Jinksy

Worth posting the vul and scoring, but I pass at any combination.

And that it's probably the only way we have to stop at the five level later if we keycard ask and P shows up with 1. That swings it for me. If I do have system that allows me to do so even with clubs agreed as trumps I'll bid 2♣. If not, 1♥.

There's an important space in the the_clown's sentence that you haven't credited him with.

Well sure, but by 'picking up' I mean 'effectively solving for declarer on the lead', not doing something he couldn't theoretically do himself. In many such situations his options for playing the hand will then then give him fewer opportunities to go wrong elsewhere. If we knew the actual probabilities of it giving something away and of (say) a small diamond doing the same, we wouldn't have a lead problem.

What sort of tweaks to the hand would tempt you?

I will be quite surprised if the club ace doesn't win DD. Perfect players love not having a human throw away their control of the hand. At the table I agree with mikeh that it's a guess, but I pretty much have the reverse preference: A heart is my last choice - I barely registered it as an option after first glance. ATxxx has too much chance of blowing the suit wide open for my limited capacity to find the killer switch after seeing dummy. Better players than me would prob do better from it. Leading a S probably won't do much to cut down on ruffs in a 4-4 hand, and has a 3/10 chance of picking up partner's queen (and a little extra of carving a K holding since I have the 10). I don't like leading from Jxx much more than mikeh, but it feels less likely to give away a trick they couldn't pick up anyway than any of the others.

This is why it seems more likely to me they have a heart fit. That said, I think hardly any hands worth a 2/1 will raise spades, unless they're playing a system that allows them to show a 10-11 3-card support hand directly. And it seems like lots of strong players on here would prefer to bid their suit rather than show 4-card support immediately if their suit is a potential source of tricks.

Everyone agrees with 4♠ the first time around, I take it?

Eight spades

It's been a while, but I'm playing my 'you have to actually give an argument rather than just saying something is terrible' card. I might be missing something, but both the assertions that the opps' fit is 'probably' spades - when that's the only one of their two suits that they've eschewed the chance to raise - and that the 'average' spade dist is 6520 - when the a priori odds against that dist are lower than eg 6430 (or 6340), which looks perfectly consistent with the bidding - sound fishy to me.

[hv=pc=n&s=skqjt8532hdq53cj7&d=n&v=e&b=9&a=p1n4s5hpp]133|200[/hv] IMPs with 4 randoms at the table.

On what grounds is it most likely spades or is that the average dist? Neither seems obvious to me.

Surely the only point of bidding here is to compete. When we bid directly over 1♣ (1♦) we're showing values in a way that might be difficult if we had to find a different bid on eg 44(23), (43)33, (24)43 etc. Here we have no need/ability to show values, and on those shapes we're happy to pass and let P back in if 1♦ is passed around to him.

I can't prove they have a fit, but so what? It's very likely they do, and this is a game of percentages. I'm more worried about pushing them into a slam they wouldn't otherwise have found than going for a large penalty, but not so worried that it's going to stop me bidding.

1. 3♠. I routinely bid one more in third, and at these colours I'm close to 4♠ than 2 :) 2. I'll double now, on the assumption that I didn't show a particularly strong hand first time around. I'm not sure I've discussed this with my Ps, but to me it looks like regular unusual, which we play as wide ranging. 3. I'm pretty mediocre at defence, but I don't see much reason to cover. W doesn't have an auto invite, E apparently doesn't have an auto accept, so we want to set this. If P only has two, then declarer might not be able to pitch his loser on such a drab dummy anyway. I'd probably have led a heart at trick 1, though.

I'll bid 4N for the minors. I don't know if I've made my final decision yet, but there's a lot of ways it can go so I won't try to explore the branches..

I think it was Pietro Forquet who said 'always lead your side suit singleton'. Since he's not here, I've cast his vote by proxy.

I've always played SAYC as helene and co describe. Stopping in 2♥ on a combined 22 count isn't such a great boon that I want to give up constructive bidding for it. Obviously as a 3rd-seat opener I can pass anything I damn well please. That doesn't tell you anything about the issue at hand - it only says that passed hand can't gameforce, which we already knew.

Run for your lives! It's the apocalypse!

I don't think I've ever heard two experienced weak NT players play the same system :P I won't lay out my full system, but my general experience has been a) that gamehunting dwarves the importance of slamhunting which is extremely rare by comparison b) that the most common tricky games to bid are those which require a major fit to make game worth bidding/inviting, and c) that as a consequence, I want to put my weak takeouts through Stayman, since it gives me a chance to learn about partner's hand before having to decide if I am actually weak. Some example responding hands: ATxx x KQJxx xxx At IMPs and probably at MPs I badly want to know if we have a spade fit. If P responds 2♦, I'll usually pass or occasionally bid 2N, depending on scoring, vul etc. If he bids 2♥ I'll bid 3♦ as a sign off. If he bids 2♠ I'll either bid 3♠ or punt game, again depending on scoring and vul etc. xx Qxx Jxxxxx xx I'll bid Stayman and either pass 2♦ or bid 3♦ over 2M - if the opps don't come in. The downside is obviously that it preempts them less than using a higher bid immediately would (though 2♠ as an xfer might let them X for the suit), but this is mainly relevant after a first seat 1N - otherwise the opps have both already passed so are less likely to compete aggressively or find a game.* We've found the gains from constructive bidding heavily outweigh the losses from letting the opps in. Also, to reduce the latter, I like to play any 4-level suited response to 1N as to play - moderately preemptive if 4M, purely preemptive if 4m again because of the low frequency of hands that could use the bids (or their negative inferences) for slamhunting. I prob would only do it on the second hand favourable (and after a 1st seat 1N), but make the hand a bit purer and I think it's valuable: x Jxxx QJTxxx xx Looks like 4♦ 3rd in at most vuls. We also find Stayman invaluable for gamehunting with 5-5 in the majors (where often you'll just punt if P shows one otherwise inviting with some artificial bid to show the shape, or more rarely sign off if he doesn't show one and invite if he does) and signing off with with 44nnsm 4351s etc, so I wouldn't want to trade it for anything NF or with either more or less restrictive responses. We played Keri for a while, which has a lot of nice properties, but in the end missed all the benefits of regular Stayman too much and crawled back to it apologetically.

