The Winners

March 25th, 2009  ~  linda  ~  No Comments 

I have been involved in quite a few team games with Isabelle and Sondra in the last while.  Tonight I was playing with Colin who played very well.  Generally Jeff and Paul have played as well with a number of fourth pairs.  Isabelle and Sondra have been consistent winners.  And tonight they displayed that consistent play and few errors are the best way to win team games.   Here are some examples of how Isabelle and Sondra won tonight.   You are South and you have this hand:

No one is vulnerable and East is third chair opens 1♥.  What bid do you chose?  It seems that there are two good choices 2◊ and double.   The advantage of bidding 2◊ is that it is a pretty safe strain.  It may be your best partscore and partner is not likely to find it on her own.  I think double is the better bid.  It gets partner’s hand into play when partner doesn’t have a diamond fit.  At our table our opponents had an accident and we got a plus score defending 2NT.  But let’s look at what might have happened.  The auction would go like this

I believe 2NT was intended as a constructive raise with four hearts.  Now you are badly placed.  But after a double partner will come in 3♣ and you will compete to 4♣ which will make at least four.  Partner’s hand is

Now maybe I am resulting a bit but I think that finding the right answer to these choice that you constantly have to make in a match lead to good results.

There was one more notable hand.  The auction was the same at both tables and it wasn’t that challenging but it demonstrates how awkward strong 2♣ auctions are and it makes you wish you were playing something else.  In first chair with nobody vulnerable Isabelle held:

Basically a one loser hands.  Most systems over 2♣ do not handle two suiters very well and when there is a choice many players opt to start at the one level.  But on a hand like this clearly that is two dangerous.  Isabelle opened 2♣ and Sondra bid 2◊.  I want to look at that bid a moment.  Sondra held

What do you need to make a positive in a minor i.e. bidding 3?  That would make this auction more difficult but in general what kind of hand should you have.  Should it be six cards long?  There is a good argument for that.  But maybe it should show no ace, king or queen outside that suit.  In a way that might be helpful on a hand like this. 

In any case Isabelle now bid  2♠ and Sondra bid her diamond suit 3◊.  Isabelle continued with her plan by bidding 4♣.  Sondra bid  4◊ with nothing better to do.  So here is the auction with Isabelle to bid.

Isabelle bid 6♣ asking Sondra to pick.  I know that I hoped that if my partner had the ♥A and liked spades that he would bid 6♥ on the way.  It might have been more of a stretch to expect partner to bid 7♣ with the ♥A and a club preference.  Partner bids 6♠ which is a fine spot and makes six.

I know they don’t come up very often but it would be good to improve 2♣ auctions because these hands can often be important ones. 

Anyway, well done Isabelle and Sondra tonight and all the other nights.  It is nice to see a young pair of Canadian women playing so well together.

Australian Women’s Team Trial Finals

March 24th, 2009  ~  linda  ~  3 Comments 

It is the third quarter of the Australian team trials with only 1 imp in it.   The open team is in the semifinals so I am going to focus on the women.  I don’t think I am going to be able to stay up to see the end.  I will have to check back in the morning.   To make the playoffs teams had to qualify by getting points playing in various events.   Six selected teams played a round robin and four went through to a semi-final.  It is interested that the team that came fourth in the round robin, Havas has made it through to the final against Bourke who handily won the Round Robin.  The Bourke team is more or less the same team that represented Australia in Beijing last year.  Elizabeth Havas was part of the team that played in Shanghai.

The team members are:

Bourke
Felicity Beale, Di Smart, A Clark, L Fuller, Sue Lusk, Therese Tully Captain:Margaret Bourke

Havas
Elizabeth Havas, C Berman, C Lachman, Helen Snashall, E Caplan, N Giura

The Open Room is starting to get compares and I am waiting for something juicy.  The first three boards look to be very dull.  Perhaps I should get a book.  I am reading a rather interesting one called Fault Lines by Nancy Huston.  It is a Canadian title but very good nevertheless (Canadians see themselves this way – we need help from Dale Carnegie) and winner of several awards.  The book is told in four sections from a child’s point of view.  You are in modern times and meet four generations of a family and then in each major section you go back one generation.  I am currently in 1982 with Randall.  The family is partly Jewish and there are some mysteries going on but I am going to have to wait to the final section of the book in 1944 to get to the bottom of it I think.

Finally the possibility of a swing.   With all vulnerable, in third chair Lusk playing South for Bourke opens 2◊multi on a pretty terrible hand and this causes the auction to fall apart.

