sfi

Are you more or less likely to double 2H in a good field? I can see pros and cons of both.

You can always open 1S. You might shut out their heart suit and you can pass any new suit partner introduces. The chance partner bids 2H is pretty small, assuming you have a weak 2H bid available, and even if partner does it may not be too bad.

Evidence is not strong that players use enough doubles in competitive situations at AL78's club.

Fair enough. I look forward to seeing the first draft. If you're right and I'm wrong you may be on to something.

Ignoring the merits of South's second action, North does have some reasons to at least consider raising 4D to 5. These include: a fifth trump, which will be another trick most of the time three spades, which means partner is likely to only have one on the auction, there's a fair chance the club queen is going to be valuable On the downside, you have a flat minimum hand with significant wasted values in spades. You're probably right to pass, but I just wanted to point out it's not completely hopeless. On the actual hand, 5D is a very poor spot and you were lucky to make - you don't particularly want to be there. It's also worth pointing out that 3NT makes 10 tricks on the hand, so no matter what you do, you were going to lose matchpoints to any pair in that contract - you're only competing with the people in a partscore and in 5D. What this means is much of the time they don't need to factor in your decision whether or not to bid game. Of course, this line of analysis requires that partner has the hand they are showing. Here they don't, so the results on this hand can't really be used as evidence about whether your pass was "right" or not.

I'm clearly on the lunatic fringe, but double looks completely normal to me. If I pass, the most likely thing is that they play a comfortable 2H for a poor score to us. Partner can have a reasonable hand with no good action over 1H, so it's on me to act with the shortage in hearts. Doubling is certainly not without risk, but we're likely to have a fit and we're never finding it if I pass here.

I understand what you're trying to do and more power to you, but the devil is in the details here. Is your rule "draw all the trumps", "draw an extra trump to check for lurkers" or something else? What I'm betting you'll find is that it will be almost impossible to write a set of rules that cannot be gamed by someone who has forgotten a crucial detail such as whether there's another trump out and whether or not it's high. And I didn't choose the double squeeze example because it's some difficult play. One of the typical features is if it's working, declarer needs to do little more than follow suit once they set up the position. It's simply a matter of recognition, unlike other types of squeezes which require annoying things like counting.

Yeah, but the critical word in that law is "intentionally", and I would want pretty good evidence it was intentional before applying it. On the other hand, if I overheard South joking about it to their partner then I would be adding a sizeable penalty and taking further action. I think the director isn't really in a position to have a sense of humour about these things and should stop that sort of behaviour quickly.

When you preempt, your side is generally not going to be looking for another suit to be trumps. The preempt also makes it more dangerous for the opponents to interfere. Putting these two things together means that negative doubles are less useful and penalty doubles are more useful. In fact, it's an almost universal agreement that if you preempt, your partner's double is for penalties.

SCREAM is one of a family of systems Mark Abraham and others developed over the years. You can find information without a paywall at http://www.users.on.net/~mabraham/systems/index.html. The site also has notes for some NZ systems and a few others from Australia. None of them are for the casual player or faint of heart.

Surely partner would try 3NT.

Hanlon's razor is a useful principle to apply here. Most likely you will already know about it if South is wont to do something shady in this sort of position. In those situations you have Law 72B, but I would only apply that with very strong supporting evidence. Even if I had some evidence or suspicion, I would generally be mentioning it to a recorder rather than adding a penalty. So 3NT= would be the end of the ruling.

I would have started with a strong diamond raise. We've already found our fit, so why not let partner in on the secret. In fact, in my current serious partnership we cannot show this hand here, and 1D-2C; 2D-3D is probably slam interest with strong clubs.

Is this the analysis you are thinking of? http://www.clairebridge.com/textes/bridge_system_collection.pdf

There are three reasons you don't want to push to bid 1NT on a poor hand with no other good bid. First, it means the bid is less constructive, making it harder to find your 3NT games effectively. Second, you can often scramble some trump tricks, especially when the opponents don't know you're in a 4-3 (or maybe 3-3) fit. Finally, it's really easy for the opponents to double you in 1NT when they should, and it's much harder to punish a low-level suit contract. Just bid 1H on these hands - most of the time you'll be fine.

Not at all. West has all the entries so leading the queen has nothing to gain over the ace.

Pilun has much more experience with strong pass and ferts, but I always like having a bid (probably the next step) that shows a bad hand in response to a double. So if your double of 1S is 16+, maybe 1NT shows 0-5 and a hand that doesn't want to try and beat 1Sx.

This is going to be hard to do practically. How do you handle: A claim where declarer has correctly said "drawing last two trumps" in the claim box (or in the chat line outside the claim box) A similar claim where declarer hasn't said anything and it's not obvious that declarer knows how many are out A claim, which is valid on the assumption that a previously taken finesse (which the opponents would never have ducked) still works A claim which is cold on the known double squeeze, but the finesse for the 12th trick loses The problem I envisage is that if you do anything but use a double-dummy solver you're getting into very messy rules for the poor computer. And double dummy is a very poor way to adjudicate claims.

This. Depending on which partner I'm playing with, any one-level opening may be right. I don't think I've ever played anything where I should bid something higher, but I wouldn't rule it out. But if you want an answer, I'll go with 1C playing Polish Club.

I'm never going to get a better chance to say something about my hand, and the most useful thing I can say is that I have support for the other three suits. Why wouldn't I make a takeout double? It's our best chance to find the right game and allows partner to compete on hands where they may find it difficult to get into the auction. With most partners it's not even light with this shape - we have some aces and excellent spot cards. Any other call looks like a distant second choice.

That feels uncommonly well thought out. It shows the clubs if you still have room to show spades, but shows support if it has to. Over double I'm guessing it assumes you are penalising and it passes? The problem with it bidding 3C in an auction like 1H - 2C; 3C is that you might bid 3S to probe for 3NT. But in my experience that's too advanced for the bots.

Unlike many of your other hands, the robot's actions here look reasonable. You can still have four spades, so it takes an easy opportunity to show them. It can always show clubs later. I can't see any reason to do anything but pass over 4D. You're in a game-forcing auction with no clear action. I agree you might have a problem if RHO had passed, but here you would have just bid 3NT.

I believe North has shown a slam try with long clubs. 2NT is a transfer to clubs rather than Lebensohl over 2C interference. It sounds like South has a particularly suitable hand in support of clubs.

That's what you get for picking up that book on finesses...

6C isn't crazy because South's bidding shows a hand that expects to make 5C - the double followed by 5C is really strong. The raise is catering for something like: x - AKxxxx AKQxxx or x - AKQxx AKxxxxx Obviously not 29-30 total points, but the robot doesn't know how to express distributional values well.