WellSpyder

I think weejonnie's approach is only an approximation. It is true that there is a 13/52 chance that declarer's first card is in dummy. But if it isn't, there is a 13/51 chance that his next card is in dummy. And so on....

I would consider going further than this, and imposing a penalty on W for deliberately conveying UI. However, I guess this might depend on the normal methods in this part of the world. Would it be normal to use 5♦ as a natural bid if oppo were playing better minor but to use it as some sort of cue-bid if they were playing 4-card diamond suit openings? If so, then clearly a penalty would not be appropriate. But this sounds like an unlikely agreement to me, whether it is explicit or implicit.

Really? How else does he show reasonable values if his only suit is clubs? Strangely enough I saw exactly this auction by oppo at the table in last night's match. The 3 ♣ bidder had ♠J96♥KJ10♦J6♣Q9754

If GIB is using double dummy analysis, it presumably doesn't understand the concept of letting declarer guess.

Indeed. But the OP does not ask obvious questions without a reason, so perhaps the challenge is to work out the reason for the question. Maybe the thread title would provide some sort of clue if my brain wasn't a bit slow today....

Not exactly the same, perhaps, but it reminds me of what might be called the "insult ace ask". This occurred in a (non-competitive) auction reported by clamatius, which ended like this: 4C (how may aces do you have? I think they were playing Rainbow Gerber!) - 4x (some number of aces) 4y ("not enough" - sign-off) - 4N (OK, how may aces do you have?) 5x (some number of aces) - 6y (sounds OK to me!) The contract made, of course....

I have played against one player who always insisted on the tray remaining on the table until the opening lead had been made - now I know why! I think this is actually what the screen regulations require anyway, but it is far from the norm in my experience, which seems to be that anyone with a moment to spare might remove the tray. (This would not generally be the opening leader, of course, since he has other things to think about at that time .....)

DNE4ME

Exactly - so are you ruling down 1?

I gave the first hand a lot more consideration than the second, so I think I'll try a Nigel-style response: Hand 1 1♠ = 10, Pass = 10, 2♠ = 9 Hand 2 Pass = 10, 1♣ = 6

One point that has not been mentioned is that you haven't told us which seat the 3♣ opening bid was made in. In 3rd seat after two passes many people play much wider-ranging pre-empts. At the bottom end it could be as few as 0 points since you can be pretty sure oppo have a game on if you have nothing and partner has declined to open the bidding. At the top end it could be as many as 14 points since as a passed hand partner is unlikely to want to bid anything whatever strength you have and you are unlikely to be missing game yourself. In 4th seat after three passes, pre-empts are also likely to depart from the norm since there is no point in pre-empting opponents who have both already declined to open the bidding. So it is normal to play such pre-empts as showing decent hands - unless you have a reasonable expectation of making the contract you are better off just passing the hand out in 4th seat! The different expectations of pre-empts in 3rd and 4th seat might be regarded as general bridge knowledge, and therefore something that does not need to be alerted. (Having said that, I do play opening bids of 3 of a minor in any seat with one partner as showing good 6-card suits and 10-14 points in an otherwise Acol-based system. We always alert these since although they are natural they may well contain unexpected strength.)

I don't disagree with you in a practised partnership, but with few agreements I think a healthy dose of "Keep It Simple, Stupid" goes a long way.

I think you are over-thinking this by worrying that N could have an 8-count. If you have very few agreements, a UCB to me would at least say "if you have a sound overcall I think we ought to have a chance of making game", and the 3♣ bid would say "yes, I have a sound overcall". Even if nothing else about what these bids are trying to convey is clear, I think you can still expect subsequent bidding to be about finding the right game, not about deciding whether or not to stop in a partscore.

Exactly. Bidding on the second round rather than the first is not just about what you have learnt about the other hands and how that might affect your evaluation of your own hand, but also about what information partner will now have about your hand and how that might affect his future actions.

Why do you need to know how many jacks partner holds?

Where were you when I was having this discussion about master points in 1 vs 2-winner movements?

I think this is an excellent point (though one might add a less than ideal shape to the alternatives of a minimum or a big balanced hand). It reminds me that I was once on an AC that had to consider what was suggested by a BIT before making a TO double of a pre-empt, albeit at the 3-level rather than the 4-level. The partner at the table chose to pass, and it was argued by some that this was the action suggested by the BIT, for much the reasons that Trinidad is pointing out. There has to be some action that isn't suggested, though......