Here is the auction so far what is your choice?

You Snasha hold

What is your choice?

Double wasn’t alerted but I am pretty sure it shows cards.  Snasha bid 3NT.  Do you like that bid?  It doesn’t seem that bad but perhaps a bit light depending on the exact meaning of Lachman’s double. 

Now it is up to Lachman. Her hand:

I don’t really like the original double.  I can see why she passed 3NT though.  She doesn’t have any clear bid over it.  When Lusk found a club lead from here fourth queen, 3NT was down when 6♠ or 6◊ makes with the diamond finesse onside.  the other table was in a pretty normal 4♠.  So I guess that proves that even if a board looks flat an enterprising player can find a swing.  13 imps for Bourke and now with a few +1’s here and their the Bourke team has gone into the lead by 10.  It will be interesting to see if Lusk-Tully can keep their focus after the mishap. 

Live by the sword, die by the sword.  Lusk tries to put it to them again and this time it doesn’t work so well.

Here is the situation.  Your hand is

You are vulnerable against not and you open 1♣.  Lachman on your left overcalls 1♥ and partner preempts 3♣.  Snashall on your right bids 3♥ and you bid 5♣?  This really has too many losers to be a bid to make.  Was she hoping for more hearts?  4♣ seems enough to me.  Down one double. off three top tricks. Lusk gives back 8 imps to the club partscore in the other room.  Bourke leads by two and the momentum is lost for the moment.

A few imps here and there and Bourke has gone into the lead by 7 imps with a chance for Havas.  In the Closed Room Bourke has missed a heart slam.  This looks quite cool.  Lusk has opened 2NT showing minors in first chair at favorable vulnerability.  Now Lachman has

She makes a “practical bid” of 4♠.  I am starting to hate practical bids.  North bids 4NT and it is up to Snashall.  She has

and she doubles.  Does that show some defense?  South passes and perhaps Lachman should be hearts now.  Does she really want to defend at this vulnerability.  This is passed back to North who bids 5◊ and Snashall?  She doubles again predictably and this gets passed out.  There is a chance for +500 on the right defense.  Snashall has to ruff in with her trump ace to give her partner a club ruff and it looks like she is there.  Well done.  A small loss.

Perhaps a hard slam to bid after the 2NT bid still I don’t like the East-West bidding much.  You can assign the blame.

Things have taken a bad turn now for the Havas team with a doubled partscore disaster that I won’t describe.  It seems to me that one bad result can lead to another:  “The Big Mo”.  The sports psychologist gave me some tools to deal with a bad result to get your head screwed back on.  She said to imagine somewhere safe to put the bad result like a safe and then to put it there and lock it up for later.   It helps a bit but I know how hard it is.

I suppose the good news is that there are only two boards left before the break.  The 12 imps gives Bourke a 25 imp lead. 

Well the last two boards are quiet partscores and nothing strange happens.  Bourke has taken a good lead in the match but Havas has a quarter to get it back.

Later: The Bourke team won the fourth quarter and the match.  Congratulations to them all.  

Watching the Vanderbilt

March 23rd, 2009  ~  linda  ~  4 Comments 

On the weekend Ray usually has a viewing plan.  He knows exactly which sporting events he will watch and when.  Ray is not a hoops fan but he loves soccer which he calls football.  HIs beloved Manchester United are always involved in a number of events including the Premier League.  He has other loves and curling is one of them.  (I confess I like watching top flight curling too).  This is the season for curling championships and we have seen some great curling in the last while.  There is also tennis and golf of course in their time.  So what about me, sports widow.  This weekend I got to watch so very good bridge online.  It would be fun if bridge was on TV with commentators and background about the players and all that good stuff.  But BBO is a pretty good substitute and has the advantage that I can chat online with some friends who are watching too.

The Vanderbilt was the highlight of the BBO weekend.  There were so many interesting deals it is hard to pick a few to write about.  Here is one from the first round where Greco and Hampson played North-South for the purple team (Diamond) taking on Jacobs and Katz, East-West for the blue team (Katz).   

You get to be Geoff Hampson playing Board 6 in the Closed Room.   Geoff along with team-mate Fred Gitleman are originally from my home town, Toronto.

