly as well. I totally agree that it would be great to have a separate Beginner forum. With my simplistic-minded quizzes, if I were to post any, I presume that would be the place for them. I also agree that most of the Intermediates that post here are bordering on advanced, and I'll go one step further - some of the expert answers to the 'beginner' questions also seem to be aimed toward the top intermediates bordering on advanced. Unfortunately, I have one small problem with the quoted paragraph, which I think is true as far as a teacher presenting a play problem. Do you still think that if the intermediate player poses the play problem? If the learning player thinks he might have misplayed a hand and wants to know how he could have done better, I'm not sure he would appreciate that all of his answers came from his peers. If you agree with what I just said, then we need some way of knowing whether the play problem came from a teacher or a beginner/intermediate. New beginners & intermediate players are coming onto the forum all the time and I would not put the onus on them. There are very few teachers that might post quizzes on the board. So far, I know you have tried, I have tried, and Rado has tried. Wouldn't it be better if the teachers put on the post that only beginners were to answer? (or only beginners & intermediates if it were a harder problem?) If we said that, then you and I know that now, Rado would know soon, and if any of Maureen's BIL teachers wanted to post problems or quizzes, they would find out soon enough - after four or five experts posted, Maureen (or somebody) would let us know that this person was a teacher, and the experts would go away for that thread, and someone would E-mail the teacher with this policy (who might edit his original post to include the request for beginners only.) If we did this, then we could assume that any play problem posted that didn't specify something like 'beginners only' would have been posted by a beginner or intermediate that wants the answer from someone who knows the game far better than they do. (IMO it would be nice if none of our answers involved esoteric squeezes - it's sometimes hard enough to get beginners not to draw too many trumps) My guess (and please correct me if I'm wrong) is that this forum is for all of the following, also feel free to add to this list: (1) Beginners & intermediates to ask questions to get advice from the 'experts' (2) 'Experts' & teachers to post problems and quizzes for the benefit of beginners and intermediates (answers to come later or perhaps be on another link) (3) Anybody to announce something that might be of interest to beginners/intermediates (this one's kind of hairy - we don't want it to be a spam forum. I think it was OK to announce a free lesson on this forum but others might not. If I charged for it, I think it would be out of line to post that.) (4) Anybody to pose questions to the beginners & intermediates, where the answers to such questions will help the questioner to better serve B/I's (5) Beginners/Intermediates to discuss things with other B/I's (they should put 'experts stay away!' in the further description field). Note that these posts would be for ALL B/I's; if they wanted to talk to only certain ones, they should open a chat room in BBO.

A 2D bid gives you the advantage that you'll have something to talk about for years. If your partner opens 1D on x-x-4-5 hands, you will have taken yourself out of your 8-card fit to play in your opponents' 8-card fit.

Somebody was going to say it. I just happened to be the logged on at the time ;) Yeah, I used to do that a lot too. My favorite partner is a more devout follower of the Law of Total Tricks* than Larry Cohen himself. Opening 1S on this hand with this partner usually does no good except to make the opponents happy when I get to play 3S doubled on my 4-4 fit. (For the newer players: A simple explanation of this Law (a guideline) is to compete to the 2 level if you think your side has 8 trumps and compete to the 3 level if pushed if your side has 9 trumps. IMO it's a good guideline.

What would I do with 4-4-4-1?

Great post jtfanclub! What you are saying is quite obvious but a point apparently missed by all of us. I'd like to follow up with some more questions for you and any other brave B/I's (beginner/intermediates) willing to answer. 1. When the original quiz was posted, and you came up with your own answers at home, did you like or dislike the fact that there were other 'expert' answers waiting for you when you finished the problems? (and why?) (By the way - I don't know the answer to this - that's why I'm asking.) 2. Is it a pipe dream to expect any but the bravest B/I's to post on this board under any circumstances? While you're certainly correct that B/I's won't want to post answers, I presume that there are other topics they would want to discuss. 3. My opinion: Although there's no reason to post, there's good reason to E-mail the teacher your answers (with thinking would be good too!) Reason: The teacher needs to know what issues & misconceptions to address when posting the answer. Frequently, misconceptions are uncovered that the teacher didn't think about when posting the question. Your comments?

I pass too. Sometimes your partner is maximum and you are play 2C with 26 points, but that isn't so awful on a misfit. Especially at matchpoints.

With my wife on the American Bridge Teachers' Assoc. book committee, I can't keep up with the new books as quickly as they come in :blink: However, before this time, I used to like to pull out the Kelsey match play and quiz books out every once in a while to keep my thinking fresh.