Thanks. I've emailed the club management to complain formally. I don't suppose it'll achieve much, but it seemed like I should try rather than just whinging here. As for 'shouting' - I dunno. Where d'you draw the line? They were raising their voices enough that I didn't feel like I could have made myself heard without shouting, but not bellowing like the town crier.

I'll now go into more detail about the context (and editorialise/rant rather more). This E/W are the sort of players who would have long been suspended if the club had a less-than-infinite-tolerance policy. I've played against them there about three times, and each time they've been thoroughly obnoxious at the table. I won't go into the details of previous encounters (mainly because I can't remember the specifics), but this one was a level above anyway. Before I give more detail about the OP hand, I'll rewind to the board before, the first of our two-board set. The bidding there, me (S) as dealer, favourable, went P 1♥ 2♠. At this point, E asked me what 2♠ was, and I said 'at this vul and in this seat, very wide ranging'. They objected that I 'couldn't say that' and pressed me for an exact point range, so I said 'if you want a number, about 0-13 points'. They then became very aggressive, claiming that that 'wasn't an adequate description' (obviously precise phrasing here is from flustered memory, but as close as I can remember), and that it 'must' be 'weak, intermediate or strong'. I followed the advice from here, and just offered as neutrally as I could to get the director involved. When she came over they immediately started shouting at her and telling her that I was 'obviously dodgy' before actually describing the scenario. When they finally did, she looked at them slightly puzzled and said 'yes, that's fine. Carry on'. They let it be known that they were very dissatisfied with this, but we carried on. At some point between now and the next board, they looked at our card, which it turned out didn't have anything like 'preempts opposite a passed hand are wide ranging'. I know this is a fault - our card changes a lot and is packed with a lot of other stuff, so we occasionally don't realise something has been omitted. That said, they did not look at it until after asking me to describe the bid, shouting at us for it, accusing us of cheating, and getting the director ruling, so no-one can claim we misled them. Anyway, the bad taste from that was part of the reason why I called the director on the next board for something I'd normally let go in a club. On the OP board, as soon as I reserved my rights at the end of the auction* they became very aggressive again. They were both attacking me at once, so I can't remember exactly what they said, and I don't think it was very consistent anyway. At the end of the play when slam made, I duly called the director back. The director was an elderly lady, who someone else from the club described to me after the session as 'very nice, but not really a director', and as soon as she arrived at the table, the opps started shouting at her that 'I was just trying to [do something bad. I don't remember their exact phrase]', and it took a good minute just to shut them up enough so that I could actually tell her the facts of what had happened. She looked slightly confused and just said 'that's fine, carry on'. (* As a side query, my P said afterwards he thought doing this was discouraged now, and that we're advised to immediately call the director/that reserving rights has no legal function. Is that correct?) At no point did she ask the opps to explain their behaviour, though they were talking enough that it was pretty clear: E admitted she had thought she was doing something stronger, and I think W even said something like 'she obviously had a strong hand' - he certainly never tried to argue that he could justify his bid from his own hand (admittedly neither of them seemed very coherent, or else I wasn't really absorbing what they were saying - it was obviously indignant noise rather than a proper discussion) I made a token effort at trying to explain to her what I objected to about the auction, which she didn't seem to understand, then gave up since I didn't think I was going to get anywhere, and meanwhile she seemed slightly distressed by the whole thing. Meanwhile, the opps re-complained about the previous board, and, having found the system card omission pressed that point to her. She rebuked me for not having filled it in, and we carried on, them scoring 90% for this board. For several reasons this has really ground at me: The system card thing was obviously in some sense our error, but it was also an obvious excuse for them to try and throw their weight around, and I'd bet serious money that if we read over theirs with a fine comb, we'd find plenty of similarly undisclosed 'just bridge'-esque agreements.If this was some rural club with the same 6 couples having shown up every week for the last three decades I might be less perturbed, but this was [modedit: removed exact location], a respectable enough place that it has its own premises and staff. I had no idea what to do when I encountered such weak directing. I could presumably appeal the board, but the board itself wasn't really the point - the flagrant attempt by this couple to bully us (and then to bully the director) was what really got up my nose.The couple in question aren't exactly strong, but they're experienced players. [modedit: removed info identifying players]As I said, they have a pattern of this kind of behaviour. This was by some margin the worst I've seen from them, but the same person I spoke to post-event said this matched her experiences - that they're tournament players who often try and exert their will on club players (though to be fair she did seem marginally better disposed to them than me, and didn't think they were normally outright hostile). I'm thinking about writing a formal note to the EBU re this, not so much to complain as just to ask what I should do in situations like this - esp where, as I say, it's a prominent club that you'd expect to attract a few new players, who'd be even less well equipped to deal with this kind of crap than I was. I walked away from the table thinking 'no wonder this game is dying'.

What do you mean what west thought he was doing? You mean how he justified the 4N bid as opposed to something less ambitious?

She did not ask either question (the director seemed really clueless) What sort of answer to 'why' would you be looking for in each case? Maybe I can provide info.

What do you need to know? I'll answer any questions as perspective-neutrally as I can manage.