Sitting South in second chair at favorable vulnerability he held:

George Jacobs opens 1◊.  How do you play Michaels?  For years I have played it is any range.  I have always been told that is theoretically unsound since it is difficult for partner to judge what to do.  I have always considered the shape and fit more important than the high cards.  Apparently some others have swung that way too.  In any case Geoff bid 2◊ Michaels.  West, Ralph Katz bid 2♥.   Unfortunately I am not sure how they play this bid but I think it showed at least a limit raise in diamonds.  Your partner, Eric Greco bids 4♠ which you pass to Katz in the balancing chair.  He now bids 4NT.  This is clearly lots of clubs to go with his diamonds and a good hand at this vulnerability.  Jacobs picks 5◊ and you are now in the hot seat.  What do you do?

Here is the auction so far

Geoff doubled which I guess showed a good hand in high cards.  If you are a doubler or a passer what do you lead?  There is only one lead to set the contract and it is not one that anyone is likely to find.  It would seem normal to lead the ♠A but this is wrong on the hand.  You have to lead a club.  Can you think of any logic to get to that lead?  I can come up with some twisted logic but it isn’t convincing.

Here is the whole deal

I think it is better to just bid one more at this vulnerability.  It is unlikely to cost much and it could save a bundle.  Do you think Hampson should bid on or should Greco? 

What I particularly like about this deal is the play after a spade lead.  Here is the whole deal:

On a club lead declarer can’t set up up clubs and get back to them with the bad diamond break.  You can try it yourself but there is no defense.  But on a spade lead Hampson has a problem.  If he doesn’t take the ♥A his heart winner will go away on the ♠K and Jacobs will be able to make the hand by setting up dlubs and allowing Greco to make a trump trick (or just ducking a club to Greco).  Anyway he cashed the ♥A.  At the table he continued a spade and the hand was completely over.  If he plays a club at trick three Jacobs will win and try a diamond to his king, getting the bad news in diamonds.  He can now ruff a heart draw trump and there will be a show-in squeeze on Hampson.  It is the easy kind because when Jacobs cashes the ♠K Geoff has to hold the ♠Q and on the run of the trump he has to bare his ♣Q.  I like these kind of squeezes because I only have to watch for a couple of high cards.   

At the other table the auction actually started out the same, more or less except that Levin (North) bid 4♥ rather than 4♠ and Moss(East) bid 5♣ at his second bid rather than 4NT.  Maybe that emphasizes the clubs even more.  In any case Weinstein bid on to 5♥ which Katz doubled.  There is a funny thing about this save.  It makes.  The cards lie in a very favorable way for North-South.  With the spades onside and the heart finesse working the defense can only take two major suit tricks.  Weinstein has to lose a spade even if he wanted to try the double finesse because he doesn’t have enough entries to dummy to do everything.   This was a huge swing of 16 imps.  There were five double digit swings in the first 16 deals but this was the biggest.

There was one more deal in the first set that I would like to mention.  Here are the hands. When I read Bridge World, Challenge the Champs,  I always like to think about how I would have bid them.  I did give it a whirl with Ray as my partner.  Here are the two hands so you can try them.  North is dealer with nobody vulnerable.

The bidding is similar at both tables to a point (and similar to what I bid with Ray).  This was the auction at the Moss-Gitleman table.

Katz-Jacobs had a slightly different auction with Jacobs bidding 2♠ showing five and the auction continuing 3♣-3◊-3♥ –3NT.  In any case you are at the first decision point.  Moss decided that with partner showing not much extra and wasted spade cards he would just place the contract and bid 6◊.  While Katz slowed the auction with 4◊.  The scientist in my likes this sequence better but I wonder if he can find out what he needs to know.  When Jacobs cuebid the ♥A, Katz thought that was enough for a grand and used keycard to basically find out about the trump queen before bidding the grand.  How good a grand is it.  Well it is as they say a Hammon slam (it makes!).  But how good?   Katz has to ruff a heart and a club in dummy.  To make it he needs a 3-2 break in both minors pretty well.  That makes it less than 50%.  Ray had a pretty good auction although he admitted it was unlikely I could have enough to make the grand a good proposition.  He bid keycard and then when I showed the queen of trump with no side kings he bid 6♣ hoping that I would understand that I needed the ♣Q to bid the grand.  Although he did say that at the table he might have just bid 6◊ after I cuebid the ♥K.

In any case this was a very helpful 12 imps to the Katz team.

I am not done reliving the Vanderbilt, more in a future blog.

Bid Boldly, Play Safe

March 18th, 2009  ~  linda  ~  No Comments 

Playing in a team game against Jeff Smith and Paul Thurston, Jeff provided an interesting example of the theme popularized by Rixi Marcus, a British women internationalist who wrote a book entitled: “Bid Boldly, Play Safe”.  Her approach was to bid very aggressively and then try to justify her bidding with her exceptional dummy play.  I will give you the auction and the two hands and you can decide who was the “boldest” bidder.

