phil_20686

He might hit you with KJxx KQx ATxx xx in which case a spade from Qxx xx xxxx QTxx is absolutely essential. Else a spade loser just goes on a diamond that you have kindly set up....

ahydra's answer is pretty much there, except: is it really plausible that partner is 22 in the majors? not really. He had the chance to make a simple raise in diamonds, and he cannot have 5 clubs or the Q was an impossible card. Ergo, it must be the case that he has Q9x xx xxxx QTxx. Unless declarer has only 4 hearts. But its pretty hard to construct plausible hands were there is a doubleton spade as Kxxx diamonds and Qxxx clubs would give you a raise. Ill play a low spade. Hopefully partner has the dimond J and will play it so i can force dummy and kill the clubs. But Im not that hopefull!

[hv=pc=n&s=sa986hat9dak95cq7&n=sq742hkj763dj86ck&d=w&v=0&b=8&a=p1h2c3cp3hp4hppp]266|200[/hv] Play goes !c A97K !c 5Q3 !d6 !h A234 !h T86Q !d 2A38 !h 9 !c6 !h75 So basically east played ace other club and had Qxx heart and switched to the diamond 5 after the heart Q. His partner pitched a club on the third round of hearts. Defenders are udca. Also, does anyone know how to put the play into the diagram? Position now is: [hv=pc=n&s=sa986hda95c&n=sq742hkjdjc]133|200[/hv] How will you play the spades. This is BB round 7 Board 8.

This is a BB hand that I thought was interesting if it were a MP hand. How would you play for 12 tricks? [hv=pc=n&w=st852haj7datck764&e=s7hq64dkqj8543ca8&d=w&v=b&b=4&a=1c1s2h2spp3sp4dp5dppp]266|200|1C could be short, 2H showed diamonds[/hv] Play was the K of spades lead, 7 Q 5. Then 4!s 3!d 9 2. Then three rounds of trumps pitching a heart from dummy and north following three times and south discarding the heart 5. What is the best play for 12 tricks? Position now is: [hv=pc=n&w=st8hajdck764&e=shq32dj85ca8]266|100[/hv]

This is what I would do if I played double for penalty. However, I play double as "cards" and if partner bid 3m I would expect him to be 4h and longer minor, so I would just pass, judging him to have some poor 3442 type hand. Unlike some others I do not think partner has promised anything like 7 points. I would expect him to play me for 18-19 with poorish spades if I double. If he judges 3m to the final contract why wouldn't I pass, might just hit xxx xxxx Kjxx xx or something?

I kind of understand this sentiment, and the poll kinda suggests it, but at least one strong player didn't double (mikeh), and I thought it was pretty close and had sympathy for pass. I even played for a while that dble here was 2.5 !s raise, and just gave up on the negative double, and found that to be pretty playable too. You had to pass on hands like the above, but we got more 3s/3h decisions right, and most of the time we got back into the auction ok when we needed to, or a lot of negative double hands you can just suck it up and bid 3m if a bit stronger.. In the end we decided it wasn't right and started playing double as a 2.5 spade raise only by a passed hand, and we like the trade offs there, so I would have passed this hand if I had already passed and doubled if unpassed, which feels a bit strange but we found the extra spade range was just so big on a bunch of boards. Avoiding poor games, getting to games when we had a "heavy" 2S bid. Staying in 2S when partner was a third seat opener. I mean, I find this auction really interesting because its just a little space constricted, especially if you open 1S quite light like, e.g. third seat openers or precision.

LHO cannot have 4 hearts or would have doubled 4s. Given that, we might try spade K then ak of hearts and a heart up. That gives us 3-3 hearts, any time lho is 2-2 in the majors. If he ruffs from 3-2 he might return a spade giving you the chance to make if the diamonds come in. This seems worse than just playing to bring either the spades or the diamonds in for no loser. Ruff lead, spade to the K and the spade finesse makes any time both diamonds and spades are 3-2 and either of the Q's are onside. It also might make sometimes when rho has 4 spades. I guess the first line probably also works sometimes when east has 4 spades. You get to trump coup one spade loser away if its Qxx diamonds in the slot.

I might well play in 6H. Partner might be a little disappointed in my trump quality.

I just assumed they were playing acol and the rebid was 15-17. Makes perfect sense of the bidding. It is very minimum for a 15-17 rebid. And now south does have a slam drive. South should bid 6N because he doesnt appear likely to have anything to ruff, and north might well have 5 clubs.

