Quantumcat

3C would be a forcing bid, 4C some cue or other (splinter or normal cue is up to agreement I guess)

I want to tell you guys about a ridiculous convention made up by some friends (fellow youthies) during the NZ nationals (which are just finishing now). Michael Whibley and Liam were playing in a random pairs event when twice in a row, they made some pre-empt or other, one opponent made a takeout double which the other penalty-passed, and they made +1 and +2 respectively. The opponent who takeout-doubled got really abusive at their partner and Michael and Liam knew that the opponent would never dare to pass a takeout double again. They both started pre-empting randomly and started getting top board after top board as opponents got into ridiculous contracts doubled. At the end of that match they agreed to make 3C a 6-way (yes, 6-way) multi for the fun of it and the stories they brought back about its use made all of us laugh. 1. 5-9 4333 hand 2. a strong balanced hand (i.e. strong NT, 1NT is 10-14) 3. pre-empt in diamonds 4. pre-empt in clubs 5. 8 playing tricks in diamonds 6. 9 playing tricks in clubs Generally, the partner of the 3C bidder would respond in their longest suit and play there (1st option was the one that came up most often), usually for two down undoubled when the opponents were cold for some game or slam or other. These results usually cancelled out the bad ones when they were in 3N making 1 when all the field is in 1N. There were at least two times though when most of the field stopped in 2N making 3 but Michael and Liam were one of the few pairs being in 3. Other bad results were being too many down in 4 or 5 C or D when a 2D or 3C bid would have been passed out. Liam played it with a few different people in the less serious events but in the NZ teams when its illegality might have caught the notice of the director (and out of courtesy to his teammates) he stopped playing it. We all enjoyed hearing about his adventures with it though.

The opener could have bid 4C if he had a really good hand, right? I wouldn't bid further. But then again if the other opponent has a strong hand, 5C could get in the way of his blackwood bid and he might have to bash six without checking for aces? And if he does I think I can see a good defence. Lead the singleton, when in with the ace of trumps, underlead the club so partner can give you a ruff, down 2. Maybe I would bid 5C if my partner tends to support with support whether he has a hand or not, and pass if partner usually has something decent behind his bid (the points are probably about even then).

I think someone told me that the seres squeeze is the only squeeze where you need absolutely no communication between the hands. Is that right? It's pretty sad that Seres is gone. There will certainly be no more rubber bridge in Australia anymore.

Would you cash your club and spades and ruff a club, and play the last heart, they take their three diamonds. We have 3 trumps left (AQ and a ruff) and so does LHO, whatever RHO plays LHO is finessed out of his trump. What if LHO ruffs the 2nd heart? Well we were planning to lose 2 hearts anyway, so it didn't help him at all, and now his trumps will come down.

If they duck the spade, I guess it doesn't work: then they play a heart, and I don't have a spade left to get a ruff with, and I don't have an entry to set up my club. If they do this then just hope the (normal) club finesse works (can't take ruffing finesse, if they cover I can't get back again). I don't understand other people's lines. What is the logic behind them?

I'm not sure I understand the exercise. How do you answer the question having no knowledge of the cards? I have another exercise that someone gave me as advice. If you have trouble getting to sleep, as you lie in bed do this until you fall asleep: Think of a number between 1 and 13. As quickly as you can rattle off every single way the other cards can be distributed around the table. Then repeat with another number. The goal is to be able to know them immediately without having to stop and think. Also good for falling asleep. Here's an example. 4: 3 3 3. 4 3 2. 5 2 0. 5 1 1. 6 3 0. 6 2 1. 7 2 0. 7 1 1. 8 1 0. 3: 4 4 2. 4 3 3. 5 5 0. 5 4 1. 5 3 2. 6 4 0. 6 3 2. 7 3 0. 7 2 1. 8 2 0. 8 1 1.

Wouldn't double then passing the NT slam be for shortage, and doubling again be for AK?

I won't read the other posts or the problem is no fun anymore. I hope I am not repeating anyone. (Probably not as I'll get it wrong anyway :P ) There's 9 tricks; 6 spades, 1 heart 1 diamond 1 club. I could take club ace and set up a club trick, they play to my heart ace but too late now, I've set up my tenth trick already. BUT if clubs not 4-2 or nicer my trick is ruffed. I can't ruff a heart now, cause as soon as I let them in with a heart they kill my trumps with A and another!! If I try to set up hearts first, they'll kill my trumps, haven't yet set up clubs so I can't get club trick cause I have no more entries anywhere. I need to be able to do both ... be able to get a heart ruff or a club trick no matter what opponents do. I think I have the solution. Play some spades and see what they do. If they kill dummy's trumps, then draw the rest and I can set up a club trick, which is now in no danger of being ruffed. If they knock out the heart entry to my club, then I have to have 1 more spade left. But then when I play another heart setting up the ruff, they play another trump at me. But if I don't win the first one I have the lead when dummy has no more hearts so it all works. Thus duck a heart if they play that, go to my hand and ruff a heart. I succeed no matter what the club distribution or what defence they adopt! Yay! Edit: They could do other stuff on winning the trump ace I didn't think of. If they cash a diamond and lead another, dummy can ruff it for extra trick. If they return a club, I win, play a low heart. If they return a heart I get to ruff a heart. If they return a club I set up my club trick, can draw trumps and use heart ace as entry. If they play a trump, win on table then same as above.