Paul

Jeff

Nobody Vulnerable

It is fun to try to figure out why they kept cuebidding so here are my guesses.  Paul had a good hand but no suit.  I am not sure why Jeff cuebid.  The hand is going to play better from his side.  Paul cuebid back because he still didn’t know where to play the hand and by this time Jeff had run out of cuebids or as Paul said at the time they had no more diamond bidding cards in their box so he had to bid a suit,   4♥. 

The real fun of the hand is the play.  Jeff got the lead of the ♣Q and won this in hand.  The good news is that he knows where the high cards are, by and large.  The bad news is that it looks like he has lots of losers.  Figure out how you would play the hand and then I will just tell you what Jeff did. 

Jeff played three rounds of clubs ruffing the third round with the ♥7.   All followed and on the third round I played the ♣J.    Now Jeff cashed the top two hearts and when I played the doubleton ♥Q Jeff had passed hurdle one.  He still has to avoid four losers in the offsuits.  He now played a spade the the ♠10 and I won the ♠Q.  I wasn’t endplayed yet and I got out the ♠9.  This was covered with the ♠9, ♠K and ♠A.  The rest is a lot easier.  This was the ending.

Paul

Jeff

Jeff led the ◊K which I won with the ◊A.  I returned the ◊10 and Jeff had no choice but to rise with the ◊J hoping I had the ◊Q.  When the ◊J held Jeff was home.   Well played, Jeff.  Here is the whole deal:

Bloggable

March 14th, 2009  ~  linda  ~  No Comments 

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?

Lots can happened in a quiet afternoon bridge game

March 12th, 2009  ~  linda  ~  No Comments 

There were some really nice boards in my practice set with Sylvia today and I will show you one of them but I have an interesting auction with a question first.    You are West and here is your hand:

You open 1NT with nobody vulnerable and I double (showing a major and a longer minor).  Your partner bids 2♥ (transfer) and you bid 2♠.  Your partner bids 4◊.  What do you do and what does it mean?

I think it means pick a game I am 5-5 but East who made this bid claimed it meant something more than that.  Does it?  I would like to know if I am the only other person not to know this convention because West definitely didn’t.  Anyway I think West has two choice now 4♥ presumably a cuebid or 4♠.  You have great cards in partner’s suits and the ♥A is nice.  Maybe you should bid 4♥.  Anyway our West bid 4♠ which seems reasonable enough.  Now partner bid 5♠.  What do you do?  Can partner expect more than this?  What is he looking for?   What would you do?  I really can’t fault West for bidding 6♠ but he was down off the top when I cashed the first two clubs.  Partner held

This started a bit of a war but fortunately it was the last deal.  Does anyone know what East was talking about when he described his 4◊ bid as some kind of convention?

Anyway now to the good stuff.  Sylvia played this 3NT contract very well.   It was made at the other table but a bit differently.  Here is the hand at our table.

Dummy

Sylvia opened 1♠ third in hand and when I bid 2◊  she bid 3NT.  The opening lead was the ♥8 to the ♥10 and her ♥Q.   If spades break you have nine tricks so you start by playing a high spade.  East wins the first spade and leads by the ♥7 North following with the ♥4.  Sylvia crossed to her hand on a diamond to play spades.  On the second spade North threw a diamond.  And on the third spade North threw a club.  On the fourth spade North threw the ◊Q.  This is now the position.

Dummy

You cash the ♣K with both following.  I was watching this from dummy and since it was a team game I was following along only seeing two hands.  From the play in the heart suit is appeared the North had started with five hearts and still had three left.   North had two more cards.   For you to make it they need to be the ♣Qx or ♣xx of clubs so that you can make two club tricks.  (or four hearts and a club).  You lead a club and you have arrived at the moment of truth.  Do you finesse or play for the drop?  Sylvia played for the drop.  I didn’t ask her but my thinking was that North had given up a club too easily and too early.  Well done.

Not Dull At All

March 11th, 2009  ~  linda  ~  No Comments 

The 8 Canucks (one with an American accident) met again tonight for 24 boards and quite a lot of action.  I was not concentrating on the first couple of boards.  I was busy all day yesterday and I was in a rush to make it on time to the game.  There is a lesson there.   I need to find a way to get set when playing online bridge.  I need to think about the best way to get my brain in action.  Maybe I need to go through a more deliberate checklist at each major point on the first hand.  Anyone have any suggestions or ways they “get into the game”? 

