Jlall

2D is the right bid with this shape if you plan to bid again (which we do).

Double is a must. I would pass 3D after that.

4D, partner can offer 4S over that himself if he wants.

If you are always going to drive to at least 4S (which is the case with a lot of 6-5s) you should start with 2D first. If you bid 2N and they compete to 4H you can no longer show your 6th diamond, and doubling shows something more like a strong 5-5. I think this is fairly normal procedure as long as you aren't worried about 2D being passed out.

I would have bid 6S, I am saving over slam so why give them more room to sort out whether or not they have 7. Now I will save in 7S, no reason not to believe them and it's surely cheap enough. If RHO psyched it wd.

You can also click on all the bids to see the definitions or scroll over them to see before you bid.

Ok then definitely 1C, was more interesting the other way :)

yeah 5H is a good bid

Since I'm sure her partner played a LOW club (possibly unreadable since we have the 2) and a LOW heart (not possibly unreadable) then yes I can definitely blame west.

1N

Prefer 1D to 1C.

Ergo, I should definitely bid the grand vs Meckwell since they are trading EV for lower variance. Yes for sure. The best strategy vs Meckwell is to bid close slams and grands. Of course this will only work once...after that they will know you are someone who likes to bid slam and will adjust their own bidding accordingly. Imo if you're going to beat meckwell in a long match you should also be aiming to bid close slams or grands regardless. They are conservative in that area and you probably won't beat them on the game hands, so hope to get lucky with the slams!

yep

Yep exactly right, bidding 2H should be because your only options systemically are 2H or 1N. If you cannot systemically bid 1S it should be because you accept the losses but feel you gain more by bidding 1N with this hand and having a more well defined 1S bid. I disagree with the conclusion but agree with the thought process :ph34r:

4S bid is silly, perfect hand to X 4H with. North assumed south was 5-6 I guess, seems reasonable. Sometimes partner has the worst possible hand and they make.

Well they are probably cold for game. And no one said this is MP anyways. And we might suffer club ruffs if we are in spades anyways. If the solution is to duck the heart so that LHO has a guess what to do when he wins the CA, that risks them shifting to a spade and getting a ruff or whatever.

If you bid 1S with this hand you are not planning to bid 2H next. I see no reason to think that the combination of 1N/2D/2H/2S that you will get to after bidding 1S will be worse than playing in 2H opposite all of those hands.

mmk /skip

1D-1N 3C-3H 3N-4C 4D-4H 6C or something similar seems like a good auction.

Maggie I'm pretty sure the reason strong bridge players want grands to be very good before they bid them is because they usually win their matches. As such they don't want a huge swing on this hand, even if they are +EV. Since most teams do not bid grands very aggressively, your numbers do not tell the whole story. If the strong teams will win the match 80 % of the time by pushing the board, they will need really good odds to risk losing a slam swing since now they will lose the match much more often. I know from playing on a lot of pro teams in a lot of regionals that I and my teammates would never want to be in a grand in the 6x% range generally. I would only want to be in one if the other team was a good pro team, or if the bad team we were playing was really aggro and likely to be in the grand somehow. I know that meckwell will almost never bid grands in a regional. Rightly so, and it's not because they fear the other guys will be in game.

Most people do not change their strategy at all because they are bad. By this definition, they change too little. Almost all pseudo/wannabe experts change their strategies too much because they know a little something and overdo it. A lot of these people tend to read a lot and post on forums :unsure: As far as real experts, I would say most go back to changing too little but it's pretty close.

Gib is not underleading the DK here into our 1N opener. I pop ace. Then I play ace of spades and queen of clubs to the ace. If the CK is on we are getting screwed since the field will bid 3N with a spade stopper. So lets hope it's off and let's not go down. If both follow I strip out the hand and exit a club in case I was wrong about gib underleading the DK and it happened to have Kx of clubs onside so I can endplay it.

lol yeah how can you pass with north?!

Looks like a great slam

Yeah 2D is obvious to me as well. Raising with 3 to encourage partner to try for game when he has 5 spades and a hand that would pass 2D is nice, but with 3 small spades and six small diamonds it just rates to get us to a losing partial too often imo. The hand is simply not good enough for 3D, and 2C accomplishes nothing (if we survive it then we get to bid 2S next which shows a hand too good to raise to 2S to begin with? No thanks!)