Card play analysis

[gdawg01]

Justin, I used the same email link too, a few weeks back! I will send you the hands again..

 

-G

[PhantomSac]

Justin, I used the same email link too, a few weeks back! I will send you the hands again..

 

-G

Hmm wtf?

 

Ok from now on if you send me your hands, I will send an email response "confirmed that I got this." If I don't send that then I didn't get it. If anyone else feels they sent me the hands please post here or email me or PM me.

 

Maybe earthlinks spam filter is blocking emails with attachments or something, dunno. I guess I need to switch to gmail?

[jjbrr]

bump for update?

[gwnn]

x2 :D

[gwnn]

Thank you Justin!

 

1 http://tinyurl.com/yk3otxy standard carding

2 http://tinyurl.com/yh9t8ht UDCA (partner might not have understood 3D)

3 http://tinyurl.com/yjf88fc matchpoints! opps lead 4th best and udca

4 http://tinyurl.com/yjeupe7 udca 135

5 http://tinyurl.com/yzl9y7l std carding

6 http://tinyurl.com/yzslg8z udca

7 http://tinyurl.com/yzfaaae 4th leads std carding

 

jlall's analysis:

 

 

Hand 1: Your partner discouraged your heart lead so you accurately shifted to spades, in case declarer had Qx of hearts before the pitch was established.

 

 

 

The key point of this hand is on the 3rd spade, you should pitch an encouraging club. If you don't do this partner is always going to try to give you a trump promotion, in case you have Kx or Qx or Jxx of trumps. A club shift will be necessary if declarer has J9x Qx KQJTxx xx in order to beat it 2. If partner has a diamond holding that might give declarer a guess, he will play a spade back anyways. Playing standard you might want to drive the point home with the CJ pitch.

 

 

 

Once declarer ruffed a heart back to his hand you were never going to go wrong in the discarding. However if declarer ran all of his trumps, you would have to guess what to discard (the HK, or the club). If declarer had J9x Qx KQJT9x x you'd need to throw your clubs and keep your hearts. Can you know? Well your partner gave you suit preference in the way he played his spades (ace then king, rather king then ace) to tell you he had the HQ. Also during discarding your partner should immediately discourage clubs for you.

 

 

 

Hand 2: I don't know if you played 2nd/4th or not, if not maybe the H9 was confusing. I would definitely shift to a trump at trick 2. Imagine partner with KJx of trumps and only 4 clubs for instance. There is no urgency to shift to spades on this hand as the spades are not going anywhere unless declarer can somehow pitch them on the clubs. This would require declarer to have 4 trumps and 3 clubs which is not possible given that they appear to have 5 hearts (assuming the H9 was 2/4th). It would also make no sense for partner to double with just a doubleton trump. As long as partner has 3 trumps a trump shift is fine as even if declarer can set up clubs, he will have no trumps with which to ruff the spades. On the other hand, it is likely that declarer is short in clubs and will need to ruff some.

 

 

 

Basically on hands like this you want to ask yourself "do I need to play spades immediately, are they going to be discarded?" If the answer is yes then play a spade, but if there is no urgency then just switch to a trump

 

 

 

Hand 3: Here you need to decide what suit you're going to try to set up. A heart will give you at most one trick, and on a bad day you could lose 5 heart tricks and get no tricks. One way to look at it is what suit should the opponents be going after? Hearts is their best suit. Since you cant develop tricks in spades or diamonds, that leaves clubs. Ideally you would like to go after clubs from your hand, leading towards dummy, in case of AKx onside or stiff jack onside. Unfortunately you have some entry problems to your hand. If you use the DK entry to play a club up, RHO might win and play a spade and you are at risk of never getting back to your hand. Even if you play a club and they're 3-2, the opps can shift to a heart, threatening 4 heart tricks and 3 clubs before you can get your 3 diamonds, 3 spades, and a heart.

 

 

 

Playing a spade up runs the risk of RHO having xxx spades and setting up a spade. This would be bad if you lose 2 hearts, 4 clubs, and 1 spade. That requires LHO having HJ9x of clubs though, and no HA. Your only other option is leading a club off the board, but that is very bad if LHO has the AK. I think it's worth it to play a spade to your hand in order to lead a club to the queen.

 

 

 

If the opps set up the spade, you have time to set up clubs. If the opps set up their hearts, you have 7 and an 8th if the diamond falls. You also are in great shape with the AK of clubs onside. Overall this feels like the best MP line.

 

 

 

After you played a diamond to the king and a heart to the 9, stranding your spade was a good play. Wackojack wouldn't pitch a heart with AQJxx there, and even if he had you're ok if he has AKx of clubs.

