phil_20686

Does this mean that you have to pass 3N with 55 here?

I don't really believe in thinking about what a bid "shows" in a compressed auction where partners options are limited. Being able to bid slams in these auctions is very rare. It would be completely different if you had two or three spades, as partner can take more actions when he has short spades. Also, would you float 3S on - Axxxxxx xxxx xx or something? Adjust to taste if you think that is too much. There are lots of distributional hands with very few points where you just have to act here because you have short spades and 4H can just be 100% cold. At the very least I hope I have convinced you that you should be much more aggressive in terms of HCP when you have 0-1 spade than when you have 2-3 spades here. I would act on pretty much all decent ten counts here without thinking if I had a stiff spade and 6 hearts. x KQxxxx AJxx xx or something I would find an action. Obviously this hand is much worse than that, but you still rate to be able to make 4h a fair proportion of the hand, and given likely bounds on opponents hands the number of points that you have doesn't really affect the expected number of points that your side has very much. You just have to do the best you can, and partner has to be aware that this auction is very pressured when you have short spades and so know that partner will struggle to act. Also, it pressures the opponents. If RHO has 3 spades and a 10-12 count he might worry over 4h that 4h is cold and 4s v cheap or cold. That 4h is flying off and he should double. He might easily just bid 4S and now your partner can double and pick up +300 from nowhere.

Much depends on your agreements about 4C here. Much also depends for your agreements on strength for micheals originally. We are limited by failure to double first, so I would not use it for slam going here given the choice, but more doubt about strain. Then 4h direct would be 5-5 hearts, and 4c followed by 4h suggests 4h and longer spades.

It seems pretty clear to double. Am prepared to concede 3sx, but seems like I have a good trump holding and we are going to have the balance of the points, so nine tricks by the opponents seem unlikely. Hands that make it into a bulletin have a strong tendency to be hands where routine actions get you into trouble!

What do you think a 3S bid should look like here fluffy? While I see the logic of other Phil's reasoning, I cannot imagine myself ever bidding 3S here with only 4 spades.

You know that partner has a decent hand here, but just couldn't take action. Your RHO generally had the chance to invite but didn't Given that he has 3 spades, he is unlikely to force an off shape takeout double without 4 hearts, which seems unlikely given your hand. He didnt bid NT naturally, so he isnt 15-17 with a spade stop, but that is almost good news, as you will need v little with no wasted spade values. I think its really close, and I might well bid here. I think that when you have short spades you should strain to take action, You need literally so little here: xxx AQx KQxxx xx would be a good game. I think that bidding will likely win here. Even if it might lose in theory its a situation where it might win in practice, as they cannot always double when you are -2 and they were making 3 spades. I would think that you are about 30% to be making game here, 40% it not to matter too much, -1 vs 3s or -1 vs -1, and 30% to be -2 or more, and only some of that time will they double. So I guess that you are pretty flat in expectation. I bid in these situations, I think it gives the opponents more of a problem. They don't know if you are speculating or have a good hand. You have to play in a style where partner knows that you will push with short spades, and that he shouldn't be trying to push to slam just cause he has a 15 count with xxx spades!

Maybe you should poll it, but I would be very surprised if a diamond was a majority lead here. I would lead a heart. Against slams with no invite, leading aggressively and setting up your trick is usually the way to go. Also, you had to give lots of slow cards in this example, because most people would much prefer to lead from xxxx or even xxx than xx if they are going passive against a slam. It isnt that likely that you are on lead against a slam and have no suit > 2 cards with no honours.

Then you are cold off anyway. :)

Nobody leads from Tx against a NT slam. I challenge you to construct a hand where that looks right on this deal.

Surely you just put the K on the heart J and run the Ten. Pretty unthinkable that south has QJ9(x) and played a heart. Its hard to imagine that I will lose more than one trick in every suit at this point. The black suit pip position is really good too. An alternative is to win the heart K and play a spade to the Q. If this holds I can run the spade 9 next, since north cannot profitably attack hearts

Sure, but we have roughly an infinity more hands to test on......

