Day 4 – Better Bridge, “the voice of the players”

Years ago Ray came and told me excitedly about finding a great news group – rec.games.bridge.  It is still alive and well as a google group.

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.bridge/topics

There should be some interesting things here and I amazed to see how active it is.

I see a post labelled “apportion the blame”.  I feel that this is something I am good at!  Here is the problem from richlp

IMPS

North

S void

H xx

D KQJ10xx

C AKxxx

South

S AKxx

H KQx

D xx

C QJxx

Before looking at the auction I try to imagine how I would bid this hand with the South hand as dealer  with weak notrump which I play with all my partners right now.

South	North
1C	2C*
2NT*	3C
3H	?

I can now bid 4S Exclusion Blackwood in this auction and will be very disappointed to here 5C (0 or 3) and we will play there.  If I wasn’t playing that I would bid 3S which should turn South completely off and he will bid 3NT showing the spade wastage if I bid 4C I would bid 5C on the South hand.

South	North
1NT (15-17)	2S  (minor suit Stayman)
3C (4 clubs)	3S (both  minors short S)
3NT	4D
4S	5C
6C

 

I guess the auction is fine up to 4D.  I think South should bid 4H now and he has more than said his piece.  North shows the spade void with 4S and South should bid 5C.  So perhaps 4S was the worst bid.The most interesting thing I find in the discussion is whether it is better to use minor suit stayman or to transfer to diamonds.

Another comment suggests that 4C would be better over 3NT allowing opener to cuebid 4D (or 4H).  That is certainly true.  And I also find that many players on the board use 4S here as exclusion.

Actually this was more interesting than I thought it would be.  Well I give South most of the blame but if North had bid 4C instead of 4D they would have been much better placed.

I read a play problem and a defence problem and an article asking people how they would change “bridge”.

I can see why people love this site.  I sign up and I bookmark it for later.

Tearing myself away I somehow drift to Gerard Cohen’s website

http://gerard.entsoft.com

and see that it is still a work in progress.  From here I head over to Swan Games.  This is an awesome site for following championships and I know I will be here many times during the world championships.  Besides following a table or two you can see the score board by board across the field in real time and the butler.  I look up the European Championship in Pau France.  There is a list of participants, all the result round by round, the butlers, and the bulletins.  You can go into any match and see the hand record and the scorecard board by board.  If it was a featured match you can see the bidding and card by card play.

I wish someone would do this for North American team championships.  They already have Beijing set up.

http://www.swangames.com/main/Bridgecast/bridgecast.html

It looks like a very fine pay for play site.  It seems to have 5 different rating systems for players including self rating.  Interesting.

From here I link to Karen Walker’s Bridge Library.

http://www.prairienet.org/bridge/

This seems focused on newer players with lots of lessons and other material.  There are a few interesting tidbits and I especially like the article on default agreements (something Isabelle, Ray and Colin and I called metagreements).  One thing I realized after a discussion one night is you have to make very sure you completely understand your default agreements, when and where they apply.  The 8 part series on default agreements: “Was that a penalty double”  seems particularly important because a misunderstanding here cost me a major championship. 

Since I am done for the day I am going to go back to rec.games.bridge and enjoy myself.