Bloggable

Sylvia and I decided to practice late yesterday afternoon and we ran into Paul Thurston and Jeff Smith in the BBO lobby.  By the way, Ray tells me that Paul really is going to finish his 2/1 advanced book.  It is the most requested book at Master Point Press.  How about it Paul?

During the match we joked about which deals were “bloggable”.  Even before I started blogging I loved to look for interesting deals and discuss them.  My primary target was poor Ray who I am sure gets tired of my stories.  Now that I am writing a blog for students as well as my normal blog a lot of deals fall into the bloggable category.  For example, on one hand I took a simple safety play.  A lot of the field didn’t but as it turned out on the deal anything you did would work.  None the less that is fodder for my teaching blog.  On another deal, Sylvia found a nice endplay to make 1NT.  Since you had a lot of information from the bidding on this deal it is a great one for a series of articles I am writing called being a bridge detective.

I thought this hand was interesting and it shows a bit about how Jeff Smith thinks.   JEff was in first chair white on red and he held:

Would you open this hand?  If you did what would you open?  Jeff opened 3♣.  He was the only player in the field to find this bid.  Two others opened 1♣.  Sylvia bid 4♥ and it was my bid.  I held:

This is quite a good hand for this auction.  It is certainly possible that we have a slam.  I tend to push to slams, maybe too much, but the preempt suggested that suits weren’t splitting and I decided to sit.  It turned out that this was a good move, in a way.  Sylvia held:

You have one spade loser and the only other loser is a heart if the suit is really unfriendly.  But as you know from Jeff hands hearts are four to the jack offside.  So this was a win for us because a lot of the field did reach 6♥ in an uncontested auction.  But 6◊ is a much better contract and is a make.  One pair did reach it.  I think we would have.  I think the auction would have gone something like this:

I can’t think of any way to get to the slam after the 3♣ bid.  Can you?  So Jeff’s bid did save some imps.  So now that you know that do you like his bid?