Splitting touching honours

[gnasher]

You're a defender, second to play to a suit. You have two or more touching honours, higher than the card led. You are going to play one of your honours. You don't want to be deceptive or random: your objective is to communicate your holding to partner.

 

Which one do you play from two touching honours?

 

Which one do you play from three touching honours?

 

Does it matter whether you're splitting on the lead of a small card, or covering an honour?

 

Does it matter whether the lead came from declarer's hand or from dummy?

 

If the lead was from hand, does it matter what dummy's holding is?

 

I'm interested in both what you think is normal and what you think is best (and why, of course).

[Phil]

Believe it or not I have several different agreements with several different partners.

 

1. Split with what you'd lead. This means top nearly always.

 

2. Splitting shows 0 or two higher. So split K from KQ or J from KQJ. I think this is what Woolsey recommends.

 

3. I used to play 2nd from two or top from 3. For some reason partner could generally work it out. This is sort of an inversion of #2.

[bluecalm]

Does it ever matter ?

I mean do the hands when it's important to have agreement come up ? Or do hands where it's important to have good agreement come up ?

[JLOGIC]

I split high from 3 and low from 2.

[gnasher]

Does it ever matter ?

I mean do the hands when it's important to have agreement come up ? Or do hands where it's important to have good agreement come up ?

Not very often. A lot of the time it will be obvious to partner what's going on, or he won't care, or you're trying to give declarer a guess so you play randomly.

 

However, it does happen. In the deal that led to this question, a defender had AK62 sitting over dummy's Q973. Declarer led the 8 from hand, and partner played the jack. Later the defender had to decide (amongst other things) who had the 10.

[gnasher]

I split high from 3 and low from 2.

Is this something you've discussed with your partners, or is that what "everyone" does?

[JLOGIC]

No it's something I discuss. I have no idea how many people do that/how common it is. I would probably assume most people split low always and you have to decide whether to play low or middle if you're splitting from 3 depending on what seems more important at the time.

[rduran1216]

I think generally just lowest of touching honors. Can we think of a case where we should be doing otherwise?

[CSGibson]

I tend to split highest of touching honors - I aways felt that splitting the K from KQJ would give partner a better idea of the hand then splitting the J. I have not considered agreements which differentiate between two and three card honor sequences.

 

Edit: In thinking further about this, the difference between splitting high and splitting low is that you are deciding what card you are denying ownership of. If, when dummy leads a singleton, you split low & play the T and declarer the A, partner now knows that you don't have the 9 - that's rarely going to be important, but I guess it could matter. On the same hand, if you split with the Q, denying the K - partner now knows how many tricks are available in the suit without ruffing/giving up the lead. That is frequently important.

 

Clear agreements like Woolsey's from 2/3 appear as though they would work even better - you should almost always be able to tell which is which.

[rduran1216]

it seems like in discarding thats fairly standard, or in the J10 situation, but otherwise idk. If my opp led toward the A and partner played the Q, I'd think he had KQ tight as long as that made sense, I wouldn't consider QJ10 a possibility. But on other kinds of signalling yes. tossing the Q under declarers A, shows solid all the way down.

[aguahombre]

Profound expression of the obvious: the choice (of agreements) matters when partner knows you are splitting, and needs to know. If there is a possibility we might have only a singleton in the suit, we will split with the lowest that will do the job.

[bluecalm]

I am asking because I saw every possible agreement recommended in various sources yet I've never discussed it with anybody, always played the lowest/2nd (which seemed clear) with my partners doing the same and I've never encountered problems.

I don't play much bridge though :)

[awm]

Interesting. I always split high in these situations, which I guess is very non-mainstream! Obviously there are particular positions where it matters, but I don't see that one way is really better than the other, except that it's bad to play low from a long string of equals (i.e. ten from KQJT is generally bad because partner won't be able to figure out the position, whereas king or queen depending on agreement is much more helpful).

[JLOGIC]

I thought splitting low was more normal since the ace would be ambiguous, it's not really a split you might be popping ace, so partner won't be sure if you have the king whereas if you pop king and it holds partner will know the layout.

[dake50]

Split shows count: A,Q=even; K,J=odd.

Other suit critical count if this suit

count cannot be relevant to partner.

[MrAce]

deleted

[mich-b]

I split high from 3 and low from 2.

 

That is also what we do.

[Fluffy]

I have always split high and never cared about why one or the other.

[gnasher]

One more situation, not explicitly mentioned in my original post: what if it's known that your card is going to win the trick? For example, declarer leads towards dummy's 10xx, and you have KQJx, KQx or QJx. I realise that it's rare to want to signal in this situation, but suppose that you did. Do you follow your "splitting honours" rule, or do you follow the standard rule of winning the trick as cheaply as possible?

[gnasher]

And another question that I've just throuht of: what do you do with KJ10?

[Codo]

I split high, but if the lead is towards Txxx I win low.

From KJT I would never play the ten, most often the jack.

[WellSpyder]

One more situation, not explicitly mentioned in my original post: what if it's known that your card is going to win the trick? For example, declarer leads towards dummy's 10xx, and you have KQJx, KQx or QJx. I realise that it's rare to want to signal in this situation, but suppose that you did. Do you follow your "splitting honours" rule, or do you follow the standard rule of winning the trick as cheaply as possible?

I think that's an easy one - I win as cheaply as possible. I think, on reflection, that that may be just a special case of the rule that my "splitting honours" rule only really applies when declarer leads up to the closed hand.

 

As to the "splitting honours" rule itself, my tendency would be always to split with the highest from three, but I'm not sure it's consistent with two. I'm not as confident as I should be that partners understand this, though - most of my partners seem to start from the presumption that you always split low, and I tend to think it's an advance once I've got them to realise that I will often split high since this can be more informative.

[Tomi2]

my first priority would be to give partner the signal, he expeted me to give anyway, so if this is a count situation i unusaly split low from any two or 4 cards and high from 3 or 5...

if this trick would be smith echo, i split low, if i wanted to encourage and high if not

 

not sure, if overwriting an information, that is supposed to be importand for US (thats why we have carding agreements), by an iformation about honors in the suit lead by THEM is a good idea

[Nabooba]

I split high from 3 and low from 2.

 

So do I, cutie!

[gordontd]

I split high from 3 and low from 2.

 

 

That is also what we do.

That's what we did when I had a partner with whom we had an agreement. I thought it was fairly standard, but apparently not. :rolleyes: