xcurt

4D obv I don't think 4♦ is obvious. I would rather bid 4♣, myself. How is this supposed to help partner focus on the cards we know are important? I don't care what he has in clubs, I need to know if he has the missing diamond and spade honors. If he has the ♠K and the ♦KQxxx then I want to be in 7♠ (since he has to have a little something else to make up a 2/1, aceless, and playing in spades lets me ruff out diamonds if need be). Anything other than 4♦ is hopeless IMO. Keep in mind that partner, looking at zero aces and at most 9 HCP in our two suits, is trying hard to slow down the auction. He's probably already doing exactly that with that 3NT slam-killer call. I need to unambiguously set diamonds so that later calls will be interpreted as grand slam tries instead of groping for strain.

Why not throw a club at trick one and tempo the opponent by playing a club, then following the line Andy described. If diamonds go 5-1 that is going to work poorly, but the main line only works in that case when RHO has xx, K or xxx, Kxxxx in spades and diamonds.

The handviewer is pretty cool, especially the GIB feature. It's nice that it's js and not flash. The iPhone doesn't do flash. Can the handviewer be made to work as a real-time Vugraph viewer? Also, considering that the iPhone is an ARM cpu underclocked to 400 MHz, it's going to do double-dummy simulations at a pretty glacial pace. So anyone looking to create a bridge app for iPhone should be thinking "client-server." At which point, you're really just talking about a front end to one of the four or five decent bridge programs. You also need to worry about screen real estate. For example, the old OKBridge unix text client (I miss that program :D ) fit in 80x24, which is bigger than most iPhone ssh applications can reasonably display. On the other hand, It should be easy to send everything about one round of bidding or play in one packet, so if the latency is under 1-2 sec it should be OK.

XIMPs, 1rst seat, favorable --, KQT87432, --, AK754 I opened 1♥. Agree? It went 1♥-2♠-P-P; ? What now?

agree with this. advancing on 4 is something i never see discussed but in exchange for the risk of reaching a suboptimal 4-x fit we save some space and avoid some other misdescription, and most importantly here, we get information that addresses the point of the hand, here, to try for slam. here, if we bid 3♦ we dont know if partners possible heart rebid implies better or longer hearts or is just a punt. on some other hand like a really strong 4144 we can't have a good auction to slam in a 4-4 club fit because partners club calls after 3♦ are cue bids.

I wasn't worrying about him getting shut out. I was trying to demonstrate that the usual rationale for not bidding 1NT -- that if partner insists on playing in our major suit singleton -- is not really a consideration with this hand -- because the tricks are all quick. 3NT on the actual hand is not that great, by the way, though I guess it has the merit of making.

It's quite bad, compared to its potential as a dummy for clubs diamonds or hearts, or as a defending hand against any strain... Of course. But at least if partner puts it in 2♠ or 4♠, we won't be just conceding a big loss. In fact, if partner wants to put it in 4♠ opposite this hand (say ♠KQT8xx and a stray jack) that's probably the best game. It's not like I have a bid that's going to let us have a scientific auction to a minor suit game or slam anyway. In fact, the best chance we have of recovering 6♦ is to let partner introduce the suit, then we know we're on a big fit and not a shaky 4-4 where we need to ruff clubs good in one hand and stop the spade suit with trumps in the other hand.

I fixed your post. I pass and will bid 4♥ in a later round when it sounds really natural. If 4♥ isn't natural then what is it? Can anyone suggest a reasonable meaning? K. Rexford, you are not eligible for this competition.

I never did Bridge Master so I don't know how to vote, but this looks like a pretty easy chain of logical inference. You have 11 tops and the 5th diamond and no communication in either threat suit, so you must assume the ♠Q is coming down. That gives you 13 so you start looking for bad things that might happen. The only thing you can guard against is diamonds 5-0, so you plan to recover in that instance with a squeeze around diamonds. So you cash your winners in the right order.

4♥ natural? Seriously, what else?

If you pass you will be most likely forced into making a takeout double of spades. I'm not so keen on that when partner would be taking the tap with the high honors in our heart contract. Also, passing and bidding later is going to maximize the chances we play the hand when it's a partscore hand, or their hand. If partner has a little something at least one game contract will have play, so I have to bid at some point. But if partner has junk I want to defend and maybe defend doubled. Finally, this isn't that bad a dummy for spades. I'll bid a warped 1NT.

Agree with LOL, you are going to need 2-2 clubs, the [DA] on, and either two spade honors tight onside or a good guess in spades. This is one sick MP contract by the way. Just get to 4♠ quickly and make them defend blindly.

I have no problem with a Barometer movement, but knowing your score means the last few boards are more important (since the pairs just off the lead will adopt high-variance strategies).

Pass. I need to stop the speeding at my table. I should add that passing might get a big win even if it's only +100, if other tables are like -300, thats already 9 IMPs.

I think you still make by shortening your hand twice, having taken 6 black tricks, two ruffs in hand, and the ♥A (and lost one diamond trick), you have ♥JTx and RHO ♥KQ9, and you can make one trick even though the lead is in your hand.

