Lobowolf

It's 2020. It's high time the robots learn that when giving a ruff, carding is suit preference.

There are two separate potential issues here - 1) The misdescription of the actual hand; and 2) A possible undisclosed partnership agreement. The (negative to the 2♠ bidder) replies to date have mostly focused on the possibility of an undisclosed agreement, but those replies are not addressing the issue as framed in the OP, which states "I'm sure the partner would not have expected this hand.". That's the very essence and description of a psych, and psychs are perfectly legal. OP's concern - as the post was written - is with the fact that s/he received a description that didn't match the actual hand. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that.

From a legality perspective, a subtle distinction that is important to note is that the relevant question isn't whether the double was reasonable, but whether a pass would have been unreasonable. If passing is a logical alternative, then it can't be eschewed in favor of a bid that was suggested by the UI.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Just to be clear, the correctness of the bid is incidental to the question.

Interesting responses. The answer to your question is no, the director is flat-out wrong.

West expects that after a 5-6 second pass, East is going to raise himself to 4♠ with a slightly better hand?

I'm a bit over 2100 USCF at chess. Used to be NSA member (Scrabble); I'm a hack by touranment player standards and good by non-tourney standards. Played a fair amount of poker before the boom, mostly 7-stud & 7-stud split. Backgammon hack. For all-around names, Dan Harrington is certainly worth mentioning. Master at chess, won the WSOP (and final tabled the next year, I believe, when entries were already up there). Neil can speak to this more authoritatively than I, but I used to play in backgammon chouettes with him, and I wouldn't be surprised if poker wasn't his best game. And on the all-time multi-game list, even if it's just 2 games, Stu Ungar was just sick. It would be like if chess wasn't Bobby Fischer's best game.

So, if you don't set a card, BBO defaults you to SAYC. You're not supposed to be playing anything else if you don't have a card posted. I've had (multiple times) players deviate (in the extreme) from SAYC, which has to be one of two things - an agreement to play something other than posted SAYC card, or a psych. Or is there a third possibility? When I've raised questions about certain auctions (usually in the last round, when the players in question have left), I've been told, "We have to know what the agreement is." But my question is, isn't the default posted SAYC "the agreement"? What's the point of BBO defaulting people to the SAYC if it there's apparently not even a presumption that that's what they're playing? If you don't post a card, and the system posts SAYC for you, then my take is, until you replace it with a card of your own making, SAYC *is* "the agreement." Am I completely out to lunch here?

I was playing at a Regional once, and led the ace of a side suit. Declarer asked my partner, "Do you lead ace from ace-king?" Partner told her (correctly) that we do. At the end of the hand, when partner turned up with the king of that suit, declarer called the director on me.

Andy Rooney & Smokin' Joe Frazier. If Frazier had been born 20 years earlier and Marciano 20 years later, it would have been Joe who was the undefeated heavyweight champ.

I pretty much cheated to keep the math simple - I took the figures for an 8-card suit out of the encyclopedia (.4668) (8221+8311+8320+8410+8500 = .1924+.1186+.1085+.0452+.0031), and I quadrupled it. So my 0.5% overstates the figure in a couple of respects - first, it's bigger than .4668% (and given that we're going to be raising things to the 36th power, maybe that's too much rounding), and second, quadrupling the 1-hand percentage isn't precise, either, as they're not independent events. The fact that one hand doesn't have an 8-card suit surely must decrease the chance that another hand in the same deal does. However, as balanced against that, I also wasn't taking into consideration any more freakish deals, the existence of which would further my main point - that the reported occurrence wasn't that unusual. For instance, if you add in the possibility of a nine-card suit, the probability that will see such a long (8 or 9) suit on a particular hand goes *over* .5% (and that says nothing of the 10-, 11-, 12-, and 13-card suits). I wasn't aiming for precision, but I don't think that the 'pure' numbers would lead to a different conclusion - what happened at the table wasn't all *that* odd.

The probability of a single hand having an 8 card suit (not just 8221 8320 or 8311) is about .5%. The probability of a single deal having one is around 2%. The probability of at least 3 deals having one, with 36 deals in play, are 1-(probability of 0 deals + probability of 1 deal + probability of 2 deals). On the rough but really close approximation that each event is a 2% occurrence, that's 1-(.4832+.3550+.1268), or 3.5%.

About 27 1/2 - 1 against, I think. Not overly damning.