Dirk Kuijt

Free So, what is XX in your system?

Interesting hand. We have a 6-4 fit, and find the outstanding trumps 2-2.

I did a study of the systems used in USBF championships. IIRC, there were only 2 or 3 pairs playing weak NT out of 60 or so pairs. To be sure, Martel and Stansby, on the winning team, are weak NT players. Obviously, this analysis is only good for American pairs; this was an event picking the US team.

I don't pretend to have an answer, nor to be good enough to think of one. But, let me raise a point which no one seems to have commented on. Why did declarer pitch a club from dummy on the second round of hearts, instead of a spade? He knows the hearts are ready to run. If we get in, the small spade is pretty worthless to him, while if he can run the clubs (as well as his diamonds), he takes 12 tricks. True, this isn't matchpoints, but it seems silly to throw away an IMP. I admit to being baffled; I don't see how pitching a club can be a deceptive play, so what is going on?

FWIW, my simulation gives, of hands that open 1♥ in a 2/1 framework, the fraction of how many hearts are held: 9+ hearts: 0.0007 8 hearts: 0.0079 7 hearts: 0.0616 6 hearts: 0.2773 5 hearts: 0.6526 Setting hands with 9+ to exactly 9 hearts, gives an average number of hearts as 5.4269. Your mileage may vary, especially depending on your view of opening 1NT with 5 hearts.

Clarification wanted: Do you have any way of playing in a spade partscore after 1♣-1♠-2♥? It seems like all the spade bids are forcing.

Thanks FWIW, our auction was 1♦-1♠ 4♠-6♦ Since I don't think either one of us bid this very well, I'll not admit to whether I was North or South. We compounded the bidding with the play. The ♥A was led, after which the hand is makeable, but declarer mistimed the play, giving us the score we deserved.

[hv=d=s&v=n&n=s107653hk1075daj42c&s=sakqh82dkq97ckq97]133|200|Scoring: MP We had a soft result on this. How should the bidding go in a 2/1 framework?[/hv] I'll admit to our bidding a bit later.

My candidates for worst 1. After the dummy goes down: Dummy ♥Qx Declarer ♥A Opening lead is the ♥J; low, and East plays the ♥K. To be sure, this was in college, and we had been playing all night. 2. Opening leads. I think it would be hard to show that any opening lead was 0%, though of course there are 100% leads. So, I don't know if I can meet Justin's standard. However, this one has to be close. I don't remember partner's entire hand, but he led the singleton ♣K against this auction: 1NT-2NT-3NT.

So, Ken, what was the answer to your question? What percentage of pairs did end in the 3-3 'fit'?

3♥ and then 5NT. Definitely want to make partner declare this one. From your side, even 3NT is not safe.

jdonn What I meant was that no one has psyched, misread a bid, or forgotten an convention; that was what I was thinking of outlandish. I agree that my 2♠ bid is bad; I'm going to claim that, in my sequence, South's double is merely poor. OTOH, it isn't all that easy to think of logical ways to get to a 3-3 fit.

If I'm guessing: what would maximize the probability, I would have East deal and open 1♣. South doubles, and North bids 1♠. From here, it gets fuzzy, but West comes in with 2♥ and it comes back to South, who balances into 2♠. Not all that likely, but no one has done anything outlandish.

Gwnn Of course the unbalanced hands make 4♥ much more easily, but can that really be the deal? Obviously the hand you cited is extreme, but, IMO, it is inconsistent with the bidding, since the opponents would be bidding much more with their many HCP and many diamonds. Yes, I'm aware there are risks in putting too much faith in the opponents to bid correctly (that is, the way I do ;) ) OTOH, it is risky to assume that the opponents have made a mistake.

