What controls / Relay Points are Best

[awm]

Well we do count 2 QP for singleton kings. But anyway:

 

4♥ = 1 or 3 top spades, 0 or 2 top hearts

---- 4♠ relay

4N = 0 or 2 top diamonds

---- 5♣ relay

5♥ = 1 top club, spades headed by the king (stopping to show king, run on to show A/Q)

---- 5♠ relay

5N = no spade jack

.......

[akhare]

Say I've shown 6 QPs and 5-4-3-1 shape at the bid of 3S.

 

Assuming 4C is dcb relay, how would the bidding continue for

 

Kxxxx xxxx KQx K

 

assuming the singleton K is counted as 1 QP

Here's the same hand based on another DCB scheme called "Go Fish" starting with 4♣ = ask for queens:

 

...4♦: 1 Q

........4♥ ask for kings

...5♥ -- No K♥, perforce only K♠ or 3 Ks, including the other two

 

Here's an unedited post by John Sheehan (of Prism Signals fame) about his GOFISH alterative to DCB when using RPs (aka AKQ points).

 

Hi all,

 

Dlr: W

Vul: EW

Auction: Moscito Variation

 

West East

A863 K5

A652 K8

Q A4

KQJ5 A876432

 

1C 2D

2H 2S

2N 3C

3D 3H 2=2=2=7.

3S (1) 4S 10 relay points.

4N (2) 5S (No queens / all 4)

5N (3) 6C Same rank.

7C

 

(1) 'Number of Relay points?' (A=3 K=2 Q=1)

(2) 'Do you have any queens?'

(3) 'Tell me about your two kings.'

 

Note: The first step after the relay points response

asks,'Do you have any queens?'

 

In response to the queen ask:

Step 1 = 1 Q.

Step 2 = 2 Q's.

Step 3 = 3 Q's.

Step 4 = 0 Q's. Go Fish! (or 4 Q's)

 

If The number of relay points is known; and,

The number of queens is known; then,

The exact number of aces and kings is known.

 

Note: 'Tell me about your kings.'

 

The first step after the number of queens response

asks about location of kings.

 

(If you are more interested in queens

than kings, skip to the second step to

ask about the location of queens.)

 

In response to, 'Tell me about your kings.'

 

To show one or three kings, stop at the bid that

corresponds in the scanning order

to the one suit with (or without) the king.

 

 

If two kings are held; then

Step 1 = 2 K's of the same Rank

Step 2 = 2 K's of the same Color

Step 3 = 2 K's of the same Shape (C/H D/S)

 

 

 

Dlr: W

Vul: EW

Auction: Moscito Variation

 

West East

A7 KQ85

AQ3 K852

AQJ874 K6

J4 A96

 

1C 2D

2H 2S

2N 3C

3D 3H 4=4=3=2

3S(1) 4S 10 relay points.

4N(2) 5C 1 Queen.

5D(3) 5N No club king.

6C(4) 6D Spade queen.

7N

 

(1) 'Number of Relay points?' (A=3 K=2 Q=1)

(2) 'Do you have any queens?'

(3) 'Tell me about your kings.'

(4) 'What about that queen?'

 

Is Go Fish! for relay points a practical approach to solving the problem

of discoverying and pinpointing honors in slam auctions?

 

Johnny Sheehan

www.prismsignals.com

[straube]

Adam, am I right here? It seems like your structure gives a poor picture of responder's hand early on and then a very good picture at a higher level...especially when the nature of the first single honor is shown. So the relayer has to be willing to play a high level (like 5S or 5N) before contemplating an ask.

 

The vanilla structure that Atul and I have been using lets us abort early but often with an incomplete picture of partner's hand.

 

Would your structure work for us if we counted the singleton king as 1? (thinking it would). I assume you count a singleton queen as 1 and that you try to show whether you have it or not. Perhaps we could count it as 0 but show whether we have it or not (like a bonus). Or maybe that would throw confusion into things.

 

Anyway, I think I like your structure. I'm not quite getting the GoFish structure.

[awm]

The thing is that many inferences are available from opener's honor holdings. Usually if opener can't tell what's going on fairly early, it actually doesn't matter because too many honors are missing for slam to be practical. It's actually not unusual once QP are shown for opener to figure that there are only a small number of possible honor patterns, and to be able to sort them out fairly early.

 

Another observation is that we do play RKC asks as well. The hand types where opener is often unable to tell early in the sequence what's happening often correspond well to the RKC ask hands. I don't really know how to explain this further except to recommend trying it.

[straube]

Atul and I tried (your) Adam's structure last night and it worked really well. Thanks a lot.

[shevek]

Even though I have never tried it, I would expect AKQ321 is much harder to read. I mean that with AK21 you often can divine the exact location of honour cards or for example that they must be 2 aces (you hold 3 kings).

It is obviously harder to determine teller's honour combination from just the response (showing some given number of relay points) because, unless that number is very small, there are many more permutations that are possible than for a comparable number of AK21 controls.

 

But there are ways to reduce that number of permutations significantly: a cheap way of doing so is to have teller show his (non-singleton) king parity* before entering into DCB. One could do as the Swedes did (still do?): stop with even and zoom with odd. Better, however, is to stop with even when holding 2, 3, 6, 9, 12 or 15 RP and stop with odd with other holdings. This is easy to remember (stop with even when 2 or a multiple of 3) and much closer to the actual frequency. (Of course, the parity answer should also depend on how many RP asker has but I don't now of a system that can show that.)

 

I've done a lot of testing that shows that this method is better than not asking for king parity or asking for ace (or queen) parity; it's still not clear to me whether this is the best method of honour-showing/DCB. (Matt Ginsberg tells me it is clearly not for a computer program but we're interested in what humans can remember at the table.)

 

David

 

*This assumes that you wisely count a kingleton as 1RP not 2; again, extensive testing shows this to be much better.

Well done in ITS. Have you inflicted stuff like this on Justin?