Amusing hand from bidding practice

Last night, I was practicing bidding with my partner Garth. Garth and I are playing several upcoming tournaments, and we have a very complicated bidding system, so we want our agreements to be in tip-top shape for our first big test-- Gatlinburg in just over a week. We've been practicing several hours a week, and getting better every time.

This hand came up as the last one of the session.


I was very amused to notice that game was most likely on in all five strains - these hands will probably make 3NT, 4H, 4S, 5C, and 5D! I've been experimenting with the E-W hands a bit, trying to see if I can make a full hand where N-S can make game in all five strains but can't make slam in any of them. I've come close, but it seems like 6C by South is always making. Can you come up with a better construction than I did?

BBO Bidding Problems

I played in an online tournament last night with my friend Gail. We've had a handful of games together lately, but I didn't have our card in front of me so we kept our agreements extremely basic. 2/1 with very few bells and whistles. Here are a couple of problems I had:

(A) Favorable at IMPs, first seat, you hold:

A9764
KJ
AKT2
T3

A1) Playing 15-17 NT, do you like this for 1N, or do you open 1S? (Or something else?)
A2) Over 1N, pard will Stayman and invite. Over 1S, pard will bid 2S. What does your auction look like?

(B) Here's a hand Gail held in 4th seat, favorable:

T4
AK7
3
KQJT832

(P) P (1D) 2C
(2S) X (4S) ?

(C) This was the final hand of the evening. If I'd gotten it right, we'd have placed a lot higher than 16th out of 217, which was certainly respectable:

Fourth seat, unfavorable, I held:

A97543
4
QJ4
J82

(3H) 3N (P) ?

Nicely bid hand on BBO

Meg and I get a lot of our practice at Bridge Base Online. BBO is the world's premier bridge site... but we've talked about that before.

We were in the Partnership Bidding Room, working on our new big club structure. One of the very first hands was this one:



I was South, and opened 1C (16+ unbalanced or 17+ balanced). Pard bid 2C, showing a game forcing hand with long diamonds. 2D by me asked about her diamond suit. 2NT showed exactly five diamonds with two of the top three honors. 3C asked about aces and kings outside of diamonds. 3D showed no aces and at most one king. 3H by me was a cuebid, and when she cuebid 3S I knew it was a singleton (since she'd denied holding an aces). I cuebid 4C to get a little more information, and Meg came out with a brilliant bid -- 5C! She had a great hand for her previous actions, and wanted to do something slam-positive... so she cued her 'trick source' in clubs, and I bid the slam, knowing her hand to be x xxx(x?) AKxxx Q(J?)xx(x?).

No, it's not a huge deal to reach a good slam* with 11 HCP opposite 21, but I like to think we would have had the same auction if my SK were the S3. And if the SK was the SA, my bid would've been 7D over 5C!

* Slam should make on 3-2 diamonds, 3-3 hearts, the onside ace of spades, or West cashing the ace of spades at trick one -- I think it's over 80%.

How should this be played? Here's my suggestion: Say they lead a heart or a club. Win it in the closed hand [remember-- the big hand is playing it, I bid 2D], play a diamond to the ace and a spade down. If RHO takes the ace, all is well. If he doesn't, play the king -- if it holds, draw trumps and hope for 3-3 hearts for an overtrick. If the king of spades loses to the ace, win the return in hand, ruff a spade, draw a second round of trumps, and if all follow, play to ruff all three spade losers in the dummy before drawing the last trump. If diamonds are 4-1, draw trumps and hope hearts break.

Do you have a better line of play?

Buffett Cup

The biennial Buffett Cup starts today in Louisville, KY. This is a 'challenge match' much like golf's Ryder Cup, which starts on Friday, also in Louisville. Europe and the USA have each sent six pairs to battle in a grueling (but friendly) set of matches. Scoring is done by board-a-match (hence the 'grueling'). There are three segments to the challenge match -- Pairs, Teams, and Individual.

The first Buffett Cup was played in Dublin, Ireland in 2006. The USA team was victorious. Europe led after the Pairs and Teams competitions, but in the Individual the Americans pulled out a last-minute win.