I mean, wow, I can imagine not getting to 7 pretty easily here, but both players basically gave up? East has an easy 4h bid followed by 5D. 4H just shows a single suited slam try somewhere imo. West, over this, is going to go absolutely bonkers. He will probably bid 4N, as a kind of waiting bid, and when partner bids 5D to show diamonds he can just bid 7. He might bid 5H on the way, but honestly, what is the point? West even after a 5D bid has been a bit pathetic. give partner three small hearts, AKxxxx diamonds and the club ace and you are just completely cold all of the time. Would I gamble 7? not sure, but am very close to it, I would probably try 5H first, when partner shows a spade void, Ill try 5N next, partner will bid 6C and that will be enough for me to bid 7 for sure.

I think its pretty textbook here for both 3H and 2N to be spade raises. How you split them up is a bit open for debate. Hand 1 I like just bidding 3N on these hands at unfavourable. At favourable I would try a penalty pass. At all white or all red I would probably go the penalty pass route. I think 2S is criminal; not because its an underbid, not sure that it is with those hearts, but tactically I would much rather defend 2H than play 2S, and when partner is inviting over 2S I would much rather defend 2Hx. If you have four hearts and it goes 1y 2x p p partner basically always reopens. If partner has enough to invite over 2S he *ALWAYS REOPENS*. Not reopening here with anything other than a dead min with 3 hearts is an instant shooting offence. Hand 2 I would bid 3H wtp? xxxx hearts is really a pretty good holding to play 4S here. 2S would be a criminal underbid. Don't mind bidding 3D if partner is a devotee of Robson-Segal. Quite like it in fact.

1) Its normal for the west hand to start with a double. 2) Its reasonably normal for the east hand to bid 3S as a pre-emptive raise. Red vs green with no shortage some might consider it wrong for a 3S bid and bid 2S. You would much prefer Jxxx x xxx Axxxx for example. I think that would be textbook. Given the existence of a cue no one of any experience would play 3S as a limit raise. All invitational or better hands with spade support would bid 3D over 2D undiscussed. With discussion, its popular to have more ways to raise spades here, 2N for most experts would be some form of a spade raise. Most common is to split them by trump length, 4 card raises through 2N and 3 card raises through 2N. I prefer to split by Offense to Defense ratio, so broadly that means split by trump length but with some scope for e.g. KQx x AKxxxx xxx to go through 2N, and Kxx KJx KJx Qxxx to go through 3D. The idea being to choose the bid that makes partner most likely to do the right thing when sacrificing/doubling. 3) After the three spade bid 4N was wrong. Not only because you won't find out if you have a diamond control, but also because you don't yet know much about partners hand. If you think Qxxx Qx Ax Axxxx was in range for partners hand you are good for grand. Then again QJxx QJx Jx QJxx gives you no play at all at the 5 level. Jxx Qxx Jx AQxxx has the right number of tricks etc but two quick diamond losers. A 4c cue bid showing the ace/king of clubs and inviting partner to show a diamond control is just the normal way to bid this hand. If partner bids 4H or 4S you just pass as you know that you will lose two diamonds. 4) 5S is a very bad bid. If you find out you have the right number of key cards for slam, you should bid slam. Bidding keycard when you aren't intending to bid slam after you find out that you have all but one keycard is very bad. In this case you even had the chance to ask about the spade Q by bidding 5D. If you have bid keycard, and have 4 key cards and the trump Q, you should always bid slam! You could have missed lam here opposite QJxx QJx x AQxxx when it is literally against the wall. In this particular case you would have escaped as partner does not have the spade Q, and you would have stopped at the 5 level. 5) North's 2D bid was also wrong. He should either bid 3D or pass. 2D wrongly advertised his strength and didn't adequately disclose how good his hand when declaring if partner also has an unbalanced hand. 6) Bidding Micheals with the west hand over 1D would be ludicrous. You claim that you saw a high level expert player bid micheal's on a 5-4 hand like this, I can assure you that you did not. Bidding Micheals with AKxxx AKxx would be more or less prima facia evidence that they are not in fact an expert. Unless they were randomising. What is much more likely is that you saw a situation that looked like Micheals but was actually part of a more sophisticated over-call structure, so that although it looked like Micheals his partner was in fact expecting to see exactly the 54 distribution he had, probably with the five card suit known. It is, in general, very bad to bid micheals when you are less than 5-5. Its especially very bad to bid it with 6-4, which some beginners do when they interpret Micheals as being "ten cards in the majors". 7) A large number of players on this forum would be counted as strong tournament players, and there are a bunch of people with international experience from around the world. At least one person with multiple international caps has commented on this thread, so perhaps a little more humility is in order. By coming to the forums to post hands and learn you are taking your first steps into a much wider world. You can learn a lot here about how to really play. I have. And we are a pretty forgiving bunch, as lots of us had very high opinion of our bridge skills until we started posting here and learned that we didn't really know anything.