If I were at the table, I probably would have chosen Ben's second line - lead a diamond off dummy and hope the opponents do something good for me. I'd like to think I would have led the H10 off dummy, but there's a good reason there's no 'expert' on my profile :blink: Your 2C bid brings up another tactical possiblility. This might actually be preferable! Spade to the ace and run the jack of clubs, giving the opponents two chances to mess up. (Actually, winning trick 1 with the queen of hearts, not playing an honor from dummy, enhances the chances here. No signal in spades.) First, RHO might duck the jack of clubs, trying to make life difficult, or hoping to give partner a club ruff later. Second, if RHO has king fourth of clubs, he will win and try to give partner a club ruff. This would clearly be a good development for your side as diamonds could go on clubs instead of on spades, making dimaond ruffs in dummy necessary. Thirdly, while it's unlikely that RHO will win and return a trump, he might win and play a spade from a doubleton hoping to keep diamonds open as entries for the defenders. To answer Chamaco's question, I love this last line if the club King is offside. The diamond play might prompt good defenders to ask themselves why declarer isn't playing trump or clubs and possibly come up with the right answer. This last line is more difficult to defend because running the club jack early might be a reasonable thing to do.

A few weeks ago I got on my bandwagon and tried to rally the B/I to speak more in this forum. Apparently to no avail. Would it work better if the beginners could E-mail their answers to the quizzes to the quizmaker and the userID's of the correct answerers be posted in the thread? That way nobody is afraid to answer, and some beginners get recognition. Here's another idea that might actually get the beginners (and I really mean beginners!) taliking on this forum - and once they start talking, maybe others will join in and the forum will become theirs again (despite the fact that I think it is good that a beginner/intermediate can ask a question and within a couple of hours get answers from several decent players.) Have occasional quizzes posted. Correct answers earn points based on when they were posted (first correct answer gets 5 points, then 4, then 3... or something to that effect) The first beginner (I assume that BBO can verify that the person was never self-ranked higher) to reach some number of points wins a playing lesson with some decent player, or maybe gets to play in a BBO tournament with some player worth winning, or some such incentive. The idea is that the beginners will start posting and talking to each other, and maybe it will propogate more of the same! (Same could be done for intermediates too, I guess.)

How frequently do you use the Lightner double ? Once every how many boards ? Maybe once every twenty thousand? I've been playing since 1973 and when I was young and foolish I played almost every day. I have used the Lightner Double twice. The first time was against a grand slam in hearts calling for a spade with a singleton ace. The opponents duly ruffed... The second time was just last month on BBO. I was playing in a game with some very strong players. I had the ♣AQ over an auction that started in 1S P 2C and they ended up in 6♠. I doubled and they ran to 6NT making from the club side and the whole table had a good laugh at my expense. By far I think the most useful convention (if you could call it that) is a new suit forcing over a 1-level opening bid.

Ouch! I was missing one critical piece of information that everybody else probably had - being new to this forum, I did not know that Rado wasn't a beginner. What I thought I was doing was giving information to an intermediate player asking the difference between the auctions, with some disclaimers that beginners should ignore some of this. When it appeared that I was being personally attacked for doing something reasonable, I wanted to report the post. I'm glad I didn't, for if I had been the one to pose the problem, I might have reacted quite the same way as Maureen did if nobody but experts replied. Funny thing is, more people probably know Rado than me on this forum, and its quite possible a lot of experts might have made the same mistake, thinking I was a beginner. (Hopefully my partners won't comment on that :D ) If Fred Gitelman had posed the same problems, I would have known that they were aimed at the beginners and clearly I would have stayed away. In essence, what I did was unwittingly step into someone else's class and 'answered' a question aimed for the students. It's clear that this is a pretty obnoxious thing to do if I knew that I was doing that and I can understand Maureen's unhapiness. In defense of my fellow experts (!), an oxymoron since I'm hardly an expert, they saw somethiing in my post that they thought needed correcting; if they thought I was giving bad information to the beginners, it's quite reasonable for them to correct me. And, just as clearly, this appeared to Maureen to be more obnoxious people stealing the teacher's thunder. Now that I know that Rado was playing the role of a teacher, I'll chime in too... thanks for trying. Gosh, if anybody else tries to do the same thing, I'm sure I'll do the same thing again if it's not obvious to me that they aren't a beginner. Somehow that needs to be clear. (Maybe since I don't know all the true experts, I should just keep my mouth shut :D ) Rado - please try again. I promise I'll stay away from your threads. And the experts that are won't feel the need to correct the expert that isn't. But this whole unpleasant incident would have been avoided if Rado had identified himself as a teacher or top player, or had requested that only beginners answer. The heck of it is, we're all on the same side. None of the advanced players post in the B/I forum unless they're trying to help the B/I's. Talking to intermediates on BBO is a more difficult task than in real life. At the local clubs, intermediates have never heard of splinters and all questions can be answered assuming the use of no conventions. Here on BBO, when I offered a short intermediate lesson, an awful lot of profiles were marked 'Intermediate' but there were lots of gadgets on most of their profiles. Issues came up which I was quite unprepared for - people asking about conventions that 2/3 of the intermediates play and the others would be totally confused by the answer. I tried to answer them privately in most cases because I like to cater to simplicity but it did slow things down in the lesson. I haven't quite pegged the level of a BBO intermediate yet. My own personal opinion is that most of the things posted on this forum are too complicated but I am thinking more about what the true beginner will think when he reads these threads and others are probably thinking more about the intermediates that use lots of gadgets.

