rogerclee

Maybe just a semantics issue, I took your post to mean that you played 4D promises values/defense. If you don't, then we are in agreement.

I would bid 4D, I agree with mikeh that 3H is appallingly bad. I don't know what he means by "overstating the defensive nature of the hand" though, I just play that this bid says I am interested in bidding 5 over 4 if we have a potential double fit, and it warns partner from bidding 5 over 4 with diamond shortness. That seems okay to me, even though I admit partner will sometimes double and it will be cold.

In order for something to be an interesting bridge hand, there must be a hand.

So far this thread is really weird to me.

Yes.

I would describe 5S as ridiculously bad.

So 1s-x-p-3h-p-3s does not set hearts but this one does? Just because it's above 3N? Seems weird to me. Yes, I don't know why that would seem weird to you in the slightest. The ability to play 3N is more important than either of the uses we are discussing for the cuebid. To peachy, I made no claims about the effectiveness of the cuebid being a strong raise, only the popularity of the agreement. To me it is not a substantial loss to just bid 4D or whatever with 3361/4351, since if partner has 5H he will basically never pass 4D, so we are just worried about missing 5D, which means our hand would have to be ridiculously strong in order to be worried about this. As for 4342, the cuebid will only gain over 4H when 5D makes but 4H is down, and we have no club stopper. Seems like a narrow target to me.

I would definitely bid this way with xx Kx AKx AKJxxx, but feel free to make the hand slightly stronger if you would not.

Really? As someone who plays NLM over preempts I think you are taking this too far. The advantage of playing nonleaping michaels over say, (3S) ?, is that you have a good two suiter very frequently, and because of the preempt you cannot bid 4m to try to suggest a save against 4S anyway with a weakish 1 suiter. On an auction like 1S P 3S ?, the first hand is much less likely, and the second hand is much more likely.

Really surprised at these answers, in my mind 4C as strong and agreeing hearts is standard.

Pulling with a stiff heart and nothing interesting about my hand is more than a little bit silly.

On a non-club lead you are on a finesse. And it's not even a 4D bid (to me).

Uhh.. 1C-1S 4D-4N 5C-5N 6C-7S hahaha

...

I agree with Han that partner should have just passed 3D. No diamond stopper, intermediate hand, no fit, etc; people should just let these 10-11 counts with no fit and no stopper go.

1C-1H 1S-2D 3C-4C 4D-4H 4S-4N 5N-? Responder can see opener has something like Kxxx void Axx Kxxxxx now. DK or SJ or a seventh club make it cold, DQ makes it on a hook or 3-3 spades, ST makes the contract a favorite, etc, and if opener has the bare minimum, then it's just on 3-3 spades.

4C

West's bidding was normal to me. East was just terrible, I guess I could see a beginner bidding 4C because he thinks his hand is not working that well, but after his partner showed diamonds, he just forgot how to play bridge.

If clubs break 4-2 and an opponent has Qxx of hearts you will have no entry back to hand in time to pitch dummy's other losing spade.

Partner has a good hand that was gonna pass 1Sx. The 3 level is pretty inconvenient, in that with something like KQTxx Axx xx Axx you can't really do anything except double, so to call this double "penalty" would not be telling the whole story.

I'd always double.

I think a huge point of this hand is to think about what will happen if you start with pass. If partner reopens, how will you bid your hand? I think it is clear that if this happens, you will have preferred to have started with 3D than pass. How about if LHO raises hearts? Then you are about to have a stupid auction which probably breaks even with responding 3D at best, and is often much worse. How about if partner will pass out 2H? Then it's bad; if partner has 3+ hearts you were probably cold for game, but in the more likely case that partner has 2 hearts and chooses not to reopen, defending 2H is probably a net slight negative. So I think the important part of a hand like this is that even though it's true 3D is a little bit of an overbid, the alternative (pass) is just beyond terrible.

There are other points to the auction (most notably north should splinter in hearts IMO, in general try hard to splinter in an inverted minor auction), but I think the biggest problem is that south did not realize how bad Txx of clubs is opposite club length.

1) I think your higher scores as dummy reflect that bidding is a strength of yours. 2) We can't really infer too much about your scores as a declarer, except that maybe you are slightly worse at it than other areas of the game. 3) I think % of contracts made is not a good measure to relate to your skill as a declarer, since auctions where GIB is declarer can be very weird. Avg MP score is a much more reliable statistic. BTW your 95% CI on opening lead is consistent with a standard deviation of about 24%.

I would bid 4S. For people who want to game try, my personal theory about this is that when it goes 1S P 2S P on this auction, and we have this kind of hand, partner is heavy and accepting your game try a huge percent of the time. By making a descriptive invite, all you are doing is helping the opponents.