The answer is never. This is one of the walls I have stopped banging my head against :lol: This has been discussed? In spite of HanP's sarcasm, I think it makes sense for the Spingold semifinalists to get a middle berth into the Swiss. Is there a similar event during the summer schedule too? I don't see a correlation between the GNTs and the LM pairs however. Exactly, the Spingold/Swiss idea makes perfect sense, the GNT/LM pairs idea does not, at least not to me. At least in theory the GNT is a "major" event. In practice, not so much anymore since the USITT was changed to the new open format. I don't know how many ITT seeding points it carries now.

I'm trying to figure out what leads partner could legitimately hate. I can only see a gripe with an anticonventional heart or diamond spot or one of the club honors. I'm leading a mundane low spade.

♦K. I think a club is huge error. If partner really has clubs, they already lost the board between being on the 5-level and blowing up 5♥. If he doesn't this is just asking to watch them run winners. I also think doubling is a huge error since a significant fraction of the field is defending 4♥ and we're giving up our free-roll against those pairs. ♠A isn't crazy but I want to combine chances for the maximum beat with chances for any beat.

I don't think this is the reason. After all, if that were the reason, offer a drop-in with zero carry-over. Without the drop-in, the nationals are over on Saturday night for the two Vanderbilt finalists. I think the real reason is that the ACBL likes having multiple tiers of national events that officially carry a NABC+ rating, but have fields where the pairs that would normally get top seeds are off in some other event. And this situation is stable because the folks that run the ACBL, skill-wise, resemble the fields in those events much more than the fields in the "main" event.

A related question, when if ever will the ACBL allow the two teams who make the final of the Vanderbilt to "drop in" to the Open Swiss with, say, a carryover equal to 1/3 of the leader's carryover? The same policy should apply to GNTs->LMs too.

I think this is grossly unfair to Mr. Cayne. Apparently it is your opinion that CEOs do not have the right for time off, where they are simply out of office. It is my opinion that everyone has such a right. 1. Cayne was no longer CEO (having tendered his resignation after the big Q4-2007 losses). Cayne was Chairman of the Board and a very big BSC shareholder, maybe the single biggest one (I saw one estimate where the collapse of BSC cost him $900M). It's hard to conceive how a potential buyer would be able to conclude an acquisition of BSC in the required time frame, Cayne's absence could reasonably be presumed to have made it more difficult to do so. Since the Paulson/Bernanke team at Treasury and the Fed was going to offer the necessary guarantees to whichever other ibank they shotgunned into the impending marriage, it's also reasonable to conclude that Cayne's absence cost US taxpayers (including me) in one way or another. It's also not impossible to conclude that the political fallout from the BSC rescue led Paulson/Bernanke/Cheney/Bush to conclude that LEH should have been allowed to fail, and that was the event that really ignited the cycle of disinvestment we are still trying to break, at a cost that's going to be in the multiple trillions to US taxpayers and unknown additional costs to taxpayers in the euro zone and other member states of the G20. 2. Cayne was awfully well compensated for his work at BSC, and it's not unreasonable to hold him to standards different than you or me. Another poster already mentioned fiduciary responsibility. 3. There had been grumbling for some time among BSC shareholders about Cayne's priorities. When he wasn't at the table he was spending a lot of time playing golf. I don't have a reference handy but it shouldn't be hard to find one. This was a contributing factor, or at least reported as a contributing factor, in the BSC board forcing Cayne out of the CEO role.

Life sucks for you if you're on call 24x365. How many people are there like this, and how many of them are bridge players who enter national events? Should the rules really accomodate such extremes? Could the meltdown of Bear-Stearns have been avoided if Jimmy Cayne had been able to receive calls during the Spingold? Actually it was the IMP pairs. And since he played the entire final (with his Italian pro partner) he certainly wasn't inconvenienced by the policy. IMO it was grossly irresponsible of JEC to be in Detroit that Friday and not in NYC possibly helping broker a deal -- seeing as how the company was going to fail if it couldn't sell itself to another entity with a stronger balance sheet before the open of business the following Monday.

I would just bid 6♣. There's no sensible way to find out if partner has the ♦K, and even if he does clubs might be 6511 or 6520. Since I need 16:13 odds on making 7♣, bidding 7 seems anti-percentage. I think 7♣ isn't unreasonable, and I will take the push if they save in 6♥, since, assuming +1100 against hearts, the IMP odds are now 9:20 [1]. [1] -1370, +1100 is lose 7, going to -1370, -100 which is lose 16 or -1370, +2140 which is win 13.

And the chess world has not yet recovered from that. When there were two world championship titles many lost interest in either. It hasn't recovered from Kasparov losing to Deep Blue.

You're very control rich and partner has no steps between 4♦ and the signoff (4♥) so his 4♥ call doesn't tell you very much (specifically, the information content, expressed by the Shannon entropy associated with partner's action set over 4♥, is low). I think you need to give partner another chance.