dellache

I don't see the point here. West has the club Ace, made a silly mistake by not overtaking the second spade, and his pard duly played him for the only reasonable chance he had : playing the opening leader for a Diamond ruff. Why should West now also hold the stiff ♥K ?

Hi Eugene ! For a start, I think it would be much better to post this kind of problem with important extraneous facts like : - the full sequence (how do we interpret the lead ?) ; - the strength of oppos (is LHO a LOL or LOM who would lead a very dangerous Jack from JTx in spite of dummy's known spades ?) - the speed of the lead : did West lead a very quick ♠J, or did he consider another lead ? Let's suppose that North just bid spades on 1♥, then gave fit in Clubs, and they went on a quick slam. I would expect a trump or a Diamond lead then, and never a ♠J lead from JTx+. If West led it quickly, it's odds on that he has J or JT bare, and I would play accordingly. We can make even if both suits are 4-1, if we play like this : [1] Take ♠K, [2] Ruff a Heart, [3] Cash ♦A, [4] ruff a diamond. It looks like you have shortened both hands now, but it doesn't really matter. [5] Play a spade toward dummy. Case a. West discards a diamond. We have to hope that he had at least 4 diamonds. We cash [6] ♦K discarding a spade, and if we have survived, we can cross-ruff the reminder and make 12 tricks. Case b. West plays the Spade Ten. We take [6]♠Ace, and [7] Cash the ♦K discarding a spade. Then we finish on cross-ruff lines. We don't care about trumps being also 4-1. Case c. West plays a small Spade. What a JOKE ! We have no choice but to play [6] the Ace, and if East ruffs this, too bad. If we make the trick, we can still manage 12 tricks if Trumps are 4-1. We continue with [7] ♦K, and discard a Spade. Now we play [8] ♠Q. If East has 4 trumps we don't care if he ruffs this : we overruff and finish the hand on cross ruff. If he discards a Heart, threatening an Overruf, we do the same, and we always make 12 tricks. (If West has led the ♠J in Jx, we also finish on a cross ruff). Actually, there seems to be NO line at the start which allows you to cater for both 4-1 splits, both ways. The above line succeeds almost always when West has short spades. Even with 3-2 spades, it seems to succeed most of the time. What did I miss ?

You maybe just convinced my pard that PASS is a decent bid. In a very tough and important match in the french national division my partner bid 3♠, I bid 3NT... and I went down 5 (on a misdefence : they could have squeezed me in 3 suits for down 6. They cashed the ♦ at the 13th trick. They made 4 Clubs, 2 Spades, 1 Heart, 2 Diamonds). 3♥ was down 2 on best defense. 5 teammates rather "annoyed" at the end of a saturday session of the french nationals. Or should I say 10 teammates ? Nobody could believe it, but the result was duplicated !

You have : [hv=d=e&v=n&s=sq7543h64d7ca5432]133|100|Scoring: IMP[/hv] You are North, your LHO opens 3♦ and your pard bids 3♥. You can decide to pass of course, or commit to game with a pushy 3♠/4♥. If you bid 3♠, you probably already know what you will do on a possible 3NT from pard. Well... actually...

This is how I bid it with my regular pard : 1♣ 1♥ 2♣ 2♦ (nmf, GF, personal agreement) 2♥ 3♥ (3 cards, 3♥ sets hearts) 3♠ ____ (Any 1st/2nd round ♠CTRL) _____ 3NT (please bid 4♥ now if strictly minimum) 4♣ ____ (not Min, ♣Ace or King) _____ 4NT (RKCB) 5♠ ____ (2+Q) _____ 5NT (we have all KC) 6♥ ____ (Nothing else) This is how I would play it using Spider with my second pard : 1♦ Natural unbal, or 4♦5♣ 1♥ Relay GF or Hearts or LIM+ w/Diamonds 2♣ 4+4+ minors unbal 11-14(15) HCP 2♠ GFR 2[NT] xx45 3♣ R 3♥ 1345 4♦ sets Hearts 5♦ 13-14HCP, 2 Keycards, ♥Q, ♣K, no other Kings. 5♠ Queens ? 6♥ No outside queens.

Nice hand indeed. South's most probable distribution is 2=6=2=3 so your line has a lot of merit.

I would bid 5NT as a choice of slams. I think we need bids to decide STRAIN when opener may have 3♦ only. I don't think that having a Grand slam try in this kind a situation should be a major concern. What should the other bids mean : 6♦ = let's play 6♦ ! 6♣ = let's play preferably in a Major, with 5521, 56xx, or 4531 maybe. Maybe it's just a partnership decision. I don't have strong feelings.

2♦, easy.

