bluecalm

Oh c'mon Hog, what about you do your research or something ? Almost nobody in Poland plays that you open 1D with balanced hand with 4 diamonds. It's not popular and it never was. Top polish pairs don't play it (check out convention cards if you don't believe me), regular people don't play it, if you open 1D partner will roll their eyes seeing some 2-3-4-4. Just because Jassem made arbitrary personal choice not based on how people actually play (or how he actually plays for that matter) in one of his many booklets, probably to make the system a bit more easier for foreigners, doesn't mean it's standard or best agreement nor how you define "polish club". For the record all 3 pairs representing Poland in recent BB (including Jassem -Martens) open 1C with 4D and balanced hand as do Balicki - Zmudzinski and as do 90% of players in Poland.

Club looks both standard and best imo.

If declarer has: KQx xxx Kxx AKTxx I have to hop with the ace and play spades. If declarer has: KQx Jxx xxx AKQxx I need to unblock A diamond sooner or later and wait for my tricks. The problem is difficult because with hand no 1 I can't afford to duck hearts to gather more information because it's 10th trick for declarer. Partner hearts discard will only tell me about location of J♠ so it won't solve my problems. How would declarer play with hand no1 and no2 ? With no2 he always plays hearts, with no1 maybe he would play A♣ first or maybe he would open diamonds instead of hearts. My plan is to duck now and see what happens if declarer plays another heart I take with the ace, unblock A♦ and see what partner signal. If he signals K♦ I return safe ♥ and wait for my tricks if not I try to cash A♠. I would love to see more thoughts on this hand as this is the kind of problem I have trouble analyzing at the table.

These days most of the forums are populated with bidding problems of various kind and it's completely random if those problems are posted in advanced, interesting hands or general bridge discussion session. I think the split should be along the lines of: -cardplay problems -bidding judgement problems -agreements/system (both bidding and defense) -BI, it seems to work fine -topics unrelated to actual play (general bridge discusion) Thoughts ?

[hv=pc=n&s=s5hkdaqt8642caqt3&n=saq832hat6d7cj842&d=n&v=b&b=13&a=1sp2dp2sp3cp3hd4dp5cppp]266|200[/hv] Imps. Lead: 4♥ I took in hand, played A♦ noting a 9 from RHO and ruffed low diamond unfortunately RHO had J9 (comments on play up to this point?). Now I played a trump and RHO played a 9. My line ? If you feel I made mistake before please comment :) ETA: this is really cool hand and I missed it; I think it's worth thinking about if your pattern recognition doesn't tel you correct solution instantly.

If RHO had 4th diamond then they could already defeat that game and they would as they could see that either partner has A♣ or A♠ so playing a club is safe and necessary. So LHO has 4 diamonds almost surely without A♣ as it's hard to imagine they would let you make the contract in such case. Sooo... assuming opponents are good I will work on hypothesis that they couldn't defeat the contract which leaves me with 2 choices: a)finesse Q♣ b)overtake spades and try to take 5spades and 3 hearts. a) looks like bigger chance so I play for it.

1st step being "frivolous and next being cuebids (with 3NT being S cuebid after frivolous 3S with hearts as trumps) works great imo. As to LTTC it seems it should be useful in some cases but I just don't see it coming up often enough to ever bother about it. Cuebids should be exchanged only if slam interest is established. Unfortunately many systems fail in this respect but you lose 0.25 or w/e that is of the trick on average every time you tell them where all your honors are. I don't know how Meckwell plays but it seems they somehow never are at 5 level while avoiding cuebids on game hands too. I think this style is what we should be striving for.

