bluecalm

While I think most people play that it's general game try (me included usually) I think it's better to play it as natural (either 5-4 with at least liht invitational values or 5-5 with any strength). At imps we are not doubling them anyway and finding our heart fit could be critical.

Why not just ask for aces and then for kings with N hand ? If it starts 2c - 2d then 3s and we are home if it stars 2c - 3h then agani, just ask for aces at one point or the other.

Interesting system you guys play there :-) I guess those are hands that - if made stronger by a Q - would jump to 3m ? :) Decent system needs a way to handle strong hands. Even the best judgement in the world won't solve those issues imo although it's fun sometimes to be torn between reversing on 2 cards, jumping on 3, or hiding your major 6 carders ;) Btw I would bid 2m on those playing 'American standard'. I think it gives the best shot at finding decent spot.

6♦ is reasonable gamble. 2♦ is completely ridiculous and I am a fan of light overcalls.

This is really very simple hand and very simple situation. Cuebid of course agrees diamonds but 3H is not yet a cuebid. It's either values to find 3NT (Ax AQJx Axx Jxxx) or cuebid in diamonds. We bid 3H, if partner bids 3NT we bid 4D clarifying that we had ♥ cuebid and no ♣ cuebid. If he bids 3♠ we again bid 4♦. Once he bid 3♦ we are never going to play 3NT with our premium support and bare ace in one of his short suits. It's not like partner is forced to bid 3♦ with 5S-4D, with stuff like: KQxxx Qx KQxx Jx he would just bid 3NT. I don't consider any aspect of this at all problematic it's seems like ABC stuff to be honest. Due to lack of space we are not always going to find the best contract here unfortunately. This is why Meckwell and their followers play double transfers so they can get one additional step in those sequencies. Here in fact partner would bid 3♣ as transfer to diamonds and we would accept with 3♦ showing 4card support he could then make a slam try futher describing his hand. It's awesome but not frequent enough to bother imo.

This is the cutoff but from other side. I think without Q♣ most would bid 3♠ anyway. If you make it: Txx xx KTxx ATxx then we are talking and I think you would have trouble finding "expert consensus"

This is "amount if hands where given card defeats the contract" not "amount of hands where given card is the best lead".

Overall results of your simulation are very similar to mine. I think letting it run on matchpoints (amount of trick taken) is better but then again, there will be more counting of cases :)

I doubt it matters but why not ? Did you count it manually going through the hands (as I am always doing) or is there any way to extract hands where it matters and look only at them ?

I have trouble believing you would prefer trump or low club as well as a diamond :)

Well, admittedly one reason he didn't open the bidding could be that he is either 4-6 in majors or has Kxx (some people hold a view that opening 2H with good 3 spades and 6hearts should be avoided, I think that they at least have a point and more probably are just right).

Yeah, I keep making this mistake because in Poland many people play that the only way to get to 3nt is to use puppet which is ridiculous, I sometimes forget that there is middle way. But it loses space so you can't put all the 5-4 hands in there and you have less space for slam exploration. All in all the difference is probably small if you don't bid puppet automatically on hands which should be bid by 2nt - 3nt.

I find the lead of A♠ as clear 1st choice.

With 5 card suit instead of 6carder it's even closer dd (J♥ - 362, low - 356). It would be really nice to have a feature which counts various ♥ configurations so we could improve on dd analysis but for now the only way is to just go manually through the hands and count them :( Also matchpoint analysis could be better than imps analysis, because then even on smaller sample the difference will be more apparent. Unfortunately those takes forever and I can't run too many cases. I made 1000 hand simul with 5 carder (xx JT87x Kxx xxx) and the results were: J♥ - 768 7♥ - 725 4♥ - 723 I went through first 250 hands, and there were following situations: -Q9x - xx, would declarer play 9 or Q ? (probably Q more often) x2 -Qx to A9x - probably again declarer would play the Q x2 -Kx to Q9x; usually declarer plays a K from it So in first 250 hands there were 5 cases where leading low is no worse but dd simuls shows it's worse. This of course suffesrs from sample size issues but it shows it's very very close. Funny case which I encountered when going through the hands where the one where low is better with this configuration: AQ96 vs K2 where leading low upsets declarer's communication

