Thymallus

If you cannot tell, after half an hour at a poker game, who the fish is ..... it's you.

"Bounce" by Matthew Syed (a book that sets out to debunk the idea of talent with respect to sports and is well worth reading) and "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell suggest that 10,000 hours of purposeful practice, i.e study, teaching and serious play with critical analysis are required to reach true expertise in a given pusuit. This equates to approx 3 and a half years of 8 hours a day 7 days a week, 365 days a year bridge. It's not hard to see why this is nearly impossible to achieve if you start in your 40s.

For all those who think they are not talented I suggest they read "Bounce" by Matthew Syed. He puts forwards a clear and cogent argument that there's no such thing as talent, all you need is hard work, good training and a lot of purposeful practice. Sadly I suck at bridge because I am deficient in all 3. My cynical elderly father says that "The one thing you learn from experience is that you ... don't learn from experience."

I have been wanting to contribute something to the forum that has been so helpful to me in learning to play the game. I find it helpful to look at my mistakes and try to eliminate them yet there is relatively little discussion of errors here; most posts are looking for the right way to do things rather than analysing how and why we get stuff wrong. I wondered about writing a pastiche, a "Muck these hands up with me" sort of blog. Playing in a robot express duplicate I finally found a hand that annoyed me so much I offer it up here. Sitting west in the following hand [hv=pc=n&s=sqt85h4dt65ckq963&w=sak4hkq872d72ca74&n=s963hjtdakq9ct852&e=s972ha9653dj843cj&d=n&v=0&b=1&a=ppp1np2dp3hp4hppp]399|300[/hv] The A♦ was led from north and I duly lost 1 ♠ and 2 ♦ tricks. There didn't seem much that I could have done differently so I settled back to wait for an average-ish score. What I actually got was 20%. There were 8/10 pairs playing in 4♥ and 5 of these had made an overtrick. From a defensive point of view I have found it very helpful to see how this happened. 2 pairs played AKQ♦ and promoted the J♦ in dummy 1 defensive pair doubled a contract of 3♥ then did the above the next north played 2 rounds of diamonds and then 3♠ so south went up with the Q♠ to promote the J♠ 2 norths played 2 rounds of ♦ and then declarer cross ruffed and cashed his winners coming down to an ending with just AK4♠ in his hand but south discarded down to Q 10♠ and K♣ so dummy's J♠ came good. Sad to say that I became so obsessed with not promoting cards in dummy that later on I failed to cash a defensive winner twice in order not to promote a card in dummy and let a contract make that should have gone down 2 .. a hand so shameful I cannot bring myself to post it. The messages though are 1) that one needs to beware of gratuitously promoting / unguarding potential winners in dummy. 2) it is astonishing how easy it is to make such mistakes. When declaring just running the winners out allows the defence the chance to mess things up. Here 2 souths kept a redundant K♣ to defend against a squeeze that didn't exist.

Sorry I can't have made myself clear The competition was a nationwide simultaneous event, not a simple club night. If it had been a club night then I am sure I would have done exactly as you suggest. But for a proper competition I felt it was not right to ignore what happened. John

Playing last night at the ftf club in the nationwide sim the opps bid thus RHO 1♥ LHO 4♣(alerted RHO then pulled out a bidding sheet, ran her finger down it to see what the right response was before bidding 4♥ despite p shaking his head to encourage me to do nothing I felt that we should call the TD who told us to play the hand, which ended up with them completing the sequence to 6 H which made. TD then said she would adjust to an average plus for us. I was just wondering if that was right? John

Why not open with 1♣ as south? 11 points 4315 shape so an easy spade rebid at the one level despite only 11 points. I imagine p would have responded 2 or 3 NT. John