I really think his line was best, of win in hand and play a heart. To make this without scoring the heart K when a club ruff is coming you need Kx diamond in the slot, and that just isnt that likely. If no club ruff is coming you might as well try a heart up as if that works you can win the return ditch a space and play ace and an other diamond and claim on any 3-1 diamond break. If a club ruff is coming then a heart up wins when lho has the stiff club and can't get his partner on lead, which seems like by far the most likely scenario. If the heart finesse loses and a club ruff comes back, you probably never had a chance, since that almost always gives lho two or three diamonds including the K. I mean, are you really going to try to cater for lho being 3721 without the heart Ace and with the diamond K, when you could make when he has the heart ace and not the diamond K? If lho wins the heart ace and gives RHO a ruff you are still in good shape, as the lead from xxxx club would strongly indicate that lho has a spade tenace that he doesnt want to lead form, so I would now happily take the D finesse thinking that lho probbaly has some Kx AQJxxx x xxxx or similar.

KJx AQJxxx - xxxx ? Think that would fetch a club lead some of the time. I agree with pretty much everything you said, just, weird leads just happen a lot in bridge.....

You should be bidding a slam here. Partner should never be light here because you are short in spades. Partner should only take action light here if he has spade shortage. I will happily pay out if I over-bid when they have 12-13 spades! Having decided that there are several options. Bidding 6H. Bidding 5S should be a grand invite with spade void. I think you are probably a touch light for that, but its certainly plausible. We have a couple of other options with meanings that are a bit unsure. Bidding 5N and correcting it to 6H? That feels like a grand try without a spade void. 5m feels natural to me. 4N followed by 6H? feels like a slam try that got ungraded based on partners response. 4N followed by 5S followed by 6H? Things are getting murky now. I'd probably just bid 6H, but I would be interested in doing something else if I could come up with a way to show a bit more without inviting grand too strongly.

Its a pretty good line to just win the spade in dummy and play a heart at once, covering east's card. Here, assuming that east plays the J of hearts, west wins and plays a spade. Then you can win the second spade cheaply in hand, and use the diamonds as transport to ruff two hearts. This works whenever the person with 3 hearts has 4 diamonds. Since you are missing 8 diamonds, that's 1/3 that the diamonds are 4-4, 1/2 that they are 5-3, and 1/4 of the rest (since you need no ruffs if diamonds 6-2 or worse), making it about 60% of 3-1 breaks. As it happens, that fails. The second line that I thought of is to win the spade cheaply in hand, then play AK of diamonds and exit with the heart Q. If lho continues a second spade, win in dummy, and if the spades are 3-1 play the diamond Q pitching a club and then a club. This will win on 3-1 spade breaks where either of the heart K or the club ace is with the singleton spade, and if all that fails, you can still take the ruffing club finesse. This needs diamonds no worse than 5-3 (since if its 6-2 they can probably arrange to ruff the diamond Q with trumps 2-2 and that is basically game over), so its about 7/8 * 0.8 = 65% of 3-1 breaks, but less a little bit because some 2-2 spade breaks can arrange to beat you either because the diamonds are 7-1 or 6-2. As it happens that also fails.

TLDR: Signalling is, fundamentally, quite a deep problem, and whether you play standard or UDCA makes almost no difference. Playing that you always give attitude when your partner leads and always count when declarer leads is obviously terrible. E.g. Say that you have xxxxx in a suit and declarer starts cashing AKQJT9 of the suit. Clearly here you would use your cards to signal suit preference so that partner knows which suit he can safely pitch on the five discards he has to make. Informing him that you will be following suit for 5 more rounds doesn't really help him. Similarly, if partner leads a K and dummy puts down AJTx it seems pretty superflous to give an attitude signal, you might play count (in a suit) or suit preference (vs NT). Partner leads an A and Qxx, QJxx or QJx comes down against NT is another situation where giving attitude would be a total waste. The toughest situations are usually where declarer plays low towards honours and partner might want to duck. E.g. when declarer plays low to KQx in the dummy. Its sometimes right to play count here (so partner can judge whether to continue with Axxx) and sometimes right to play attitude (e.g. ducking from AJxx). Some people have fairly simple rules and hope to work around them by having the opportunity to signal about this suit in one of the others. Other people have an exhaustive list of cases in their system files for this type of carding situation.

This feels very odd. I understand why you are so keen to bid 2S on two cards if double basically rules you out of a 5-2 spade fit! I wouldn't play 2N as natural from either side, which deals with these hands. If you double when you want to force partner into bidding a minor, then you bid 2N over the expected 2s response. That forces partner to bid a minor.