Very interesting problem. I didnot take the time to analyze all possibilities but here is what I came up with for the time being. East is probably marked with AT8xx, the only marginal cases being AT9*8* and South 5*4*3 and the very remote possibility of East having only Ax8 (that is statistically rare, and did South really open 2♥ with relatively bad Hearts and 46xx ? Unlikely). That leaves South with 5 cards in the minor suits, and a high club honor (unless your pard failed to reopen with A AK and 5 Spades). If South has a singleton Diamond, we'll be in a bad situation : a club Jack return will tell the whole story immediately. A neutral Spade+Spade is no better : South cashes his trumps and plays a Diamond up. Again our next play will tell the whole story. When South has 2 diamonds exactly, a Club play may be essential in case East has the 9. If South has it OTOH we are stuck : south will take in Hand and the club suit will be frozen. He will then have time to play a Diamond to the Jack, and even if we guess to duck this, he can eliminate spades, and play another diamond. Enplayed again. What happens if instead we cash the ♠King, the ♦Ace, and play another diamond ? It changes nothing if South has a singleton as we have seen. If South has a doubleton, the situation for declarer is tricky if he has xx KQxxxx xx Axx. Most declarer wil reject the finesse ! OTOH if he has xx KQxxxx xx Kxx, he may find out why I didnot play the "obvious" club, as the finesse is not that dangerous this time (but finessing also has dangers). Of course, if South has xx KQxxxx 109xx A, Ace of diamond sets it. I think that at the table I would probably Cash ♠Q, and play the agricultural ♣J, unless pard overtakes my ♠Q to request a Diamond ruff. The only defense I won't consider is a 3rd round of Spades. I don't see any advantage in this. Cheers,

East takes the second Heart with the Ace and plays a spade. Your play. 7. Taken by West, who exits with a Spade. Now we need 5-1 clubs, or good news in both red suits. Do we cash Diamonds now ? The hand is very difficult to analyze because something may happen in all suits, and both declarer and defense have a lot of decisions to make. I have the opinion (maybe mistaken) that a club at trick 2 puts maximum pressure on defense while retaining many options for declarer. I guess Phil has his own idea on this hand. Best regards,

East takes the second Heart with the Ace and plays a spade. Your play.

I find this hand tough to analyze. Spade is out of question, it will probably lead to a fast 5 tricks for them. If I lead a Heart to Queen and it takes the trick, I will be in a bad position. That leaves a club to the 9. I like it for 2 reasons : - you start to set a 2nd club trick for you ; - West may be in trouble after this, and he may just decide to continue clubs himself. I may then have clues coming from East as how to finish this hand. So I finally play my gut reaction to this : ♣ to 9. What happens ?

Honestly, I think this is not worth any complications here. On the boards of the sims, even if you *always* trf, and if you always bid game in any strain (what a silly strategy !), you will be wrong 75% of the time (and I don't know the precise cost of it : I don't know if you would make 2NT or score 3M). Stupid strategy but let's see. Let's simplify matters by saying it's only a matter of 4M versus "3M always making" or 3NT vs "2NT always making". Let's say we get never doubled. Let's say we are white. Then the **maximal** cost of forcing to game, even with 2-carder is 2.5 imps in average on the 2000 boards of the sim. It's a total of 5000 imps lost every 23 million boards. So this is a maximal average lost of 0.0002 imp per deal played. In reality, of course, there are garbage hands that you would pass, and so on, and the loss on the garbage hand is probably less than 0.0001 imp per deal played. This is meaningless. I remember I once spent a lot of time designing a scheme like this on the 2NT using sims : 2NT 3M-1, Then : 3M = bad hand 2 cards, NF Other = superaccepting 3+ cards. And finally, the gain was so negligible in theory that we rejected this idea. In fact we do prefer that : 2NT 3M-1, then : 3M = 3+ cards always Other = Misfit. The 2NT 3M-1 3M(fit) is actually better in practice, imo. If you only want to be in game (often the case), there is no need to tell anything to the defense (like bidding a Control), and no need to complicate matters by retransfering or whatever. My 2 pence.

Difficult to program the superaccept, so I'll just give you the results depending on the number of trumps of the 2NT opener. DEFINITIONS : 2NT = 20-21.6 using usual evaluation tools (+0.8 for 5xxx, +0.2 for Ace or ten, etc.) +Includes 5m422 with guarded doubletons +Includes 5M332 Responder = 0-3 HCP, 5Mxxx, not 5-5 (the "not 5-5" doesn't matter anyway I think) RESULTS: ________Nogame 4M 3NT Both-Games Total Trumps 2 704 30 62 15 811 3 495 145 32 59 731 4 155 65 19 31 270 5 96 64 2 26 188 Total 1450 304 113 131 2000 Number of generated hands : 23451888 (23 millions) The situation "2NT+responder weak-5M" occurs once every 10000 hand (you need to deal 23 millions hands to generate 2000 cases) Then I think the above results for THOSE 2000 cases are clear. You can conclude what you like from this DD analysis. Maybe the superaccept represent half of the 4 trumps line. Regards,

♥10 was "standard". That means that it can be from 109, K109 or Q109. I was tempted to say : "who would make such an attacking ♥HT9+ lead against a strong NT opener when having a safe lead in spades ?" Now I see Phil's post. Gee.

The obvious problem is to avoid a diamond overruf with the ♣10. As others already pointed out you cannot play clubs from dummy for lack of a secure entry play. So you need to play clubs from hand. What club ? Playing an honor allows you to cater for ATxx in the West hand. A mirage. East is marked with ♥KQ and a high Diamond honor, and at most 3 spades (no spade lead). Do we think that he would not balance with 10 cards in the reds ? So now a lead of a small club from hand caters for the possibilty of West having the stiff Ace and 6 diamonds. One may object to East having AT in clubs and a doubleton diamond. This also looks impossible : West would lead a spade with a stiff and that means East passed 3C having 6 Hearts to the KQ and 12 HCP. I would play ♥J (a routine play to conceal position of the King) take the ♥Q with the Ace and small club from hand.

2♣ followed by Double.

[hv=d=n&v=b&n=sxxhada9xxxckj432&s=sakxxhkq7dkxc9876]133|200|Scoring: IMP 1♦ 1♠ 2♣ 3NT Oppos silent.[/hv] They lead 5♥ which could be... anything ! How would you approach the play and why ? (strong oppos).

If you look at the results of the 2 polls : POLL-1 and POLL-2 you may think it's not very consistent. At least, two possible interpretations : 1- bridge players indeed really have a big ego ; 2- people contributing to this poll cannot be considered as representing a meaningful sample of the bridge players community. "people who answered this poll know what they do but the majority of *others* don't" ; Your opinion ?

I see nothing really wrong in East's 1NT : (8)9-11, dull shape, I don't really care about having ♥xxxx and I want to bid my hand because game is still possible. OTOH I would not have bid 1♠ : bad suit, no real lead directing values, wrong shape, borderline hand in term of HCP, low ODR. Bidding 1♠ isn't terrible though. I'd give 100% blame to West if any, and give full credit to NS for taking the PEN at these colours.

I remember that we had exactly the same kind of board in the french national training session in september. OUR AGREEMENT after mishandling this : It depends what is the sense of 4♠, compared to a slower approach of bidding lebensold/rubensold. We agreed that we would need at least 6-4 (or 7-3) with short trumps to bid a direct 4♠. Then the pass over 5♥ is F1, and asks for extra distributional values. We would have considered that East already described a mildy distributional hand by 4♠, and assign the blame to West. We would never try to bid slam.

I agree with West's pass : the hand is bad, and if I bid 2♠ facing a passed hand, my guess is that most of the time we'll end up in 3♠, down 1 or making. And I don't expect to be often in more than 40% games. For me passing 1♠ is clearcut. I would have opened 1♠ OTOH. Excellent suit, no rebid problems, 6 losers. This is borderline though. I don't care if my partner thinks I have more in defensive tricks. BTW I'm not sure I want to be in game with these 2 hands. In 4♠, I'll roughly need diamonds to be at worse 4-2, and if they break 4-2 I have to handle the 3-1 trump splits. Even then I may have to guess Hearts, and even if I think I can guess them 2/3 of the time (optimistic), my guess is that I'll make that game 40% of the time. Sometimes I'll be down 2. All in all, if I loose imps on this one I would just blame cards, and say that that they had no talent this time.

Now I have extra chances :P. I play the ♠Q. If she's a Walrus she will cover it, but if she doesn't have it and has a doubleton she will start an echo. Then I can Vienna coup my Spades, and my highest small spade rates to be higher than her remaining spade. Thus I can cumulate chances. And anyway now, she looks to be the kind of player would not open with only 3HCP. One even better line : do like me, refuse to play against walrus.

Please, oh please ignore my previous poll, I asked the wrong question ! Obviously, I took the finesse the wrong way. The right question was...

I'm happy to be at these colours : if they were Vul and if they were playing Namyats, the Clubs could actually split 8-1. Here I don't think that a 8-1 club split together with a 3-0 trump split is at all likely. It means that I can ruff my clubs and count the minors in the process, without problems. Will I be better placed to make a decision then ? I doubt it. The Vienna coup in Spades looks a better option than trying to drop the ♥J and fall back on a Spade finesse, unless West is known never to open 3♣ with less than 6HCP even at these colours. Even if East shows up with a xx23 hand, meaning West is probably 3316, I would not hook the Spade : if he feels he can open with ThAt, why does he need the ♠K after all ? This is really a kind of hand where knowing West's style is crucial.