 

 

 

Hand 4: At imps, the biggest concern on this hand is making against 4-1 trumps. On your line, if trumps were 4-1 you were always down. A stronger plan is to ruff a club in your hand first. That way if hearts are 4-1 you will have set up the clubs BEFORE using the HA in dummy, then you can just run clubs down their throats. What about if RHO pitches on the club? If you ruff and play king of hearts and a heart you're still down on 4-1 trumps.

 

 

 

One possibility is to just pitch on the CJ. Now LHO will win and must tap the dummy. Unfortunately they will have 2 tricks in, so if you lose 2 more trumps you'll be down. With dummy tapped you'll be reduced to 3-2 trumps.

 

 

 

Another possibility is to change your plan completely. Ruff the club jack, and plan to take 2 spades, 1 club, and SEVEN trump tricks. Cash your SAK, ruff a diamond, ruff a club, ruff a diamond, and ruff a club with the HK. Now guess what to ruff in dummy for your 10th trick (almost surely a diamond).

 

 

 

What about if RHO follows to the CJ? If you ruff and get overruffed that could be bad for you. You now need LHO to have 3 trumps if they tap the dummy. This is pretty likely though, it's unlikely LHO has led stiff K of clubs and has a doubleton trump (10 pointed cards). If LHO has 4 trumps, you still have a shot. Just in case, you can ruff with the 9 when RHO follows.

 

 

 

The biggest key here though is to NOT play trumps, and to set up your side suit first. Whenever you seem cold on 3-2 trumps, think about how to make it on 4-1 trumps. Usually in a 4-4 fit with a side suit that needs to be established, setting up the side suit first is best.

 

 

 

Hand 5: Here is another hand where it should be tempting to go after clubs immediately. This would mean winning the HQ, pitching a heart, and leading a club to the ten. The biggest problem is that this puts you in jeopardy if RHO wins the CQ and plays ace and a club. You now might lose a trump trick to the jack. But what is the gain? Well if you pull trumps first ending in hand (assume 3-2), and play a club to the jack, what to do if it holds? You have to play a club off dummy, and if LHO has AQxx you're down. On the other hand, if you lead a club immediately and LHO wins the ace and plays a club, it might put you to a nasty guess. What if trumps are 4-1? The only 4-1 we can pick up is onside, Jxxx, and that requires us playing ace then queen first. If we do that immediately and then play a diamond to the ten, pitch a heart, and play a club to the jack. If that loses to the queen, they can play a heart, and later force dummy wiht a heart to kill the clubs. This is the same whether or not we draw trumps first.

 

 

 

So basically on this hand we SHOULD draw trumps first to avoid losing a trump promotion. When drawing trumps you have to play the ace then queen first, in order to pick up the only 4-1 that you can, Jxxx on your right. If RHO does have Jxxx, be careful to only play 3 trumps before playing your clubs. You need the CQ onside now. On this hand you were doomed no matter what.

 

 

 

Hand 6: You defended this perfectly not much to say. In general with this club holding, you need to play the queen and then the ten so that partner knows what's going on. However with K9xxx in dummy partner will know you have QJT playing the way you did also, since if declarer had the queen he would cover the jack. If dummy had Kxxxx though, it would be possible from partner's point of view that declarer had Qxx and played low to the king and ducked one, so he would never overtake your ten to shoot something through if he had Axx which looks important on this hand. It is still nice to play queen then ten so partner doesn't have to work all of this out imo.

 

 

 

Hand 7: Your main plan to make this will be 3-3 hearts, combined with either 2-2 trumps (so you can ruff 2 diamonds), or 3-3 diamonds (so you can pitch 2 diamonds). However in this type of situation you should always be leading a club off the dummy early, in hopes that your RHO will pop. You cannot really afford this if spades are 3-1 (since you need the entries to ruff a diamond and come back to the diamond). Accordingly, cash the SK then the SA. If trumps don't split just pull trumps and set up the heart. If trumps do split, you can try a club off the board.

 

 

 

You don't have to see a gain immediately in order to try this, a trick is a trick. The biggest gain of this should be to tighten up some squeeze positions. In your actual position, you played for a heart/diamond squeeze at the end, but your LHO was pitching behind you so it could never work. Your best chance was a CLUB/diamond squeeze on LHO. This means ruffing the heart in dummy and playing spades. If your LHO happens to have QJ of clubs to go with QJ of diamonds you have him (not that likely but you never know). If RHO was the one with 4 hearts, you would have had way more squeeze possibilities.

 

 

 

For a heart diamond squeeze to work on LHO, you need both the ace and king of diamonds in tact so you have entries.

[inquiry]

I just stumbled (back) onto this thread to find some of the hands with analysis has finally been posted. Amazingly, no one commented. WTF? ?

 

Anyway, I thought Justin did an excellent job with his comments and I appreciate the insight he shared with gwnn and really appreciate gwnn sharing them with us.