[hv=s=sakqjxxxhxdxxxckx]133|100|P opens with 1♥, 3♦ after your 1♠. He refuses to have any part of your spades no matter what you bid (unless you sign off in them that is). I think I eventually got sick of bidding and just said 6♠ at some stage.[/hv] [hv=s=sakqjxxxhxdxxxckx]133|100|P opens with 1♥, 3♦ after your 1♠. He refuses to have any part of your spades no matter what you bid (unless you sign off in them that is). I think I eventually got sick of bidding and just said 6♠ at some stage.[/hv] These both came up as practice hands today, not sure of the right approach.

You can't see the three so maybe partner led from something like 8 4 3 (8 just a random middle card) or just 4 3. If he has 3, declarer has 4 and bidding is normal but a doubleton, declarer has 5 and wouldn't open 1N (well a lot of people would but I presume he wouldn't). Anyway, even with 8 4 3 why would he lead that against 3 noies? He has to have the King. I don't think it can be right to throw the Queen or the Ten or dummy will make an extra trick, won't it? Partner will figure out what you have and not believe your 2 as a choice. Having the King he plays a low one finessing dummy, then he overtakes my other card and cashes all his tricks so good to continue suit. Either partner will figure out that you're not discouraging and do the right thing or he won't, not much influence you can have on what he does. Is this right? It seems too easy. I think I've missed the point of the problem.

Well you want to keep your cards after dummy. Ten on the nine, Queen on the Jack. On the Ace, not sure, I guess the two, partner can still overtake one of your cards. If your ten wins, I would lead back the Queen to knock out the Ace, then partner's presumed King will take care of the Jack. If I play back a low one, partner has to play the King to knock out the Ace, and I have to play the Queen to get rid of the Jack but I can't give partner all his low ones now. I played in a small congress this weekend and my partner didn't do this in a similar situation. She had KQ8 and me AT to 6. Declarer was before me, had J third. I played a low one, she played her king, then a small one. We had just these three tricks and another (nonworking finesse on partner's side) for a bottom when we could have had 7 tricks (everybody else was in 4S 1 off, but our opponent decided J third was a stop, so could have been a sound top!! Sigh.)

That's all well and good but probably what that person meant is that beginner/intermediates need to work at drilling basic techniques and competencies that occur at every match. Counting, forming plans that are capable of achieving the objective, understanding the standard natural bidding rules, etc. You can't appreciate squeezes or an obscure position or a difficult transfer response system if you don't yet have a solid understanding of the basics from which to build from. How many Japanese people have sucessfully learnt english grammar or idioms before memorising the alphabet and the sounds of letter combinations?

A very good book is "The Languageof Bidding" by Paul Marston. If you read this and Card Play Technique and understand it all, you'll be better than 90% of players at the club.

I'm not very good at explaining my thoughts. God created the world. He had the final say in everything. Yet we can do things that change how he created the world, since God didn't just create the matter, but created the entire timespan too. God has be somehow outside of time in a way we can't understand, or else he can't have come into being. It's like a little 2D man on a piece of paper, and time is a huge stack of these papers, each with the man changing slightly in between, time is one paper per paper (like our time is one second per second). We decide on some rules (laws of physics) that determine how things change from paper to paper. We stack all the papers up, draw on the first one and all the other ones get written on too (like writing a function of x, you determine the first point and the rest of the curve is determined from it). So our little man believes he experiences one paper after another even though really they are all stacked up from our point of view, we can see them all but he can only see the one he's in at the moment. 2D men can't see outside their paper. If he had free will, that would be changing everything we'd made.

One or two people quoted my post but I don't think they understood what I meant at all. God being all-powerful means he knows everything in the future, the past, every subatomic particle at every position at every time etc. This means he knows all of our future actions and decisions. He chose the starting point for the universe, so knew all that would be around us as experience at every single nanosecond of our lives. He would know what will cause us to make different decisions, he knew how the starting point for the universe would become different experiences for us, so chose what our decisions would be. If we were to be able to choose different things than God planned for the the environment that surrounded us during our lives, that would mean we would be more powerful than God, because then he would not know what was going to happen every nanosecond, the world would not be as he created it in the beginning (he is outside of time, he created it for all time) so, do you see? Either we have no free will and he chose for some of us to be damned. Or, we do, and God is not all-powerful which doesn't make any sense with the Bible and we may as well throw out this God idea. And another thing. God needing to violate physics makes no sense whatsoever. He chose the starting point for the universe, he knew how it would unfold. If he wanted to save 500 people because of a collapsing bridge, he could choose for it to not happen at all or for it to be reasonable that the broken bridge flew to land by itself. He chose for everything to be the way it is: him needing to violate physics is saying he made a mistake. And again, if it was God's choice for man to never sin and for everyone to believe in him and for adam and eve to never have chosen the apple, he could have just made the world that way when he created the universe. Either he chose for everything to happen the way it did, or he doesn't have control over the universe And is not truly all-powerful.

