The psychology of avoidable mistakes

[MrAce]

If I had been half asleep my spade lead might have been a misclick or a misread of the auction or the failure to realize that this is IMPs and we are not going to take the contract down with passive defense since opps have made a quantitative invite so they should have enough power to make 4nt. In other words, an aggresive or speculative lead is called for. I realized all those things before I made the lead.

 

The general conclusion you came to in bolded quote is wrong imho. Unless you have a suit which screams "lead me please!!", one should avoid making any aggressive lead that may cost trick(s) vs the contracts of 2 NT or 4 NT. But I am not talking about this auction in OP. I am just talking about the bolded area of the quote.

 

1NT--4NT-pass

2NT--4NT-pass

1NT--2NT-pass

 

They have their power, but they usually do not have their tricks in those auctions. Tricks comes via various techniques such as finesse, end plays, squeezes etc..In this type of auctions not giving them a trick they do not deserve is important. Of course I am talking in general and there are exceptions to that, but hard to know it when you are on lead. Basically, the race between defense and declarer will be usually about tricks here and there rather than the tempo.

 

Aggressive leads are required mostly when they actually DO NOT have the power for the contract they are in. And people bid games with 20-23 hcp combined for a reason and this is not because they have balanced vs balanced hands and insufficient values but because they have "trick source based" expectations. Now we are talking about tempo being priority over safety. You should lead aggressive vs this type of contracts in order to have a good sprint in that tempo race.

 

1♦--1[NT]

3♦--3 NT

 

3x--3 NT

 

3 NT gambling all pass

 

Note: By passive lead I did not mean "lead your shortest suit" or I did not mean "lead your longest suit" for aggressive leads. To me passive leads are the ones which aims not giving gifts to declarer. Aggressive leads targets setting up enough tricks for our side before they set up their suit. Because once they set up their suit, it usually is a nightmare for defense even if they do not yet have enough tricks, due to being wide open to squeezes, bad discards, communication between defense being jammed up, endplays etc etc.