Wackojack

[hv=d=w&v=n&w=sj9763ha6dk743cq6&s=s54h97dj96caj10542]266|200|Scoring: IMP P 1NT P 2NT P 3NT [/hv] The 1NT was alerted as 12-14. The 2nt response was alerted as a minor suit take out. Partner leads 3♥ to 7 Ace and 4. You return the 6♥ to declarer's jack and partner's king. Partner returns 8♥ to declarer's queen, dummy discarding ♠4 and you 3♦. Declarer then plays ♣9, partner following with the 7 and dummy plays the 2. You have a very simple choice? What is it and why? Would your assessment of your partner's experience and ability make any difference to your choice?

Hi Jillie, Getting away from the specifics of the example hands and after reading this thread with interest, I have been musing why you hate jumps in a minor. It seems to me to be "system" problem. If we have a 6 card minor suit and an opening hand which is less than a game force, then all we have are 2 bids to describe this range of hands. Either we open 1m and rebid 2m, or we open 1m and rebid 3m. Some hands as a "least of evils" evaluation we may be able to shoe-horn into the no trump range, but we still have a huge range of unbalanced hands with only 2 bids to describe them. You can overcome this particular problem by playing a strong club system or by playing 2 levels of strong bids (Acol style) If this seems like a bad idea (for other compelling reasons), then how about doing this: Give up the weak 2♦ bid and replace it with a multi 2♦ showing a weak 2 major suit opening or a near game hand in a minor, thus providing 3 levels of opening bids below the 2♣ game force. This (with some variations) is quite popular in my part of the world (UK). Is a multi legal in NZ?

Took the words out of my mouth

Standard methods should get you to: 1♠ 2♦ 3♠ 4♣ 4♥ 4NT RKC say 0314 5♣ 5♦ Q ask 6♣ ? yes + K♣ At this stage South can picture North to have: ♠ AKQxxx or better ♥ A(xxx) ♦ (xxx) ♣ K(xxx) where some of the x's may be Q or not there. 12 tricks assured. 13 if North has Q♦ or 13 likely if North has ♦xx. Is there a way to find out? Possibly by bidding 6♦ which must be showing AK to a number of ♦s. North might now bid 7♠ holding the Q♦. With the doubleton actually held probably too much of a leap into the dark to bid 7♠. OTOH south might have gambled 7♠ on the basis that at the very worst the grand depends on the diamond finesse. Certainly if you were looking for a swing you could bid the grand

Neat :) Didn't consider a fork. Nice analysis. Nice but wrong, see edited post above. But thanks, I'll take compliments where I can get them. :D After the last diamond goes on the Ace of hearts you will be in dummy with: ♥x♦QJx opposite ♠KJ7 ♣10. If you use up your trump you will need the ♠Q to fall on the King which is unlikely. Better chance is an end play in diamonds. Play ♦Q and if the Ace is not in the same hand as the remaining master ♥ then over the ♠KJ must either play to dummy's master diamonds or into the ♠KJ. If the ♦A is under the ♠KJ then at least you will be given a free finesse in spades. If when opps lead a trump at trick 2 and the 10 in your hand holds, you can play the same way but you will have 2 clubs in your hand with a 5 card end postion. So you possibly have a better option of playing spades by force. Making when 4-4 or the Q comes down in 3.

Run 10♥, then finesse (if not covered) and repeat. Looks like this wins with QJ stiff in either hand or QJ9x or QJxxx with LHO. Also wins with 3-3 distributions except QJ9 precisely with RHO. This is still better than just 3-3 or QJ stiff in either. It also strikes me that a clever RHO with QJ9 might in any case win the finesses with Q and J. No ..... forget that, because assuming RHO led a spade from QJx(x) then she cannot return another spade without giving a trick, so must return a heart. Now with QJ9 say RHO returns the 9 after winning with the Queen then its a tricky decision. Looks like restricted choice so you win and get back to your hand and finesse. So you still lose to QJ9. However RHO might not play you for the 10♠ and feel it safer to return a small spade. The you are home

There is no point in making an artificial bid unless you believe that partner will know that it is artificial. That does not mean that you have a pre-agreement. Thus with this ruling you can take advantage of your less experienced opps and not explain to them that for example your cue bid of their minor is showing 5-5 in the majors which to your expert partner you would expect to understand. Surely to restore equity it is incumbent on you to alert to your opps what this bid means. This ruling is bad.

I don't know 2/1 that well, so imagine I am your pick-up partner. 1. Invitational 2. Game force 3. Definitely not passable 4. Could have 5 GIB is supposed to play 2/1 and I am not sure if it plays 1. as invitational

Pumped storage schemes are excellent for "peak lopping" and are designed to respond within a few seconds. As an aside, if after say a big football match, everbody decides to switch on their electric kettles, the "TV pick-up" has to be met very quickly otherwise many will be blacked out completely. The reason pumped storage hydro power is normally in mountainous areas is that power output is directly proportional to the "fall". Basins in a flat landscape wont give you many Megawatts for your money. Of course the net energy from a pumped storage power station is negative. The power that you use to pump the water up a level exceeds what you get back because of the efficiency losses. What you get out of pumped storage is fast response to sudden changes in demand and you flatten out the demand curve. As pointed out by Rik, nuclear power operates most economically and conveniently on a continuous basis. This is called "base load". Thus nuclear power at off-peak times can advantageously be used to pump water up a level for hydo-electric generation at peak times. In theory wind turbines could be used in exactly the same fashion. However, using them for pumped storage hydo power is a "heavy" solution. It would need extensive and environmentally damaging civil engineering, whereas using them to produce hydrogen would not have such an impact. Quote hrothgar Posted on Nov 26 2008, 08:39 AM There are some intriguing suggestions that we should decommission some aged numclear power plants by turning them into pump storage systems. (Basically, you dig a giant pit where the power plant used to be and use the existing turbine infrastructure. Hydro plants are (conveniently) located next to rivers for cooling, so there is even a conveninet source of water) Unquote No way. Hydro and steam (nuclear power is run by steam) turbines are entirely different in design and orientation. Also the fact that nuclear power stations are on low lying sites on river estuaries or the coast is a wrong for pumped storage. Moreover if you de-commision a nuclear station without replacing it with another base load station you wont have the power available to pump the water. Sites that already have nuclear power stations that have come to the end of their life should be replaced with new nuclear power stations. Where else are you going to put them?

Yes, there is some truth in what you say. However, 1. If you have your wind generators scattered over a sufficient geographical area, and all feeding into a common electricity grid, then there will always be at least some wind generators providing power. Thus even if we ignore hydrogen produced by surplus wind generation, we should be able to safely have more than 10% of our electricity produced by this means. 2. If we can build more wind generators and get into a hydrogen economy, we have a bonus. At off peak times, which incidentally can be as little as a third of peak demand, we have a huge potentioal to increase the utilisation of the installed windpower, by electrolysing water to produce hydrogen. Ok you might give me a scenario of a large anticyclone over Northern Europe where UK, Ireland, Holland, Denmark, Germany, Skandinavia are all becalmed. However, the European electricity grid is interconnected to the whole of Southern and Eastern Europe. Thus we should argue for a greater rather than a lesser proportion of wind power. We also might put in solar generation in to North Africa and connect it to the European grid by dc cables. Iceland too with its abundance of thermal energy could be likewise connected. (and thus helping its broken economy)

An alternative to producing hydrogen from solar is to producing it from wind which as Gerben noted has the lowest CO2 impact. Wind is particularly more attractive in the higher latitudes such as UK and Northern Europe. Build more wind farm and at non peak times in the demand curve for electricity the excess can be used to electrolyse water to produce hydrogen. If a viable hydrogen infrastructure could be introduced it should be environmentally better than a battery infrastrucure.

A partnership say agrees to use the response of 3M to 1NT as showing a singleton in the suit and 5-4 in the minors. Lets call it (for the sake of brevity) the Walddk convention. Accordingly that partnership should recognise that there has now to be another forcing bid that sets the trumps in order to ask for key cards. Ok TT could fulfill that need. TT is now an adjunct to the Walddk convention. Should not beginners learn Walddk before they learn TT?

With strong 5332 hands, Texas is no good to you. Thats what GIB has just been cured of doing after complaints. Agreed 1NT-2♥-2♠-4NT should be quantitative, but I bet most non experts who play Texas would still take 4NT in this sequence as key card. If you really want to find 3 card support and then ask for aces with this type of hand, then why not rebid a 3 card minor (partner to take it as 4) and then bid key card if partner shows 3 card support for your major. If inconveniently, partner raises your minor, you can still cue bid. Additionally, for many of us 3♥ and 3♠ are both used for other things. Also, it gives additional auctions that can be useful. For instance, in one partnership of mine, here are our transfer slam options. 1N-2♦-2♥-4♥ - Non-forcing RKC (opener passes with a bad hand for slam, shows keycards otherwise) 1N-2♦-2♥-4NT - A 1N-4N quant. raise, but with 5♥. 1N-4♦-4♥-4NT - Forcing keycard for ♥ 1N-4♦-4♥-Cue - Self sufficient heart heart suit opp. xxx or Hx, strong slam interest Yes agreed that these follow-ups do add something significant. The lesson here then is that agreeing to play a convention is useless unless you have agreements on the follow-ups that actually bring something extra.

Over the few years now that I have been reading this forum and learning from the contribuions, I have noticed derision given to Gerber and Flannery (the G and F words) Isnt it time another forbidden word should be added to that list? The "T" word. It is an artificial transfer bid of 4♦ or 4♥ in response to an opening bid of 1NT. It is designated to have no interest in slam. Standard systems already have 2 other ways of saying the same thing. NB 1. 1NT -2♥-2♠-4♠ and 1NT-2♦-2♥-4♥ or 2. 1NT-4♠ and 1NT-4♥ non transfer and slam interest are 1NT-3♥ and 1NT-3♠ Texas Transfers (Its no good I have to use the word) are learned by beginners where the scope for accidents are enormous for zero possible gain. I know that in lieu of the redundancy offered by the use Texas transfers, knowledgable players use 1NT-3M for different purposes. Significantly these conventions dont have a name, so beginners do not learn this. At least not to my knowledge. Defenders of Texas tranfers will say that it "right sides" the contract at the same time as reducing the risk of opps finding a sacrifice. OK so it is just possible that after 1NT-p-2♦-you get an intervention of say 3♠ which is then raised to 4 when had you responded 4♦ the opps would have been silenced. But OTOH 1NT-4♥(natural) would in similar circumstances silence the opposition and might even be the best side to play the contract. One thing I can't help noticing is that useless conventions have names and useful conventions don't.l

Whats the rule of 15?

I cant see a double squeeze. If LHO has guarded Q♣, K♥ as well as ♠s, then he can be squeezed. Maybe he foresaw this happening to him if he led a trump and to forestall this tried underleading Kx. Nevertheless, I'll go for LHO not having Q♣. So go up with ♥Ace, draw 3 rounds of trumps ending in dummy, and then play a small club to the 10. This picks up a quite likely 4-1 split.

Thanks I am a little wiser now but not much. Perhaps sometimes in order to please partners and not to seem a stick-in-the-mud, we agree to play conventions when natural methods are either just as good or better. Maybe Suction methods are superior. For me though, the jury is still out. Incidentally, I have agreed to play Suction defence to 1NT with one partner. It hasnt come up yet, and all I can say so far is that it should be fun when it does come up.

Hi Jilly, Back to basics. Have you worked out why you want to play inverted minors in the first place? What does it bring to your bridge game? Before you decided to play inverted minors, did you get some bad results that you think this gizmo will put right? Out of the very rare occassions that inverted minors apply, what proportion of them would you do better than normal raises? Good idea to know about inverted minor suit raises but its another thing deciding to use them.