Um lead could easily be from QJxxx diamond with partners only entry in clubs? If declarer has QT9 of clubs you can be taking away a guess from declarer in the club suit. He might place ace and another giving your partner two club tricks. On the given hand, ducking the first heart, winning the second looks pretty normal to me, just to make communications more difficult for declarer. Then return a diamond. What can declarer do? He will probably play a spade to the ace and a spade to the Q. When that holds, if he tries to cash the diamond Q pitching a club he is trivially off, as you still have stops in both majors, so he will probably try a spade to the ten. At that point you can just win the J and return a low spade. Whatever he does you will not come to 1c and 4 major suit tricks by stranding him in dummy. Even if he has the QJ of clubs it doesn't help him, as if he finesses in clubs, you can use one major suit tempo to clear the club ace, and another to get the club K. Lets imagine instead that he decides to establish hearts. You win the second heart, return a diamond, win the third heart. This is a stronger line from declarer as now east has to switch to a club, but at this point its obvious to partner what is happening, so he can duck this club easily. Ducking one heart feels like the default here. If you don't duck and switch to a suit into Ax it feels like you know exactly how the defence should go and its because you have long clubs yourself. its what you might do with AQx heart and Qxxxxx clubs or something, although that's not very consistent with the bidding. It just doesn't feel consistent with a hand that isn't really sure whether to go active or passive. On your hand, if you give partner those club pips to go with the diamond honour that he promised, is he not basically 100% to go off unless dec has the Q9 of spades and guesses the spade J right, and returning a diamond to make partner the possible danger hand with long cashing diamonds should encourage him to get the spade wrong! I guess that is what feels weird. Partner winning the heart ace and switching to a suit that isn't mine feels like he is strongly indicating that he feels the most likely way to beat this is with club tricks, in which case ducking would be pretty bad. Partner could easily be switching himself from QT86. If I duck to the 9 in this situation my partner will chop off my head!

Since the hand with more hearts is more likely to have the Q, it must be the case that the hand which has the Q is more likely to have long hearts.

Comparing it to Ferguson is hardly an apples to oranges comparison. One is all about the context of a specific incident, the other has been repeated in reasonably controlled conditions hundreds if not thousands of times. Code breaking, as with most learning techniques, comes in two stages. In the first you literally do attempt to analyse every movement to get the best explanation of the results possible. In the second, you take your hypothesis about the code to a second, unrelated set of boards, and see which parts of your hypothesis stand up to this independent test. If, broadly, your hypothesis is predictive, then you can be reasonably sure that you have discovered a signal. This is called "training your model" and "testing your model", and there is a usually a third part, validating. If we put woosley and ish in the "training your model", then approaching it with the belief that they are cheating is the right thing to do, the next step is to take the code to some unrelated set of boards and see if its predictive on boards that the code breakers have never seen.

It depends strongly on how good they are, how motivated they are, and how good they want to become. The first thing you have to do is play. A lot. You should be playing hundreds of hands a month on BBO. When I was learning at University it was kind of expected that you would play between 500 and 1000 BBO hands a month. Pretty much every month really. Once you have got about 10,000 or so hands under your belt you will start to be able to really think about the game, stuff like counting the hand and hand evaluation should be comfortable, and have come across most common bridge situations. Then you need to get into the cycle of reading bridge books. Start with defence. Pretty much anything written by Kelsey. Then play, a lot. And read, A lot. And talk about the game with pretty much everyone who is better than you. A lot. Sometime after about the next 10,000 hands you will need to play with a strong player, they will introduce new dimensions to your game. Good quality partnership bidding. Good defensive signalling. False carding situations. Its about now that you should start working on remembering every pip every time. There isn't any quick way to get better, and if you want to play in an U20 squad that has a chance of winning a medal, then that is roughly what you have to do. Play 20,000 hands, read all the standard books, and get in into a partnership with someone who really understands the game. That last part is where things like an U20 squad can really help. Kids love challenges. Tell them that they need to practice that much if they want to get on the U20 team, and they will probably surprise you by actually doing it.

Seems clear to lead the diamond A to me. So likely when you have 5 low hearts that declarers losers are about to go away on the AKQJT of hearts. Partner didnt double 5c and partner didnt make a lightner double, so leading a heart or a club would be a bit superflous if you trust your partner, so diamond A it is.

