Jinksy

Assuming you're not playing transfer advances or anything similar and advancer is bidding a new suit naturally, which if any of the following have a consensus/standard, and what is it: 1/1 advances 2/1 advances 2/2 advances What if the bidding had started (1x) P (1y), and the overcall had been fourth seat? Any other key cases I missed? (I'm assuming no-one would play anything as forcing by a hand that couldn't make an opening bid)

Obviously it doesn't make sense if you haven't played the boards yet, but if you've played a board your opp's playing (or at least if you've finished the whole set), why shouldn't you be able to go in and laugh at his bad play/gasp with horror as his reckless abandon pays off?

FWIW I posted south as a single-hand problem on bridgewinners, and 70% of the votes were for S signing off immediately in 5!D, including Phil Clayton's, the strongest player I know of to have voted in the poll: https://bridgewinners.com/article/view/bidding-problem-2-6io0rdymql/

Woops, right. Changed the poll.

[hv=pc=n&s=skjth4dk7542ckqt4&n=sh532daq9863ca982&d=s&v=0&b=11&a=1d(4+%20)2d(Michaels%2C%20unspecified%20strength)3s(Splinter%20%5Bno%20specific%20strength%20agreements%5D)4hpp4sp5dppp]266|200[/hv] IMP teams, with no sophisticated agreements. Also I can't find the hand records now - it's possible S had the JD. Would that affect your view?

[hv=pc=n&s=saq42ha3da43cakq7&n=sk53hkj9dkq75cj62&d=s&v=0&b=11]266|200[/hv] You get a spade lead. My squeeze play is neither good enough to see a way to deal with W guarding spades and E with long diamonds and Qxx or better hearts, nor to prove that there isn't one - though I think the issue is that both the pivot and menace against E would be under him?

I'm spending a week with a few friends, very smart people who've never played bridge, and teaching a handful of them the game. The difficulty is going to be familiar to most people here - they're nodding along as I explain tricks, contracts and trumps, then their faces fall as I start trying to explain the bidding, and all the exceptions. I've had a look online for bidding cheat sheets, but honestly all the ones I've found are basically awful. They include stuff like Stayman (maybe transfers), and all sorts of nuances about bidding majors rather than raising partner's minor, doing things to probe for 3N when we've found a minor suit fit vs just blasting 4M. One of them, who I'd started teaching slightly earlier than the others, came up with what I thought was an excellent suggest for a bridging (no pun intended) game between minibridge and actual bridge - to wit, just playing a version of bridge where 'anything from 3N upwards is game' (obviously we can also do without vulnerability and full scoring at this stage). This has allowed me to make a substantially more simplified version of the bidding system, where we don't have any special treatments for majors, and just give basically very consistently patterned instructions for raising with 12-14, 15-17, and 18-19 point hands (which obviously at this stage are as partitioned as I want to make them). Was wondering if anyone else had tried this, or come up with any other pseudo bridge variant that seemed particularly effective for beginners?

('cause that would make it more likely you could actually get enough other people playing to have an interesting comparison)

Or you could reverse the emphasis, and have a daylong which anyone can play, but where your percentage is only calculated against people on your friends list, or perhaps against other stipulations you could specify (max degrees of separation, perhaps, though not sure how processor hungry that would end up being). They would see their percentage differently than you did, but would that really matter?

It seems a shame that, although my score gets compared with all my BBO friends in a daylong, the result ends up being pretty meaningless since they've usually played completely different boards. Presumably this is to reduce the risk of cheating, but personally (at least for the free ones) I would gladly trade a couple of % against the cheats for the ability to properly compare the decisions I made with players I respect.

Yeah, this was robots, and they insist on 4 for the bid.

[hv=pc=n&s=skt92hkqjda743c96&n=saj765ht64dkq2c42&d=e&v=n&b=2&a=p1dp1sp2sp3dp3sppp]266|200[/hv] IMP scoring. 2♠ promised 4. 3♦ was a naturalish game try, though could still have only 4 spades.

Bird and Anthias found a substantial DD advantage for leading an honour from KQxx(x), and a slightly reduced (but still present) advantage from doing the same with QJ holdings. FWIW I've never heard anyone advocate anything but an honour from QJ9 holdings.

For one thing, many of my partners would have no idea if we were playing in Blackwood on such a sequence. Even assuming good partnership understanding, what does P then do over 4♣ with such as xxx Kxxxxx x xxx? Rebid that junk and find you with xx A AKQxx AKQxx? Or raise you to 5♣? - which on the actual hand might go several off with 6♥ almost laydown. I'm not proposing that changing the way we respond 2♥ would give us the optimal way of bidding such hands, but that if we just changed the default understanding, it would help a lot of people who didn't have detailed partnership agreements.

For one thing, many of my partners would have no idea if we were playing in Blackwood on such a sequence. As for not going far wrong over 4♣, what can P then do over 4♣ with such as xxx Kxxxxx x xxx? Rebid that junk and find you with Ax x AKQxx AKQxx? Or raise you to 5♣? - which on the actual hand might go several off with 6♥ almost laydown. I'm not proposing that changing the way we respond 2♥ would give us the optimal way of bidding such hands, but that if we just changed the default understanding, it would help a lot of people who didn't have detailed partnership agreements.