So your intuition is that showing very rare hand type which is strong variant of 1C is more important than investigating a stopper. It might be correct I don't have definite proof but I would be very surprised if that's the case. I polled several friends and for them it's as obvious as it is to me that 3S is stopper ask or cuebid but responder treats it as stopper ask unless proven otherwise later (ie opener bidding something after 3NT). Yes but: a)85% of our range is 12-14NT b)2nd most frequent hand which is 15+ points with clubs also need stopper ask more than bid setting hearts as trumps; opener might be 2-2-3-6 or w/e with 15hcp. c)the hand when you really want 3S as setting hearts are hands with 18+hcp and those constitute about 6% of our range in the spot. So the comparison is not ridiculous at all. I offer you nice tip how to treat those situation in a system I play my whole life and people around me play all the time. Don't call ridiculous when you are not correct :)

Polish or not, are you ok with playing 3NT without a stopper ? I mean, if it went: 1NT - 2S - 3H - p ? 3S would be stopper ask here, right ? It's the same in pc as weak nt is vast majority of opener range. Opener might have 4 diamonds, wtf Hog ? Every balanced hand with 4 diamonds opens 1C in pc.

I polled several friends and they all want this double to ask for red suit lead, probably hearts as it's the one suit opponents likely doesn't have. I ten to agree with them but I can see arguments for other meanings.

I always thought that if you play semiforcing the idea is to have natural 2C and 2D bids thus you have to pass with every 5M-3-3-2 below NT range. Am I wrong here ?

You mean just transfer ? That's one way to play it. The other is Bergen switch (3C = hearts, 3D = diamonds, 3H = clubs). I have long thought it must be the best approach, especially the switch because it doesn't have disadvantage of bidding NT from the wrong hand (ie the one behind of overcaller). Surprisingly almost nobody in Poland plays those and people are doing ok.

We play double as fit showing and nice hand here so I double.

So what do we do with: a)AKx Jxx x AKJxxx b)AQx AQxx x AJxxx playing this style ? But if we have more diamonds then partner never has four of them :(

This is unclear imo. Jxx Ax AQxx Qxxx for example has no better bid than 3S. Maybe some hands in 15+hcp with 5clubs range also should bid 3S. Next question is what pass after 4♦ mean. Most people play it as hand with doubts (and double as penalty) but implementing pass/double inversion here is better as responder has more interesting hands to show and opener is usually balanced (so if pass asks for double and direct double is encouraging then opener has more space to show various things). Also if you play pass/double inversion here it will be clear what 4H from opener shows. After standard forcing pass opener will bid 4H on some hands with Hx hearts, like the one I gave for example or some 2-2-4-5. After pass asking for double opener only bids with big reason and that reason must be ♥ support so 4♥ shows real support and by logic of the situation at least 15hcp with clubs (as 12-14 hand with support would bid 4H round before) and all other bids are slammish with hearts support. What is left to agree on in such context is what pass and pull to 4♥ by responder means. There are 2 possibilities: slam try in hearts or 2nd place to play (x AKJxx xx KQxxx for example). You may choose only one ;) Back to your original question in original context: 4H is just some weakish hand with Hx of hearts. Other bids are cuebids with H support and strong.

Interesting would be to talk separately about 1NT after 1S opening and 1H opening. Forcing nt has more going for it after 1S. Also this: Is only context of opening every 5M-3-3-2 in range with 1NT and probably only if you play it as 14-16(17) because passing those 14's doesn't look too good to me. Overall I think you have nice parlay with forcing. Chances to get to better minor partscore, vastly superior 5-3 or 6-2/6-1 hearts partial or approximately equal value 5-2 spade partial. Those pluses partially disappear if opener has 5 hearts (which is better shape to open 1NT anyway). Some top partnerships play semi-forcing in 2/1 context so it can't be that bad :) I think for many of them this is price you pay compared to forcing though because they use 2C as multimeanign bid and 12-14 5-3-3-2 hand is difficult to pack there. Apparently Meckwell thinks that even in precision context where bidding after 1NT is much easier than in 2/1 semi-forcing is still best so this option at least deserve some respect (although I once pulled all vugraph hands where they and Lauria-Verisace passed 1NT and I am pretty sure they would be better off bidding; in LV system it's not an option though as 2C is gazilli.

Isn't it possible that W still have only 4 spades from E's point of view ? Agree with stronger part, disagree with diamonds part.

So I am learning some Italian vocabulary to understand Bocchi-Duboin system and now I need add Dutch to it :) Thanks Gerben42, this is awesome !