Sorry didnt read it properly. But I still think that it doesn't follow from this that he can't have KT98, he might just have decided that on this auction against this pair he will play to disguise the spade solution, trusting south to have been expecting this dummy. Or he might just have played badly on the first trick. It happens quite a lot!

You are dreaming Paul. RHO will never discard the J from Jx if I play the 8 from KT98. From easts point of view Declarer could at trick one have had AT9 and be about to guess the spade suit wrongly!!!! If I play the ten then he probably will play the J from Jx. Also, if he does have Ax he might have played a low spade up first. Against lots of holdings playing the ace just guarantees that the opponents will duck the optimal number of times. E.g. if you had Ax and lho has KJTx opposite 98, then the defence cannot go wrong if you play ace of spades and a spade. He just wins the Ks soon as he sees the 9 from partner. Finally, you cannot seriously be arguing both that its right to duck here and that its trivial for lho to win the K from KT98 on the second round. If its right to duck the Q then it can hardly be trivial to play the K from KT98, since ducking would set the contract on layouts like this!

Its not clear that that is the case at all. If he has that holding he will know for sure that declarer has 3 and his partner has singleton J, in which case what does he have to lose by ducking, unless his partner has an ace. But he knows for sure from the bidding that south has all the remaining key cards, since they apparently bid keycard so rising would be a poor play, ruining your chance to go wrong in the spade suit.

This just feels odd. Why did partner win the first heart? why did partner switch to a club when you lead a diamond and hit AK on the table? partner is basically guaranteed to have a stiff diamond unless he has 5 clubs, but why did declarer play the 8? Playing the T or Q from QT98x would be much more normal to disguise the position. the spades are going to 3442, and clubs are 5225, then partner has a stiff diamond and 6 hearts, which is impossible. I feel like if we can beat this by ducking the club, then partner must have done something very wrong. A club from shortage is such a weird switch with a safe diamond, and, if he doesn't have AQ9x of hearts, a safe heart switch. Ducking the club is really assuming that both rho and partner have played quite bizarrely I think?

You can clearly estabilish a diamond loser by force, and it doesnt give the opponents any tricks which they cannot get anyway. Whereas heart gives them a trick before it creates a trick for you.

Throughout i will assume that only lho can guard the diamonds If clubs are 4-1 I can still make if the person who has the fourth club has the spade K and no more than two hearts and the diamonds are 3-3. If after two top clubs the clubs are 41 i could, say, cash 6 red suit tricks discarding a spade from hand and play club club hopefully endplaying someone into giving me a spade trick and an entry to the 5th club. I can test the clubs if I am prepared to play a spade to the QT instead, suppose that I win the diamond Q and cash two clubs, if they are 3-2 then I can cross to the diamond ace and play a spade to the Q, if that loses whatever they return I can still test diamonds unblock the spade ace and then run the clubs using hearts as the double menace. This works whenever RHO has one of the K or J of spades given that I am assuming that diamonds are guarded on my left. I think this is far stronger than the heart to the J variant since I cannot see how to fit in any chance of a 4-1 club break. Its a bit dependent on the inference that only lho can guard the diamonds.

Um isn't it routine here for partner to have a weak hand with 6 spades too weak for a one level over call? T9xxxx Axx xx xx or something? Admittedly that makes constructing the e-w hands a little problematic, at least in my style of one level overcalls, but not impossible. In that case it isn't hard to make hands with 4S a claimer and 3N off. You have a 'free bid' opposite a double in protective seat, so isn't 2S showing 7-11 (borrowed K theory essentially) and better than that you bid 3d when you are balanced? If partner wants you to compete with less than that he just has to double 2d again when it comes back to him.

Against good but normal opponents east will play the J from KJ J or JT only. Playing from J9 on the first round will seem ludicrous if declarer next produces the ten from hand from ATx. A play in which then partner is then forced to give access to the winning spades in dummy or afterwards to be thrown in with it later. Playing the Q wins against 2/3 of the holdings which matter. Phil

I think its pretty easy if you have an even number of diamonds. There are also other ways this line can lose. like a trump promotion if you play kd and diamond hook into Qxxx, and they might put you to the test by playing a third diamond from Qxx at this point, might you be tempted into ruffing high and hoping for 3-3 trumps? Obv if the 9 holds its a non-problem.