You may think it was predictable, but I am not aware that it was predicted! There is a big difference between being able to explain afterwards why something happened, and actually expecting it before it happened. (I am an economist by profession, a field where "experts" often seem to be on the wrong end of this comparison!) I am not trying to argue that the failure to predict an increase in Antarctic sea ice invalidates global warming science, but it would certainly have been a more impressive validation of the science if this had been foreseen rather than being explained afterwards.

How confident are you really about this? He has got to lead something, and I wonder whether there is a possibility that he might feel a lead from QJ bare won't give anything away. In that case I think you have a bit of a dilemma following your line if ♦J falls under the A. This means ♦ were 3-2 all along, but if trumps are 4-1 you no longer have the entries to safely ruff out the diamonds and return to cash the suit. You can cash AKQ of clubs, but if West discards I don't see how you are going to get home unless he has a third diamond after all.

I, too, would be interested to hear more about what any advice from your club's L&E committee about how your wording could be improved. I tend to give an explanation very similar to yours, and that is how I think about the bid. This is also the explanation one of my partners gives. But I have noticed that some rather old system notes of his actually describe the bid much more along the lines of your partner's explanation. Having said that, I don't think the sort of hands on which he makes the bid has changed at all. So I'm not actually convinced that there is any difference in practice between the two ways of looking at the bid, even if one sounds like it is asking and the other showing. The key difference in the explanations really, I think, is that one implies support for partner's suit and the other apparently does not. But if all the hands on which the bid is chosen actually have support then I prefer your explanation to your partner's. If 95% of hands on which the bid is used have support but a few very strong hands also make the bid anyway then it gets murkier. I suppose in that case the explanation should be "usually a high card raise to at least 2♠, but sometimes a GF hand without primary support that wants to find out more about my hand."

Before reaching a decision I would like to know a little more about the bids available to North. What sort of values are normally expected to bid 2♥ rather than a negative 2♦? (I think this is a relatively unusual agreement, so like mbodell I would want to be confident that there really is an expectation that a weak hand with genuine ♥ support would bid 2♦.) Was there an alternative bid available to show a stronger hand with ♥ support but still less than GF values?

It is probably unusual to find two loser-on-loser plays in the same hand, one a loser from dummy discarded on a loser from hand and the other a loser from hand discarded on a loser from dummy. It wasn't your fault that the first loser-on-loser play turned out to be a loser-on-winner play!

Oh. You may be right. I don't ever actually have to do this, and I don't think I've played in a two-winner movement for many years. But I thought my experience as a recipient in the past was that each sub-field was treated exactly the same as for a 1-winner movement, ie in your example awards of 24, 18, 12 and 6 rather than 40, 30 , 20 and 10. (This would certainly imply a higher total number of masterpoints awarded in the one-winner case, though not, I notice by as high a ratio as I claimed in my earlier e-mail.)

I don't know how masterpoint awards are determined in your part of the world, but over here (England) you would get the same number of players getting them - one third of the field. (It is possible that rounding effects give one more pair winning points in the two-winner movement than in the one-winner movement.) Much more to the point, I would have thought, though, is the actual number of masterpoints awarded, rather than the number of people they are given to. I think this is something like three times as high in the one-winner movement! That sounds like a pretty good argument for arrow-switching to me. To understand why this is, look first at the second sixth of the field - ie the bottom half of those receiving MPs. These people get exactly the same number of MPs as if they were in the top third of a field half the size - eg in a two-winner movement. But all the top sixth of the one-winner movement get more MPs than this, and therefore more than if they were in the top third of the other half of a two-winner movement.

Sorry, I seem to have raised a bit of a non-issue. I was North here, and it didn't really occur to me that I might have done something wrong. I didn't even consciously think that partner must have psyched. I simply thought that if partner decided he didn't want to play in 2♠ doubled even though I had told him by passing that I was happy with this, then it would be silly to tell him to play in 3♠ doubled instead. East, however, seemed firmly of the opinion that I had fielded a psyche. Since he seemed more interested in making sarcastic comments about my bidding than in calling the TD (no doubt since they got a top anyway!), I thought I had better see what the general view here was in case I really had got this wrong - I know it can be hard to form an objective opinion when one is involved at the table, however much you think this is what you are doing.