OK, I admit to being one of the 3♥ bidders, and I don't think this is such a WTP, LOL problem at all, especially at matchpoints. It seems to me that there are several warning signals that suggest going low: 1. The 2♦ bidder is likely to have an easy and effective opening lead of a top diamond honor, so you don't get any help from the blind lead, and it sets up tricks for the defense. 2. The partner of the 2♦ bidder didn't double, which suggests that he doesn't want to go higher in diamonds, which in turn suggests that partner will have a few diamonds, which will be very bad for us. 3. The opposing bid was 2♦, not X. Double would tend to have more values in spades; this suggests that missing spade values are in the dummy, which is not a good place for our side's values. 4. The OP said the partnership style was to open most 12's and good 11's, so there is no potential 'reserve' of high cards, since partner is a passed hand. Putting it another way, you are not going to make this game on power; if you make it at all, it will be because of good distribution, and, at the moment, you have no reason to expect that good distribution exists. Let's look at a few possible hands: KQxx Axx xxx Qxx The worst: This is an easy beat for the defense, and if clubs are 5-1, even 3 hearts is going down. Pretty pessimistic, I admit. Kxxx Axx xxx Axx I give you having the spade Ace in front of the king, but it doesn't help much, does it? AQJx xxx xx Axxx You will make this hand fairly easily--if both round suits are 3-2. Is that likely? I'm guessing that the compound probability on this auction is less than 50%, and, note that this might well be an opener by OP's standards. Having written down a bunch of hands, I concluded that you make if partner has most of: 1. 2 or fewer diamonds 2. 4 or more hearts 3. QJ in clubs (not A, not only Q, not only J) There are too many assumptions to have an effective simulation, IMHO, but it seems to me that there are lots of hands that are going down in 4♥, and, on a really bad day, in 3♥.

Bab9 I'm back, after a detour through the ICU via the ER; don't try this at home. I don't attempt to distinguish between kinds of fits in terms of length. 4-4 is the same as 5-3 is the same as 6-2, and they are all worse than 5-4, or anything with 9 cards, which are worse than anything with 10 cards, which etc. I do favor major suit fits over minor suit fits. In terms of NT, I deduct for having too much shortness in any suit. 3-2 is considered the shortest "normal" holding. A deduction is made for 3-1, and a bigger deduction for 2-2. 3-0 is still worse, and 2-1 worse yet. OTOH, I do add for length in suits in NT, though not as much as if one played in the suit itself. Thus 2=3=4=4 opposite 2=4=3=4 gets a deduction for the 2-2 spade holding, and no bonus, while 2=2=2=7 opposite 2=3=4=4 gets a deduction for the 2-2 spade holding but a bonus for the 7=4 club holding. This adjustment for deciding whether NT is right or not "feels" right. Of course, the exact adjustments are highly debateable. In real life, the race between the stoppers in the short suits and declarer's long suits would be critical; that level of analysis is far beyond anything I'm trying at the moment. I'm working on including values, but right now, not so good. (So far, the program has bid every hand the same :huh: ) More to come.

Not the most memorable hand, but the most screwed up tournament. Playing in college, 40+ years ago, two things happened. First, rather more people showed up than expected. Good, right? Well, the director only had one set of boards, so, for the only time in my life, I played one board per round. Second, at least one person sitting N/S was a novice at scoring. This was back in the days of travelers. Instead of putting his pair's score on the line for his pair number, he put it on the highest available line, which meant that his pair's score moved all around the traveler. It took a long time to get the results that night.

Pavlicek has a study of this kind of problem at: http://www.rpbridge.net/8c01.htm

[hv=d=e&v=n&s=shakq10xxxdakjxxcx]133|100|Scoring: MP East opens 3♥! I couldn't think of anything intelligent to do, so I passed. We beat it 7 tricks, for +350 (declarer dropped a trick, not that it mattered). East intended to open 3♠, and was happy enough with -350. However, North had ♦Q10xx and ♣A, and everyone else North/South was in at least 5♥, going down. A cold top for us![/hv]

FWIW, as I play the outside void is fine. As for whether to bid 4♥, it depends on something that you hinted at, but didn't specify, that is, what does partner's 3♥ mean? If this is invitational, then you have an evaluation problem, and 4♥ seems right to me, even if it goes down because partner has too much stuff in clubs. If 3♥ is a further preempt, then you pass without looking at your hand. To violate an agreement (such as 3♥ is a further preempt) by bidding 4♥ means that you found another ace that you overlooked the first time; this hand is not so unusual, as I play it, to violate a partnership understanding.