I did completely and egregiously misplay 3NT on the first board.  I am going to write it up but in the mastering bridge blog as a lesson to new players!  Since we are now featuring the Mastering Bridge blog feed on Bridge Blogging the deal in question will show up here a little later on.

Sondra and Isabelle are doing very well.  We compared with them again tonight and any time I thought we had a good result they duplicated it or even improved on it.     Let’s start with an interesting problem for East-West.  At favorable vulnerability you hold this hand fourth to speak.

North opens 1♥ and South makes an irritating bid 1♠.  What is your plan?  I don’t have an answer to this question.  The choices I see at this point are pass, 2♠ (if natural), 4♠.   If you pass you might enter the auction in spades later or even somehow get diamonds into play.

Herve holding this hand bid a natural 2♠.   Pamela bid 3◊.  What now?  Herve bid a simple 5◊ which was doubled. 

At the our table the auction started the same way but Jeff passed.  I suspect that 2♠ was not natural for him.  North (me) bid 2♣ and Sylvia raised to 3♣.  It’s your turn.  Jeff bid 4♠.  I think 3♠ might have bid enough but maybe I am being too fine. 

Neither contract had much play when dummy arrived with a very disappointing hand and of course you know the spades don’t break.

Dummy is:

The biggest single swing was on this hand and is an opening lead problem.  Paul Thurston held

Given as a problem I think most “panelists” would find the lead of a diamonds.  We could argue about whether the ◊J or ◊8 is better.  I like the ◊8 and that is the one Paul led to get his spade ruff.   I would also say that I liked Sylvia’s slightly pushy 4♣ splinter.  Her hand was

Well done to all, sigh. 

Here is a hand on which we blew the defense.

The auction is:

Sylvia led the ◊6 and dummy has

I won the ◊A.  What is the best thing to do now?  I want to make sure that Sylvia overtakes the ♠K but how do I do it?  In retrospect I think it would have been better to cash the ♣A first.  I led the ♠K and it was game over.

At the other table they played 4◊.  This can be defeated on a club lead but it is nigh impossible to find.  

There But For Fortune

March 10th, 2009  ~  linda  ~  2 Comments 

I was thinking about Phil Ochs when I looked at the whole deal after it was played but at the time I was thinking more about the guy who says “ho ho ho”.

With everyone vulnerable you hold

You open 1♣ and your partner, Colin, bids 1♥ and now righty unexpectedly bids 1♠.  This looks like a pretty good spot so you pass in tempo and hope that partner has the where-with-all to balance double.  Partner bids 2♥ and righty bids 2♠.  You are happy to greet this and a most suitable dummy appears (at least from your perspective and your side manages to get all its 8 tricks for a juicy 800.  When you look at your opponents hand his bid doesn’t seem all that unreasonable.  What do you think?

So what happened at our tables?  Did many people fall into this trap?  Well actually quite a few did.  I feel sorry for the poor West at one table.  My hand (strangely?) passed and Colin’s hand opened 2♥, he bid 3♠which doesn’t seem so terrible.  Almost every North-South pair seems to have slopped a trick on defense though.  It isn’t that hard since without a club switch from Colin’s hand I am going to be endplayed eventually.  Strangely more than half the field did not double spades when they had a chance but bid over it.  They obviously didn’t hear the tinkle of jingle bells that I did.  All of the North-South’s in hearts ended badly but the notrumpers fared better.

But all did not work out quite as nicely.  Colin and I had some discussion about this deal where we got to a rather ambitious 6♥.  Here is Colin’s hand.

You open 1♥ and I bid 2♠ which shows a four card limited raise.  Colin bid 3♣ and I bid 3◊.   Our normal agreement is that after a limit raise all bids are slam tries.  We don’t invite in this situation we just bid game.  So we should now be in a game force with my 3◊ bid as a control.  I like 3♥ here to see if I have a spade card which would more or less make slam impossible.  But Colin wasn’t entirely sure that we were in a game force so he decided not to risk it and bid 3♠.  Now when I bid 4♣ he couldn’t be certain if I held the ace or shortness.  He just bid 6♥ and this was my hand:

As it turns out on a non-diamond lead he can make it since the spades work brilliantly for him with KQx in one hand.  After the diamond lead he needs the finesse since he just doesn’t have the entries to make it.  I think in retrospect that I should have splintered which would have avoided the whole issue.  And it does illustrate that not being confident of your system can make things a lot harder.