Every hand of this event will be broadcast on Bridge Base Online. Here's the schedule of the broadcasts.

This year's teams:

Europe:

Sabine Auken and Marion Michielsen

Michel and Thomas Bessis

Boye Brogeland and Espen Lindqvist

Tom Hanlon and Hugh McGann

Tor Helness and Jan Peter Svendsen

Michal Kwiecien and Jacek Pszczola

USA:

Bob Hamman and Zia Mahmood

Geoff Hampson and Dick Freeman

Alan Sontag and David Berkowitz

Tobi Sokolow and Janice Seamon-Molson

Howard Weinstein and Steve Garner

Roy Welland and Bjorn Fallenius

Happy kibitzing!

Bridge Master 2000

Bridge Master 2000 is, in my opinion, the best bridge program out there. It's a declarer play program, with dozens of preloaded hands. There are five skill levels. Level One is challenging for a novice; any reader of this site should breeze through them. Level Three should be tough for most players. Level Five is miserably hard... these are meant to trouble even World Champions. I'll put my favorite Level Five hand at the end of this article.

Bridge Base Online offers six sample deals at each of the five Levels. Try it for yourself! Log in to BBO, and click on "Other Bridge Activities". Near the bottom of the list is Bridge Master 2000. Click your preferred level and try the sample hands! You can purchase individual sets of hands on Bridge Base for $10.00 per 30 hands, and you can buy the whole program here for $59.95. The price tag may look steep, but I promise it's worth it. My suggestion would be to play the sample hands on BBO and find your level, then buy two sets of that level and one of the level above that. Then practice!

These hands are set up to reward the best lines of play. If you play it and fail, you can try again as many times as you need. Be warned-- the lie of the cards that wreck your first try may not be the same lie when you try again! If you try a different sub-par line of play, you'll get punished for that too.

My favorite deal from the samples on BBO is Level Five, deal 4:

Dealer:South Vul: None Scoring: Rubber

♠ AJ ♥ 5432 ♦ 432 ♣ A432 ♠ 2 ♥ AKQ ♦ AKQJT9 ♣ KT9

Once South finds out that North holds the black aces, he bounces into 7D. The king of spades is led, and it's your play. I'll post the full play in the Comments.

Hands From BBO

I practiced on Bridge Base Online a few days ago with my friend Paul. You'll read a lot more about my adventures with Paul later this month-- we're playing the most popular Regional in the Northwest - Seaside, OR -  together. Paul and I had some amazing hands and some good practice. All problems IMPs. What happened at the virtual table will appear in the Comments, as always.

(A) Red vs. white

J83 K4 AJ4 AQT86

(3H) P (P) ?

(B) Red vs. white

none KQJT4 J9862 T42

?

Am I the only one in the world who would think of 2H here? How about at other colors?

(C) White vs. red

AKJ73 QT98763 9 none

1H (P) 1N [forcing] (P) ?

Or would you have opened 1S? Or passed?

(D) All white

2 AKJ754 Q65 A85

(1D) X (3D) [weak] ?

(E) All white

K985 543 62 AJ42

(1S) 2D (P) ?

Assuming you pass here, the auction goes

(1S) 2D (P) P

(2H) X [1] (P) ?

[1]: Takeout.

(F) All white

KJ9632 5 KJT54 8

You pick this up first in hand. Do you open? If not, what do you need to add to the hand to make it worth a one-bid?

Two Hands from BBO

I played on Bridge Base Online this evening with my friend Anne. Anne was the winningest female player in the ACBL last year. She ended up the year with 1,419.97 masterpoints-- just ahead of Melanie Tucker with 1,419.86! Check out the tight race here. We held two hands that illustrate the importance of accuracy with high-level competition.