(forewarning - a bit of a stream of consciousness rather than a serious argument, but it's a view I hadn't considered or heard before) As far as I can see, the biggest problem with an auction like 2♣ 2♠... is that opener with a strong heart single or double-suiter now has to start describing it a level higher - which is generally a Very Bad Thing. But in the similar auction 2♣ 2♥... opener hasn't lost any bidding space except in the highly unlikely case he's got his own primary heart suit (which hardly seems like a disaster), and has gained substantial information about partner's hand. Sure, you'll wrongside more often, but if that gets you to a different contract 1 time in 5 my guess is it will pay off against wrongsiding. And it will hurt slightly on the hands where responder has substantial extras - but how common will they be compared to minimal borderline positives? Here's the hand that got me thinking about this: x AQJ AKQ9x AKQx As someone who avoids 2♣ openings at any excuse, in standard bidding, at pretty much any colour or form of scoring I think you just have to do it on this hand (agree?). It got predictably unpleasant: 2C 2D 3D 3H ? Assuming you don't have any fancy conventions to help you out that this point, you seem pretty much screwed. Would P bid 3♥ with such as Qxx xxxx x xxxxx, or a balanced Yarborough? Or do all hands that can't muster a pure 3M bid now or a diamond raise have to bid 3N? Either way there's a huge grey area that leaves you with what seems to me an impossible next step - do you raise hearts, or bid clubs, either of which could land you in a doomed Moyesian with 6 cold in the other suit. Or do you bid 3N and go off when they run spades when you had a slam in *either* round suit? Whereas if you had the agreement that partner would respond 2H to 2C much more aggressively, this sequence might lose a lot of its bite. There will still be a grey area, but now partner (perhaps) can't have even a moderately good hand with Kxxxx of hearts, bidding clubs seems a lot clearer. And in that situation, if P rebids 4♥, that would sound more like a club cue showing the heart king (cha-ching$$) - since there's a very small set of hands that couldn't muster a weakly positive H response to 2♣ that would now have any desire to naturally rebid their suit). With stricter requirements on the 2H bid, who knows? Maybe 4H now is still a cue, but it's going to stuff your natural bidding up more. So this is mainly about the 2C 2H sequence, but it occurs to me that the thoughts are analogous in any sequence where you'd have respectable support if the suit(s) you're bypassing turn out to be partner's primary suit. Compare something like 1) Qxxxx xxx x Kxxx and 2) Qxxxx x xxx Kxxx, and hear P's 2C opening. If you respond 2D on either, he'll be in a similar quandary over your 3S continuation (and you can swap the minors and hear a 3C rebid and I don't think things look much better). On hand 2, too bad - you can't afford to bid 2S and hear 3H, leaving you still with no idea about the best strain. But on hand 1, if partner has hearts you can raise him directly, and if he has any other suit you haven't lost any space with your 2S bid. The sequence 2C 2S / 3H 4H isn't exactly great, since P may well have slam interest and no five level safety, but you could probably play 4C as a cue (you don't want to argue your two suiters against his, let alone against his single suiters), and even if not, I'd prefer to know we're in a sane game with some slam-finding difficulty than to wonder whether to raise P's 3S on such as KQx, with little confidence of whether we'll miss a 9-card fit if I don't, or play in 4♠ opposite xxxx if I do. 3m responses to 2C seem like they need a lot more definition, since they rob you of the hugely descriptive 2N rebid. But still, it doesn't seem crazy to contemplate bidding 3C way more optimistically on 3316 hands than on (13)36 ones.

Yeah, Timo was right on the money. My - glacially slow - partner had tanked for about 30 seconds in a game we were already behind on in this position with KQTx xxxx xxx xx, and I snapped at him afterwards for wasting everyone's time. As Timo also guessed, I was pissed at the time of posting, and the intended question was 'are there any 13 cards consistent with passing twice and bidding now?' Maybe the answer is yes, but I don't think the hands people have given above are right. If the normal criterion for pulling a double of 4+ to the 5+ level is because you think you're making, then the canonical hand would be something like QJTxx KQTxxx x x (or whatever would fall just under a bid over 5♣ for you), and P would be entitled to raise on AKxx Axxx Kx AQx or similar. If you're going to pull on the same sort of shape but no values, then even when pulling was 'right', you'll probably find yourself playing in 7Mx. Or you need to be playing an agreement that pulling says 'I think they were making' rather than 'I think we are', which seems like courting disaster.

It's that obvious? :P

[hv=d=e&v=e&b=6&a=p3dd5cppdp]133|100[/hv] This sequence was the source of a rather silly dispute between my regular P and me - not so much what he should have done on his hand (passing was obvious), but whether he could possibly have a hand consistent with having passed twice (he had a multi-2♦ available) that could be bidding on now. IMP scoring.

Yeah, this seems like a salient point for the robots - humans just aren't always going to have the hands the robots think they should for the bidding (to say nothing of vice versa!), so they shouldn't be making provably bad plays just because they think they can prove a contradiction.

I've just played a daylong, where a robot did something very weird, but presumably a report is little use without a hand - and apparently I don't see records of daylongs? If it's stored somewhere, see if you can access a board I played about 20 minutes before posting this in said daylong - board 6, 2N - 1 The entire defence was surreal, but tricks 8 and 10 were a particular kind of special. Maybe my over-heavy WJS confused it? But those were still some drastically bad decisions.

Nigel is describing the system, not the hand.

2N is probably right (neither opp has overcalled spades, so they're probably not running 5 against you), but I like the idea of 3N, nominally showing a good club suit and a semibalanced hand. It'll stop us from missing game when P bid on Kxxx xxx Jxxxxx -, KQx xxx Txxxx xx etc, and if P goes hunting for a club slam I'll eventually pull him back to diamonds and hope he gets the joke.

I was about to claim just that for my auction, and when W leads the J♣ I'll insist that E lead one :D

[hv=pc=n&s=skha543daj7543ck6&n=saq9843h8d6caj932&d=s&v=n&b=15&a=1dp1sp2dp3cp3hp3sp3nppp]266|200[/hv] W leads the 7♥ (2nds/4ths) to East's Q. What's your plan?