Never Say Never

March 9th, 2009  ~  linda  ~  2 Comments 

I wasn’t expecting to play in the Canadian Team Trials this year.  With Isabelle unable to play for work reasons I had considered other options but just decided that there was a lot of other good things to do instead.  Ray and I plan to go to Brazil in any case.  I am going to be chief blogger (unofficial).  However, it turns out that I will be going to the trials in Penticton anyway.  I will be playing with Sylvia Summers Cayley.  We have only had a few game together on BBO so like the current saying goes:”we have hope”;  hope that we will be able to play well together.  In our case there are some good reasons for this hope at least from my point of view.  Sylvia is a fine player.   I will post some examples in a later blog. 

I am also playing a bit with Colin as we get ready for some play at  the Toronto Regional.  It is always a wild experience playing with him.  Here is one deal that we played Saturday.  I raise this partly because it illustrated the point that people will bid anything, any time.  You are East red on white and you have:

South (me) opens 1◊ (playing 10-12 notrump in this position) and North (Colin) bids 1NT.  What do you do?  Well I can see why you might want to bid and double is a bit of trouble with a singleton club.  But do you really bid 2♠?  If partner can’t balance can you really be missing much?  Does the 10-12 notrump figure in?  I think it makes it somewhat more unattractive to balance since if I am balanced I have at least 13 HCP and I could have a strong notrump.

Our opponent did overcall 2♠ and the other trouble with this bid showed up.  My double here is for penalty.  Some bids are hard to penalize but in this auction knowing my partner is likely pretty balanced this one is not.  I had

so my double was really easy.  This went 4 down for a yummy 1100.  Since Colin had 7 HCP most players played 1NT our way.  (We were headed for 2NT).

Okay, this isn’t a great lesson.  Don’t make bad overcalls when you are at unfavorable after both opponents have bid.  But I have noticed that more and more people just ignore the auction and bid.  Is this a trend?  Is it Colin who attracts the action?  Or have I just not been paying attention.

Bols Bridge Tips

March 5th, 2009  ~  linda  ~  1 Comment 

I was very happy to learn that we had just published the ebook edition of The Complete Book Of Bols Bridge Tips.

Why was I so pleased about this book?  Well first it is out of print.  Apparently there are 30 copies in a warehouse in England and that is it.  So if you want it you can’t get it.  I always hate to see a good bridge book become unavailable.

I have fond memories of this book.  Years ago when Ray and I started Master Point Press we went into bookstores and made presentations to whatever customers we could round up.  Sometimes we taught them how to play bridge in half an hour and sometimes we were lucky enough to have a few bridge players around and I would give them tips from this book.  I didn’t have to prepare.  I could open the book at random and find something worthwhile to talk about.

Where else can you get some of the favorite bridge tips from all the best in the world like Terence Reese, Bob Hamman, Larry Cohen, Giorgio Belladonna, Bobby Wolff, Mike Lawrence, Jim Jacoby, Eric Kokish and others?

Any time I pick up this book I learn something.  You don’t sit down and read this book from end to end.  You savor it, dipping in and reading a bit at a time.  At least that’s what I do.  So I am going to do it again.  I am going to open this book at a random page and see what pops up.

Well what do you know?  It’s Jeff Rubens, editor of the Bridge World.  The article is called Honor Thy Partner and it is in the defence section.

He starts out with an auto crash where Car A’s erratic driving causes Car B who is following behind him to crash into a tree.   Jeff is talking about bridge crashes where one defender makes a mistake but he is “abetted” unintentionally by his partner.  A good partner is alert to his partner’s problems and tried to help him.   He starts off with an easy example where East is on lead in a notrump contract and purposefully doesn’t cash a winner to give his partner a discard problem.  That is a theme I am familiar with and I do think about when defending.  There are several other good examples of other ways you can help your partner do the right thing.   A great thing to do because beside winning imps it makes partner happy.

Another random flip gets me to an article I know I will like because it is something I have been thinking about lately (as a teaching point).  It is the idea of holding up the ace of trump written by Giorgio Belladonna.  There is a nice bio but anyway back to the article.  He points out the value of holding up the ace of trump using an example of a deal where you have a suit to force with.  A cuter example is this deal:

You, East, are defending 4♥ on the lead of the ◊3.  After winning the ◊A you are able to place declarer with three diamonds.  Do you see the defence?  Hint, hint, notice the title of the tip!

Anyway, a cool hand.

More on Bols coming to this space soon.