Non vul v vul in 4th seat I held ♠KQT95 ♥QJ62 ♦93 ♣76 Bidding went LHO 1NT (12-14) Partner X (16+ or other strong hand) RHO 2 ♣ I figured, I don't like double since I don't have diamonds and we haven't discussed this sort of auction (scared of a cock up!) I didn't like to go straight to 3 N .. 4 of a major might be better I didnt like to bid 3 ♠ since this would use up lots of space and shut out the hearts. So I bid 2♠ thinking that p would read this as a free bid and therefore a game try Needless to say he passed and we made 10 tricks for a rock solid bottom. What should I have bid? double I suppose. Thanks in anticipation John

Last time I posted there were lots of helpful answers which cleared my thinking temporarily .. at least until the clouds returned. This time I held with no one vul ♠T87 ♥AQ6 ♦AK54 ♣876 P dealt and passed as did RHO. I opened 1 ♦ LHO bid 1♠ and partner Doubled. Now I felt I had no good bid. Assuming p had made a negative double I felt that bidding 1N was out (no spade stopper), bidding 2 ♦ was out (only 4 cards) so I had to choose between 2 ♣ or 2 ♥. I feared (irrationally probably) that 2♥ might be taken as more positive than 2♣ so bid 2♣. P went straight to 3N and was doubled ... going one off. LHO had 5 spades and A clubs P held ♠K2 ♥753 ♦JT98 ♣KQJT so what should I have said in response to the Double of 1♠? Thanks in anticipation John

Thank you very much for the helpful replies. Having thought and reflected upon this I can summarise the following learning points for myself 1) Apply the KISS principle (Keep It Simple Stupid!) Thus when I am tempted by what seems like a clever bid I should stop and see whether there isn't something blindingly straightforward that's better! 2) With the SAYC 1 club bid opening a response of 1 N implies a club holding (doh , but for an acolite this is something of a revelation!) 3) Personally I lean over backwards to avoid bidding NT as responder and perhaps that is wrong. I should not be averse to it when it is the most descriptive bid available.

Having been brought up on 4 card majors and weak Nt this sort of hand makes a fool out of me more often than I'd like so advice please. Playing in an indie with us vul I hold ♠862 ♥A4 ♦AQ8 ♣95432 P deals and opens 1♣ the opps pass throughout I assume this is a SAYC 1♣ and so this is the sort of hand I feel very uncomfortable with. I don't like raising clubs since this may be one of those 3 Club holdings in p's hands. I don't want to bid NT since I may have a good holding if p has long clubs so I compromise with 1♦ at least this way I will find out what p has. He answers 1♠ so I think Now .. p has 5 clubs, 4 spades, I have an 8 loser hand in support of clubs so I can raise to 3 ♣ and effectively limit my hand. p bids 3 N and we go off 3 for minus 300 and 8% His hand was ♠AKJ7 ♥K6 ♦9632 ♣QT8. Much misery sets in and I stumble from one catastrophe to another. Strange thing .. last week I played this indie and came 2nd out of 300 this week after further tragedies i was 298th! so I'm overall an eventful average! Perhaps I should stick to pairs. So how should I have bid the hand to avoid the disaster?

Re-reading Mike Lawrences programme "Counting at Bridge" I came across a hand in which he stated "pre-empting with a 4 card major is a poor idea." Usually he is extremely good at explaining his thinking but this statement just sits there unsubstantiated. Is it really a bad idea? .. after all how often holding a weak 2 minor hand does your side lose from not showing the major compared with how often your side gain from messing up the opposition? For example ♠8 ♥9653 ♦AKJ753 ♣J6 sitting in first seat non vul v vul looks like a pretty attractive pre-empt to me. Thanks John

The "Think with Fred" session was a jaw dropping demonstration of how to play the game. His clear description of the mechanics counting, how to picture partner's and opps hands and plan accordingly was first class. Sadly I could not watch it all and was therefore delighted at Maureen's e-mail transcript of the whole session. This was a truly superlative way of teaching and I would exhort other experts to take the plunge and use it too. John

The name is derived from the Acol Street, in London, which was the address of the small bridge club frequented by the developers of the system.

The wrinkle our family had for "Oh Hell" was that the total number of tricks bid for was not allowed to equal the total number of tricks available so someone is always going down on every deal!