This isn't quite an answer to the question, or, if you prefer, an abstention. I wouldn't double in the first place; I prefer 1NT to doubling with a doubleton heart.

Free I limit opening bids to 2NT, the first response to 3NT, and subsequent bids to 5D. I do this to reduce the size of the tables; the memory used is enormous as it is, and constructive bidding doesn’t normally start above 2NT anyway. I’m not sure what I said that implied that I’m looking for 7 card fits; I’m not. The scoring system for the program has the highest weight for a major suit fit of 8 cards or more. I have special, extreme penalties for finishing in a 6 card or shorter “fit”, but that doesn’t mean that I’m looking for 7 card fits. Limiting all calls to a maximum of 2NT is an interesting idea, and I may try that. I’ve got to check how easy that will be in the program. (Yes, it should be simple, but these things don’t always turn out that way.)

hotShot There is no question that both taking into account the level of the contract will make a difference, and taking into account those pesky opponents will also make a difference. I admit that, at the moment, I’m doing neither. My justification for this is that I’m working on a problem that I hope to solve. I tried to take into account level (that is, HCP) earlier, and got nowhere. If I can get it to solve the simpler problem, then I’m definitely going to try the next one as well. Bab9 The bids it uses are simulation dependent, to some extent. It always uses dealer’s opening pass, 1C, and 1D. After that, usage drops off quickly, so that an opening 2NT (the highest I allow for dealer) is the rarest, occurring maybe one run in 10. However, it is not linear, and there are often gaps, such as no 1S bids, but 1NT, or no 1NT, but 2C. In any case, bids at 1S and above are rare and tend to show very specific hands, such as exact distribution. As to which fit it finds, my impression is that there is no difference between 7 card fits, though I don’t have any statistics to prove that. The weight adjustment does distinguish between two 8 card or longer fits (one major and one minor), so the program does favor the major suit fit in that case. As for the weights, clearly two sequences should not show the same hand. In fact, there must be some difference between them, though that difference may not jump out looking at a few hands, or at least jump out to me. If the weights were really exactly the same for two bids, then one or the other would always be chosen (either first or last, depending on the details of the program). Of course, not only should the bids mean something different, they should mean something substantially different. However, how to quantify “substantially” is not obvious to me, nor is it obvious how to adjust the weights to make things better if the weights didn’t differ “substantially”.

Further progress, or at least understanding of what is going on: (I'm still just trying to get to the right suit; getting to the right level is another large step.) 1. The program "never" (at least in several runs) uses all the opening calls available to it, and rarely more than 5. Finding a way to rebalance the weights such that it does use all the calls when doing training is my main concern at the moment. 2. The opening pass is invariably the most common call, and invariably converges on a generally balanced hand. Balanced here is not as restrictive as you would normally think, it may have a singleton. However, both short suits (0-1) and long suits (7+) are clearly weighted against, having negative weights when I allow them. Having dealer's pass be the most common seems right. 3. Higher bids are more specific than lower bids (which seems right). Often, opening bids from 1S on up have very specific meanings, like only 4=1=1=7. 4. Intermediate opening bids (1C to 1H) tend to fall into two categories: either two suiters, or bids showing an exact holding (typically 4 cards) in a specific major suit. The two suiters are sometimes two specific suits, sometimes an anchor suit and some other, though the other suit is normally one of two, not one of three. E.g. Hearts plus a minor, but not hearts and another. Devoting a bid to a one suiter seems to be rare. When it does "violate" its system, it often fails to get to a good spot; well, at least responder isn't cheating :-) 5. Allowing or not allowing negative weights doesn't seem to make a difference.

I don't claim to know what's right here, but I'm bidding 4♥. After this bid, I don't think anyone else at the table will know what's right, either.