A Bidding Problem?

If you are angry at me because I wrote so many blogs today just don’t read this.  Ray and I had this discussion about a hand in the paper in Paul Thurston’s bridge column.  It was from the 2009 England gold cup final.  So here is the “you hold”

With both vulnerable, RHO passes and partner opens 1D,  The opponent on your left overcalls 1H.  What do you do?

At one table this hand made a negative double.  Do you hate that bid?  What is your choice?  Perhaps 1S.  Anyway Ray gave me this hand and forced me to double.  I am assuming that your methods don’t force this, you are doing it by choice.  Now East bids 4H which is passed back to you.  I have a simple answer I bid 4S.  Unless we have very strange agreements partner must know that I have game values and a four card spade suit.  I would have surely bid 1S with 5.  I almost have to have support for diamonds to risk a bid like this. 

You could double instead but the risk is that partner has lots of diamonds and not enough spades to bid them and will pass.  This might be bad.

Perhaps I am resulting.  But then again when Ray gave me the hand I didn’t know the result.  The player with my hand doubled.  They played there for a double game swing against them.  Partner held

S 642
H Aj
D AJ8432
C 72

A hand that many would not have opened.  In any case at the second table the “you hold” hand decided to just raise diamonds and splintered over the 1H overcall.  This worked out quite well when it induced partner to bid 5D over 4H.

If you bid 1S and it goes 4h-p-p you really aren’t so well positioned.  Partner can still have spades but perhaps he is less likely to.  So you might try 5D.  I am not so sure of that.  So the negative double doesn’t work out so bad after all.