Could strong club posters explain why they find this defence easy and which defences they they would find most difficult? This is why I asked the question. I would like to know the most effective defence against a strong club. Edit addition: Just read Askolnik's post who seems to be advocating constructive transfers against Polish but not against Strong. To my simple mind a transfer gives one extra bid to the opps and not two. Presumably against the Polish club the constructive extra bidding space for the defence is felt to be worth the extra room given away. Whereas against the strong club destroy destroy is paramount. Is this the argument? The way it appears to me is that overcalls at the 2 level are more destructive than those at the one level so it makes sense to show 2 suiters at a suitable low level. Is the argument that overcalls at a low level are best to be ambiguous so as to have most destructive effect? Thus the recommendation of suction type bids.

I play this defence to a strong club with a few partners at my local club. I dont know where it came from or if it has a name. Opinion's please? dble = ♥ +♠ 1♦ = ♥ 1♥= ♠ 1♠= ♣ 1NT = ♣+♦ 2♣ = blacks 2♦ = reds All other bids natural single suit Would this defence be appropriate against other artificial club systems such as Polish?

What the kibber said was rubbish. A related question though. How does one obtain bridge judgement? When to overcall, sacrifice, ask, tell, hand evaluation etc. Here is an incomplete list not in any particular order that might help (and me too): Have the desire to improve Get a list of "must not do's" Allow your partner to use judgement by describing your hand Watch viewgraph intelligently Use this forum intelligently Read books on bridge judgement Get to understand the underlying principles of bidding theory (and that has nothing to do with what system you are playing) Maybe the first and last on the list are the most important

I was kibbing this hand and was critical of Wayne. The reverse (although sub minimum) can sometimes pay off if you find you can get to 6♣ when you otherwise would not if you open 1NT. OTOH a response of 3♣ after the reverse to 2♦ has no possible advantages in the absence of any agreed Ingberman or similar gadgets. Then surely 3♣ can reasonably be taken as showing minumum preference. After all there is a ready alternative of 2♠ that should keeps all options open. In all partnerships and in particular pick-ups, one should strive to avoid possible disasters. In the long run pragmatic bids score better than clever plunges into the unknown. Dont be the "Unlucky Expert"

FWIIW, this is Johnny Foreigner's thoughts sitting West: I know that my partner (intermediate Acol player) was taught to play 1NT rebid as 15-17. (15-16 the norm in Acol but 15-17 is gaining ground) I am going to uprate this hand to 18 particularly when I hear the 1♠ response. The 3♦ rebid I am not sure if this is meant to be natural or a general force. What do I care? My next bid is 3♠. 4♦ from partner? Not sure if this is showing 5-5 or a cue, but I think it is showing some slam interest, so I will give a courtesy cue of 4♥. 4♠ from p? Shall I try 5♣? No I cant get the info I want with this bid. Slam looks at least 50% if partner has 2 key cards, so I wheel out RKC. Quote "Also I play the 2N rebid as GF, which perhaps argues against upgrading too many 17 counts to fit the rebid (and even so can occasionally get you too high), but makes the subsequent continuations a bit easier." I cant believe you are serious 1-eye. This would lead to 3NT contracts on mundane 23 points.

Open 2♠, its too tempting not to. If you dont open this then you must pass throughout.

Hand evaluation. If evaluating the outcome of various hand scenarios with partner is either too difficult or inconclusive. You can look at the losing trick count. That points to bidding 4♠. The 18 count with not only 2 aces but also a KQ to go with one of the aces makes it clear to me that 4♠ would normally be the clear winner. The other day in a tourney I had: ♠ AJ1086 ♥ K4 ♦ 9 ♣ AQJ83 The bidding playing 4 card majors was p p 1♠ (2♣) 2♠ p ?. Pros and cons for bidding 4♠. Bad news only 15HCP. Good news 5-5 with decent cards in long suits and 5 losers (perhaps saying the same thing) Bad news opp intervened over my hand. I decided on caution because of the overcall and bid 3♠. Partner passed and came up with a dead min hand ♠ 9752 ♥ Q1095 ♦ 8754 ♣ 5 When spades split 2-2 making 10 tricks was straight forward and we lost a few imps on the hand. True partner had no wasted values but nevertheless a combined 17 points and game is 50% or just better. I dont think I am just resulting. Oh in case anybody asks its love all and 5♦ looks like 2 off.