One example of agreement of this kind: When you are discarding and want to encourage from Hxxxx we play 4th, not 5th. This way partner instantly knows when we have Hxxx if he sees the lowest spot and from 5 count will often clear too quite fast. So while it is attitude situation for us, we don't play the lowest to encourage from every holding. It seems the idea is completely alien to some people here :) Yeah, I think it's quite reasonable agreement. I have know idea if it's best though, it well might be. At least it' doesn't require much mental effort to analyze possible spot holdings.

Yeah, this is exactly my point. Maybe for example xXxx, Xxx, xX is more readable in most situations than xxxX, Xxx, xX. I was hoping someone could offer some insight/analysis of that because I don't really know how to start thinking about it to arrive at some useful conclusions.

So do you play attitude or count here ? We discussed it and generic rule for us seems to be "if declarer showed a lot of cards in side suits in the bidding then we give count, otherwise attitude". This for sure apply after 3level preempts and 2 suiter openers. I am not sure about 2level openings. Do you care to share your thoughts on this exact situation ? (I mean, what signal would you give here ?)

Yes, that's why I posted it in this forum because again I am not interested in what is practica in B/I/As or pickup partnership. I am interested in what the best agreement is in situations where: a)we give count b)distinguishing between xx and xxxx might be both difficult and important (which for example isn't the case after high preempts or 2suiter openers, where playing the lowest card is almost always readable) i agree with that 100%. Again, I the thread is about what the best agreement is and not what is practical in pickup/non serious partnerships. Interesting. I was under impression that most players who use standard carding give even count with 2nd best. Am I incorrect here ? I feel I need a break from posting because I easily get annoyed lately but your reasoning is just incorrect. It's not "therefore", it's only correct to play the lowest if that card allows you to solve the most situations at the table. This may well be the case or it might not be. Some great players I know, play 2nd from xxxx in those situations, others play low. I don't know the answer to the question which agreement is better so I make this thread here. I don't want to sound mean but what about thinking about this problem for a bit instead of giving generic, not suitable for this thread advice about what is practical in casual play when you don't have specific agreements. This forum sadly lacks discussion about signalling which world class pairs use. Most threads about the matter are reduced to generic advice for I/A players. I try to dig a bit deeper here and discuss the best way of playing, please don't reduce that discussion to something it wasn't intended to be. All is nice except you want partner to continue clubs. In fact if you were to guess which is the best line of defense at this point it would clearly be to try to cash another club because if partner switch to say diamonds, the club loser will disappear on hearts, as we don't hold the queen. The only problem is that you don't want partner to continue clubs if declarer has stiff in the suit but you really really want him to continue clubs if declarer is xx. Now, how do we work that one out to give us the biggest chance of getting it right ?

Yes, A from AK and that's it. We generally give attitude but in situations where count is clearly (!) useful we give count. Here I am not sure even with attitude, we see that partner needs to cash K♣ as we don't stop hearts but we don't know if declarer is ruffing club or not. I would have doubts which card to play playing attitude. I recognized it as count situation though but still the problem remains which card is the best to play from xxxx while giving count. I think players who use std signals use 2nd spot there ? Maybe in UDCA also one could use other spot than the lowest from xxxx.

I am sorry, maybe I got carried away but I got really annoyed about "giving lessons" quote. Explaining your style which might be completely alien to your opponents is not giving lessons, talking about "general bridge knowledge" in that situation aren't lessons either. I hate this attitude - people who think their intuition and habits are expected to be treated as knowledge and explaining it are "lessons". Also I didn't call him a cheat. I said what he is doing is mild form of cheating and if he continue to do so is straight up cheating. I probably should have used expression: "foul play". Even players who try to be ethical foul from time to time but deliberately doing so is borderline cheating at best. I am sorry for my selection of words though I should've be more careful and less emotional about the issue.

Standard leak of standard. If you are going to play this system the best is to jump to 3C and partner taking into account that you could have 4 or even 3 cards (AQxxxx AKx x AKx). So temporary solution is to bid 3C an hope partner bid 3D knowing what hands 3C contains. You can't play standard being forced to jump 3C on various trashy 3-4 cards club holding and have partner assuming you are always 5-5 because you usually aren't.