Dealer: South Vul: N-S Scoring: IMPs

♠ K963 ♥ J3 ♦ AKT ♣ K954 ♠ 7 ♥ AQT9742 ♦ Q52 ♣ 86 ♠ A52 ♥ K865 ♦ 976 ♣ QT7 ♠ QJT84 ♥ none ♦ J843 ♣ AJ32

1♠(2♥)4♠(5♥) P (P) X (P) 5♠ (6♥) X (All Pass)

Anne and I play a system that allows light openings with good playing strength and the spade suit. The South hand certainly has both, so I had an easy 1S opening. Lefty bid 2H, pard bounded to 4S, and righty bid 5H. Now, 4S by us is sort of a 'two-way' bid. It shows either a minimum game-force in high cards and a fit, or a preemptive raise to 4S. So my pass to 5H wasn't forcing. When pard doubled 5H, by agreement this said "I was bidding 4S to make", so with my undisclosed playing strength, I bid to 5S. LHO made the good decision to continue on to 6H (would you bid one more after being doubled in 5?), and partner's double ("Please don't bid any more, pard") ended the auction. On most lies of the cards, we would be on for 5S but not 6, and the opponents would be -500. With both minor-suit finesses on for our side, though, 6S was on, and 6H went -800. This was a well-judged hand for both sides, bidding to the single-dummy right spot. We figured out what was going on by good partnership and good understandings. West did it from a good (educated) guess.

On the very next board, we picked up

Dealer: West Vul: E-W Scoring: IMPs

♠ 987 ♥ QT9764 ♦ 6 ♣ 752 ♠ KQ6 ♥ A85 ♦ Q742 ♣ 863 ♠ AJT543 ♥ none ♦ AJ85 ♣ QJT ♠ 2 ♥ KJ32 ♦ KT93 ♣ AK94

(P) P (1♠) X (3♠) 4♥ (4♠) 5♥ (P) P (5♠) X (All Pass)

My RHO opened 1S in third chair, and I had an automatic takeout double. My lefty made a limit raise in spades, and pard (bless her-- great bid!) was in there with 4H. Righty bid 4S, and it was my guess. At IMPs, it tends to be percentage to bid one more, so I pulled out 5H. This would've gone for 300, but righty had heard of the 'bid one more' principle also, and bid to the doomed 5S. I didn't want my partner to worry about re-saving in 6H, so I doubled. We collected our two clubs and a diamond for +200.

These were both big pick-ups. Sure, there are hands consistent with the auctions that would have worked out poorly for our actions, but I think all of our bids were 'right'. Thanks again, Anne, for playing! (And nice 4H call!)

One More Reason To Love BBO

McKenzie and I used to run into the same problem over and over again. We'd get on a bridge high one day and spend hours discussing theory and tweaking our system, only for days or weeks to go by before anything we talked about would come up in play. Inevitably, he'd remember and I'd forget our discussion, resulting in some terrible misunderstanding at the table and lots of frustration on my part.

Getting a bad board isn't the worst thing for me -- what kills me is the embarrassment. I hate looking like a fool at the bridge table, and few things sting worse than when the defense is about to lead and partner announces "There's been a failure to alert..." D'oh. Then I see that we're playing our 4-2 diamond fit when we're cold for 6 of either major.

Lately, McKenzie and I have talked about adding 2-Way New Minor Forcing to our card. I haven't seen it used very much, so aside from my experience playing regular New Minor Forcing, I didn't know anything about this convention. It's fairly simple, but I knew that without getting it into my head right away, I'd miss it the next time it came up in a game. So McKenzie set up a practice room in the Partnership Bidding area of Bridge Base Online.

He set up the room so that he would always hold 11-14 point hands with 2-4 spades, 2-4 hearts, 2-5 diamonds and 2-5 clubs (always looking like a weak notrump, never a hand that would open a major), and all of my hands were 7+ points. This didn't guarantee that we'd have a NMF sequence every time -- it doesn't help if I *know* it's coming -- but it did come up quite frequently, and I was able to get enough practice to drill it into my head before blowing it at our next duplicate game.

You don't get to play out these practice hands in the BBO room, but if it's bidding practice you need, it's bidding practice you'll get. This is a great tool, and I'm sorry I didn't discover it sooner. Did I mention that it's free?