 

All I could figure out, it was too much for people to click on the hands and then scroll down to read the text (it really isn't THAT hard). However, I grabbed the hands, imported them into bridge composer, added the text from the post above (plus showed a little of justin's "credentials") and created a PDF.... which I attached here... one click and you can read the comments and see the hands.

 

Now, if the other nine guinea pi.... er bridge players... will post theirs life would be beautiful.

gwnn_justin_lall.pdf

[inquiry]

Not sure what happened, but in the attached document the 5♦ hand was played by han and gwnn (not gwnn and Edmunte1), and gwnn was declarer not defender. And the hand board 10 (4♥ contract) gwnn was declarer (again with a different parnter).

 

Because of this, I will see if I can delete the attached file to the previous post and add a different one with these errors correct. If not I will delete that post and repost it.

 

EDITed.. the names from the board 7 hand and the board 10 hand got reversed somehow (no idea, how or why). I have corrected the file and reposted it as the same file name. The five of you who downloaded the wrong file can-- at your own decision -- download the correct one. No huge need if the text doesn't confuse you about where gwnn is sitting.

Edited July 7, 2010 by inquiry

[lmilne]

However, I grabbed the hands, imported them into bridge composer, added the text from the post above (plus showed a little of justin's "credentials") and created a PDF.... which I attached here... one click and you can read the comments and see the hands.

Awesome. Thanks.

[zasanya]

Thank you Ben not only for rekindling this thread which people like me had missed earlier but also for the pdf file.

Thank you justine for the analysis and csaba for making it available to us.

Tongue in cheek comment:Reaffirms my faith in today's youth who sometimes appear flippant and shallow and self-centred but in reality are focussed, talented and do have concern for others.

[gwnn]

two little comments about the PDF's:

• my name is gwnn, not gwn
  
• there are several hands where the names are jumbled up. Almost none of the hands have the usernames correctly. Only in my hopeless 6♠ contract are the names correct I think.
  

but I agree with the others that this is a very readable and good format. Also that jlall is great!

 

I think the 1st hand has the nicknames from the second hand, the second from the third hand, and so on.

[billw55]

That pdf link only gives me a large wall of garbled text.

[gwnn]

You just save that garbled text to a .pdf file and then Acrobat should be able to open it. downloading works on Internet Explorer, though.

[NickRW]

That pdf link only gives me a large wall of garbled text.

It works OK in Internet Explorer - but gave me garbled text too in Firefox - despite the fact that Firefox reads pdfs OK normally. Try a different browser.

[hotShot]

That pdf link only gives me a large wall of garbled text.

It works OK in Internet Explorer - but gave me garbled text too in Firefox - despite the fact that Firefox reads pdfs OK normally. Try a different browser.

just rename the save file to anythingYouWant.pdf and the Adobe Reader will be able to use it.

 

Seems that it is sent with a wrong mime type.

[inquiry]

two little comments about the PDF's:

• 
   
   
  
• my name is gwnn, not gwn
   
   
  
• there are several hands where the names are jumbled up. Almost none of the hands have the usernames correctly. Only in my hopeless 6♠ contract are the names correct I think.
   
   
  

but I agree with the others that this is a very readable and good format. Also that jlall is great!

 

I think the 1st hand has the nicknames from the second hand, the second from the third hand, and so on.

Sorry for the typo in the "title", but you should note I had it as gwnn on each page where it said "gwnn's comments", and in the title of the file.

 

I have discovered what went wrong with the automatic import. When I created the lin file, I simply cut of the http... handviewer info up to the equal sign and put all the hands in a single file. Each hand was not seperated from the next by the normal qx|o1| qx|02| etc. If I had included those the names would have been alright, as it was, it took the next group of players for the hands rather the "current" ones. So if you want to do this using "bridge composer" be sure to include the qx|o1| type thing at the start of each new hand.

 

I have manually fixed the errors in the file now, and REPOSTED it for a second time. Note: there were 6 downloads (including mine) from the first posting, the counter reset after the first correction and there was 86 downloads of the first correction. As of right now, there has been no downloads of the final (hopefully version). Again, the hands and comments are right, just the names were changed (to protect the innocent? ) in each new version.

 

Since some people have trouble with the PDF (see several post above this one), I have included an html version of the material in this post. The table of justin's world championship events is screwed up in the html version, but the bridge stuff is just fine...

 

Thanks again gwnn for posting this stuff in the first place.

justin_lall.htm

[wyman]

bump for updates from the other 9?

 

Also, can someone re-upload the pdf? Maybe it got lost in the changeover.

[gwnn]

Hi, I was looking at old posts and found jlall's old cardplay analysis thread.

 

https://www.bridgebase.com/forums/topic/35968-card-play-analysis/

 

Unfortunately, I can't go past post #35 (where I posted about the analysis he sent me). I know there was a PDF assembled from all the feedback he gave, but apparently it's gone. :(