I have deleted material not appropriate for this (or any other) forum. This is what's left: :D

Why 5-4-2-2? Couldn't you have a 3-4-2-4 19-count that intended to rebid 2NT until your partner bid your four card heart suit?

I know my opinion is going to be unpopular but I think you should add NMF to your arsenal if you feel you need it; i.e. you are confident with basic bidding. If you don't feel you need it, concentrate on honing the finer points of basic bidding first. OK, done with the contraversial stuff. Onto NMF. I play it. I think it will help you if you're finding it hard to bid your strong hands after partner has rebid 1NT or 2NT. Apparently decent players feel that some convention should be used because on the thread in the General Bridge Discussion forum on bidding after a 2NT rebid, I stated in the initial post, please assume NO CONVENTIONS. As many posts as not ignored my request and stated that some convention was needed. Now some of these guys are pretty good players; they should be able to get along without a convention. But they refuse to... so THEY think they need something, and NMF was a popular choice. In any event, this has been discussed before and others have said it better than I could, so, click on this link. Then, click on the link in the second post for a good explanation. (I'll repeat the link here.) THE PRIOR FORUM POSTINGS: http://bridgebase.lunarpages.com/~bridge2/...r+forcing" BEN'S SUGGESTED READING: http://www.bridgeguys.com/Conventions/NewMinorForcing.html I hope he would still suggest it or I have committed yet another faux pas :D I just looked at this link. There are some complications in the article that many (if not most) are not aware of, like this stuff about raising the NMF without stoppers. Even the clickable 'simplified NMF' is pretty complicated! Oh, my! You won't know what version of NMF your partner is playing. Don't worry too much about it. The important stuff is: You: 1 of a minor Pard: 1 of a major You: 1 Notrump Pard: 2 of the other minor (NMF - alert!) You: Support the major with 3. (Some jump with a max, some don't. If you do, partner should understand.) Bid the other major if you have 4 of them. Otherwise bid something that feels right. Your partner should have at least an invitational hand. The other important thing: You: 1 of a minor Pard: 1 of a major You: 2 notrump Pard: 3 of the other minor (NMF - alert!) Bid the same way, but at the 3 level. Tend not to bid higher than 3NT since that's a likely game. You might have bypassed a 4-card spade suit to bid 3NT so the auction 1C-1H-2NT-3D-3S is not unlikely. NMF over a 2NT rebid is game forcing. Responder, if playing NMF, can sign off in his major at the 3 level by just bidding it (1C-1H-2NT-3H.) If you are NOT playing NMF (or some other fancy convention), I think this sequence needs to be forcing. I think that most play 1C-1H-2NT-3C (same minor) as a slam try in clubs. Forget the hearts - 3NT is a signoff now and anything else is a cue-bid, encouraging your partner to move toward six clubs. Don't sweat the complicated stuff, your partners probably aren't playing it the same way anyway. Agreeing to play NMF, you and your regular partners need to discuss the differences between auctions like: 1C-1H-1NT-2D-2NT-3C, and 1C-1H-1NT-3C 1C-1H-1NT-2D-2NT-3H, and 1C-1H-1NT-3H etc. NMF gives you many more ways to bid responder's hands but it only does you some good if you have good agreements about these auctions. In general, I think most play that an auction that goes through NMF to reach the same spot is stronger than one that could have used NMF and didn't.

What is FOT?