What an interesting discussion! Let me put in my two cents (I had a lot of these kinds of discussions with my ex-boyfriend - he was religous to the point of excess) God knows everything. When he designed us, he knew all our future thoughts and actions etc and decided to design us to do those. So punishing us for that which he chose for us to do makes no sense. The solution usually used is that man was given free will. But this means he might do things that God didn't know would happen - thus man is more powerful than God. This also does not make sense. Either we have free will, which makes us more powerful than God, this doesn't make sense. Or we don't have free will, and God chose for us to do the wrong things we do and "punishment" makes no sense either. Either we have free will or we don't (tautology) and both possibilities lead to contradiction. Another thing. God knows us thoroughly, right? So he would know what kind of evidence each of us would require to realise he's there. He doesn't give us this evidence, thus choosing for us to not know or realise he's there. The bible says his wish is for everybody to know him, yet he is choosing for most of the world not to. That does not make sense. So, either he does not want people to be saved, or he is not there at all. There was an experiment performed where about 200 victims of a disease with very similar histories and life expectancies etc were divided into four groups. One group had groups of jews, chritians and muslims praying for them another other had beatiful scenes out of their windows and paintings on their walls, one group had both and the other had none. Can you guess what happened? The two groups having beautiful scenes out of their windows and paintings had a much reduced death rate in the time period they did the study in while the only prayed-for group and the nothing group retained the expected higher death rate. They didn't know they were being prayed for. If God wanted the person carrying out this research to realise he was there and listening to people's prayers, he could just miraculously heal all those people, as we here about in anecdotal reports from churches (never any medical evidence for those sorts of "healings")

Why do you need to lead the ♦A now? If I were west with a spade void and 1 point I would have bid 3♦ after your 2♠ cause everyone knows I'm weak from passing east's open, only reason I could be coming in is spade/heart void. If anyone has a spade void it'll be east, and why would he want to ruff dummy's losers (he has to have at least 12 of them)? We are going to get in no matter what east plays on and by then we'll have some info on the correct defence. Trump ace is a powerful card, if you aren't 100% sure it's the only right thing to play why throw it away on trick 1? Well I am a beginner and everyone else expert so I am wrong but I'd like to know exactly why :P

It has to be 10-12 or so: 1NT is 6-9, if 2NT was 13-15 where would 10-12 go? I haven't read the complete topic but I can't see any logic against it. If he had the hand he did but with 10-12 points and 2NT was 13-15, he'd have to bid 2C wouldn't he? That doesn't describe his hand very well!

My partner tends to open 8 counts in 3rd seat so I am staying the heck away!

This sort of thing is the first step towards people disappearing ... I heard that here in Australia soon there could be passed a bill which would allow the police to capture and hold people for questioning with no charge for up to 21 days, and those people would be forbidden to tell anyone where they were while they were being held, or tell anyone where they had been when they got out of there? And if they did they would be prosecuted? It is all in the name of the "war on terror" but it sounds like we are on our way to Argentina in the 70's (my dad escaped from there with his family as a child) and other similar places/times. Can you imagine, as a mother, your child disappearing one day, the police refusing to help search, and her wandering back three or four weeks later, dazed and confused, with unexplained bruises and cuts which she couldn't talk about? And this is actual, modern times, in completely developed countries we are talking about.

I guess discarding the high spade achieves the same goal as discarding the heart, but there is no risk involved. Cool. What was all that about guarding suits and throwing the queen of diamonds? I didn't understand it.

Well declarer seems to have 11 tricks: 6 clubs, 2 hearts, 2 diamonds, a diamond ruff. If he has 4 diamonds he has 12 tricks because he can ruff 2 diamonds so ignore that. For his 12th trick he can try either the spade or the heart finesse. We know that the heart finesse loses but the spade finesse wins. We want him to take the heart finesse, so we discard a heart in a generally unconcerned manner as though we don't have the queen. I guess he can't have 4 diamonds or he would have his 12 tricks, so the discard of queen of diamonds can't hurt you, but I really don't understand what it gains (maybe too deep for me).

Why are visualising combinations and using rule of 11 mutally exclusive? Doesn't it usually happen this way: use rule of 11, see declarer has 1 card higher (say) think which one it could be (e.g. can't be jack or partner would have king-queen-10 and led king, can't be 10 for same reason, has to be king or queen thus safe to play the 9) Why is rule of 11 stamped into people's minds as only for beginners? Is this why everyone wants to appear that they are too good for it? It seems to me, in this country at least, that bridge is one of those sports (like equestrian for example) where it is not socially acceptable to boast that you are better than you are (or even as good as you are). Is it not the same in the US?

Kitty Cooper's site is great if you are interested in teaching bridge, especially to children (it has loads of material). www.kittycooper.com