So I kind of agree with this view, but its not without cost. If partner is some AKxxx x xx Axxxx and the bidding goes 1S 2h p 4h you might struggle to get back into this auction. Obviously, this is a slightly contrived example, but there is definitely significant upside to doubling now. Obviously, you might be giving up some upside when you would rather defend two hearts, but since you have a double-ton spade, so you arent that worried about playing 2S vs defending 2h un-doubled. On this hand, with xxx hearts and ten nice looking points inthe minors, I will double, if it was something like x Kxx Qxxx KQxxx then I would probably pass, as I think a stiff spade and a heart honour makes it all quite a lot worse, even if you are kind of "more shape suitable" in some sense. I have a lot more interest in defending 2H in the pretty common case of partner being some 5323 hand. Also, three hearts is not such a huge defect as there are not that many hands that cannot support spades, and have fewer than three hearts. I mean I would double with lots of hands with three hearts, maybe that is a style thing. Anyway, I don't have such a strong view either way (although I think actions other than pass or double are crazy!) but I prefer to bid when unsure so I would double here.

I would think about doubling and then not do it. I don't really have anything insightful to add except that they do sometimes xx, particularly if they are good.

I haven't looked at this hand closely but my instinct is that its better to try eloping with my trumps anyway. There are lots of variations. But I might try ruffing the opening lead playing the heart Q from hand. I might get a good read from this if lho isn't a strong player and ducks the ace here. If RHO wins the ace then I will almost always win as I get another dummy entry. If this holds I will play a club to the K and then ruff a diamond and a club to the ace and then a diamond ace, and discard a heart and play the 4th diamond. Now I can decide if I want to ruff this diamond or pitch my remaining heart. to transfer the ruff. At any rate, at this point I will be set to score three red ruffs in the south hand, and if lho has only two clubs I doubt they can prevent me making this if I read the position right. Since I have scored 4 tricks and three ruffs, and so I need to arrange to score three more trump tricks with the position being, say, [hv=pc=n&s=sa98h3dc532&n=sq2hk42dck4]133|200[/hv] and I exit a club. Now I like my odds (better). Depending what you want to do now. It seems a much stronger line than playing for Kx spade onside and 3-3 clubs, which is basically what your line amounts to. I mean, its hard to say what will happen, but suppose clubs are 3-3 and rho wins the club. What will they do now? if they play a spade, probably strongest, you can go up with the ace and ruff the 4th club with the Q and play a heart. playing lho for some 3343 including the spade K. If they are weak players they will not play a spade away from the K. If they are strong players maybe you just hope for whoever wins the club to have the spade K. then you can win the spade Q and then spade ace and the winning club. If RHO has 4 clubs you are even better placed. LHO will be some 3442 most likely and then I will always make. If LHO is 4342 I might still struggle after a fourth club, as lho can pitch two hearts. Now I will need rho to have a stiff spade J or T. and exiting the spade Q will end play west. Obviously things can go pretty wrong if lho has something like 3244, but you were probably struggling here anyway on your line.

It just feels like you need too much for 6S here. Partner needs to cover 4 black suit losers and one red suit loser. Your shape just gives you too many losers, even though you will also have lots of winners eventually. This means that its pretty easy to construct hands where you are just off too many tricks. AKxx xxx x AKxxx would give you slam on a 3-2 spade break, but KJxx KQx x AJxxx needs luck to make 5 spades. If I had AKJx xxx x AKxxx to make slam cold I would have bid more than 3S. The problem is that your partner was under pressure already, Axxx Kxx x AKxxx looks like a pretty great hand over 2H to me, much too good to put in along side a weak nt with 4 spades. An easy 3S, and 5S is like 30%. Then again, I would try for slam trivially if I could do so below game though.

You forgot the elephant in the room: the cot deaths. For years in the UK having two cot deaths in a family was basically treated as evidence that the parents were murdering their children, on the grounds that it was so unlikely. It was years before anyone pointed out that: 1) By the birthday problem, its actually pretty likely in that the UK has a bunch of families with two cot deaths in them. 2) And, more importantly, they aren't independent events, and there is a chance some environmental or genetic factor means that having one cot death makes you more likely to have two. It ended up with some expert witnesses being struck off the medical register. Even absent the wrongful convictions, a lot of parents who had just lost two children to cot death had to face suspicion from authorities, and in some cases the indignantly of a murder investigation. I expect that trial lawyers these days are a bit more up to date with statistics than they were in the 70s-90s when most of the really bad stuff seems to have happened.

Sure But if those were my constraints of no discussion I would assume that 4H showed 55 and with 6-4 you just rebid your 6 card suit and live with it.

South forgot to bid 3N opposite a NT overcall at his first turn! :) But seriously, you have to at least invite opposite an overcall. An over call tends to be a touch stronger than an opening. As it is, you will go off if they lead a spade and make if they lead a club, which is not unlikely on the layout. If partners spades were KTx that would be enough! As it is pass has worked really well as you are happy to double. It makes because you are very unlucky to have so much concentration in diamonds. I would double all day in this position.