I am not claiming there are no layout like that obviously. I just think it matters so rarely that it's not worth it. I also don't believe there are many (or any) people out there who could make agreements like: "if bidding suggest we profit more from strong T then we use it and if bidding suggest declarer profits more we don't)" and making more gains from it than losing due to misunderstanding. J♥ - 369 8♥ - 357 4♥ - 356 On 1000 hands sample (dd simulation) assuming opener has 4spades and max 3 hearts and responder doesn'thave 4 spades and is in 8-9hcp range. I went quickly through some hands and one funny example of when leading low was right is Ax in dummy and 9xx in hand. One example of J being right was KQx in dummy and 9x in hand which points that low heart may be better than dd simul suggests. Also if there is K9 in dummy and Qxx in hand declarer will often play the K (same with Q9 opposite Axx) - those cases seem to be quite common and could tip the balance toward leading low. Interesting stuff, unfortunately I am busy with some other things right now so I had to postpone writing my own simulator which would make easy to just list every hand when it mattered which would be helpful to improve our intuition about this stuff.

This is only my observation from vugraph. As I saw more vugraph hands than probably anybody else and analyzed play of many top pairs extensively (and made some stats about first lead success for example) it's more than just casual observation but still only an observation of someone who never played at top level (or close to it). When I talk about "European players" I mean elite players which by definition is very narrow group of the best players who win a lot in international competition and are frequent guests on vugraph.

This is super standard in Poland. People play various things here, the most common is: 1♣ - pass - 1NT - ?? now use your defense against 1nt openr 1♦ pass - 1NT - here there are a lot of versions; one I like and which is quite popular is 2♣ = majors, uneven length or strong hand, 2♦ = 5-5majors.

oh c'mon. You could have xx Ax Axx AKQxxx which is 8running tricks and partner will picture it's perfectly; That being said I think ♣ + ♦ is better in this auction. As we are at it, what about: 1♦ 1♠ pass 2♠ 2NT = ? (assuming 18-20 bal is not possible)

You can't get me to show more interest in it :) Seems far too obvious and waste of resources, sorry. I have a bit of aversion to trump leads as one of my previous partners led it much too often which blew hundred of tricks. One thing about leading trump in such situations is that even if it doesn't blow a trick instantly it requires finding difficult discards/switches later while leading obvious card makes subsequent defense much easier (once you lead a trump on this auction, partner will play you for Axx ♥ and nothing on the side for example).

What does lebensohl have to do with anything ? If partner open 1nt and you have QJxx xx Axxx Jxx you want to double. It doesn't matter what your 2NT bid mean. Penalty doubles are thing of the past in those sequencies, no elite pair play it as far as I am aware and I personally don't know anybody who would like to play those doubles as penalty. At 3level it's equally clear. dbl is just points, what else you will bid with KQx xx Axxx Kxxx ? (This is about the best treatment, no idea what those doubles mean in sayc)

My feeling is that opening 1M is better, especially at matchpoints but you for sure need some system and a lot of discussion to make it work. Many decent bidders (Meckwell for example) just open 1NT almost every time they are in range so it can't be that terrible though :) Best Italian pairs open 1M but they have gazilli in place which come in handy when it comes to solving problems of 15-17 hands.

I usually make assumptions like 6-9hcp and not more than 10total points which are defined as pc + distributional points which in turn are defined differently for every situation, here I used 1 for 2 for stiff, 3 for void and 1 for 4th trump or something similar. I don't think people are jumping to 3 level with 4 trumps as often as they do after an opening (no bergen etc.) so it should be about right.

I think that form of scoring doesn't matter much. It's very difficult to find a hand where leading one thing is better at imps than at mp's and even if you find such hand the difference is usually very small.

I don't know if implementing it is difficult having all the stuff basically read, my guess is it's easy but I could be wrong. Then bbo just takes 5% of prizepool. I don't see any additional costs comparing to running standard games. All mechanism are in place, even money distribution.

Some stuff like 9-14hcp for overcaller and 6-9 for responder, partner having 5hearts with 11-15 range but not 5-5 or 6-4 if 14+. something like that Ican't remember exactly. It doesn't matter much, I often played with various assumptions for such problems and results doesn't vary too much as long as they are sensible.