wank

x looks entirely normal. lol at 1nt.

i think that west is legally correct. however, i do think the world be a happier place if signalling were excluded as a demonstrable bridge reason.

ktxx is obviously terrible. north has effectively denied spades so seems pretty clear. obv aftertiming but this is a pretty clear example of the stuff in you get in the david bird book.

the biggest factor is surely if 1h promises clubs or not. if you're playing a style whereby opener can still have short clubs, 1 spades should be natural.

but this can be understood in several ways. i'm 'careful'. i'm 'careful' to make sure that i only pause while i'm thinking about the bridge issue immediately at hand. i would be careless if i was thinking about the latest twist in Eastenders or what I should have bid on the previous round of the auction. as long as i have a genuine bridge reason for thinking and am careful to limit the duration of that thinking time to this issue, i've done everything the law requires.

yes south does have something to think about. 4s wouldn't be ridiculous. you have the right to give the matter as much thought as you need to make your mind up, assuming that's what you're doing. if your opp misguesses what you're thinking about, that's just unlucky for him.

shhh that's my partner for the pairs ;-)

they're all difficult hands if the auction involves a jump in a new suit when you don't have an agreement on what it means.

7c was fine. you have the gibbon too much credit in the play though

ah yes that would be a big improvement on what i said

partner seems to have at least 4 spades but hasn't bid so he won't have as much as 5 or 6 hcp. seems best to sell out to 2h then.

what he said he was doing affects who his peers are. you would need to find people who would also psyche 3c on the way to game to conduct a worthwhile poll. good luck with that.

no it's not and no it isn't. there is no logical alternative to bidding game for a man who has resolved to bid game via a lead inhibiting call. his hand looks like a game bid which doesn't want a club lead. he says he was bidding 3 clubs on the way to game to stop the lead. you might not believe him, but i do. given i believe that's why he bid 3 clubs, he has no logical alternative to 4 hearts on the next round. just as it would be inconsistent to make a game try, hear it rejected and then bid game, it would be equally inconsistent to psyche to increase one's chances of making game, and then not bid it. imagine this, you want to bid slam. you have xx of an unbid suit but you think you've got plenty of tricks. you decide to wheel out voidwood to deflect the lead. partner only makes his ace showing response slowly. you might well have 2 or 3 losers off the top (2 from the voidwood suit) based on partner's response, but from the slowness you have a sneaky suspicion that partner has something in reserve (a void of his own of AK of the void suit maybe). by your logic you would have to sign off, despite your earlier voidwood bid de facto committing you to slam.

trump. looks like we have all the side suits reasonably well stacked.

result stands. 3c looks like a lead inhibiting bid and that's what west claims it was. it might be harder to believe west if he had more clubs.

sometimes when you have values you need to invent a bid to avoid the risk of missing game. raising to 2S would be inventing a bid. it's almost always 3 cards. anyway, this is not one those occasions where creativity is required. west has a very good club suit he can bid as a passed hand, or perhaps not if you play bergen as a passed hand and over interference, but that would be a rather unusual and poor thing to do. east just misevaluateded his hand. a balanced 16 count with the king of hearts under the bid and 3 cards in the opp's suit opposite a simple raise in competition is a game try at best. personally, i would take a pessimistic view and ask for the dummy. if you can't evaluate hands like this, make your life easier and open 1NT.

no

this is a very difficult hand. one has to choose who underbid more. personally i'd go for west, but it's a close run decision. east certainly doesn't escape remedial lessons on bridge scoring and game bonuses.

how does one look up another player's results?

nothing wrong with this. jack of spades is quite a sensible lead on this bidding. if he led a club and north had those everyone would be crying.# to understand why the jack of spades is a good lead is beyond most club players and highlights the problem of spotting cheats: lesser players may misidentify good play as cheating.

penalties

are they famous? i never heard of them. have they won anything that doesn't include the option of kibitzing one's own table?

2s is fine. your partner is a results merchant.

pass. my spades are crap. i don't want to stress those. i'm not short of defence. there's no rush to pre-empt. better to try to describe my hand later, for example with micheal's.

Partner has akxx j kjtxx kxx. You make 4s easily and 5 if you guess well. Opps make 10 in clubs. I don't think p can be blamed for passing out 3c.