Being Flexible

[OliverC]

Igo on sometimes about the need to have a plan for each hand. Plans aren't always set in concrete, however, and it's best to keep them flexible. This hand I played with Eszter yesterday is a case in point.

Game All, Dealer West
You are South and hold

South
K7
1092
J95
KJ983

Bidding
West         North         East       South
1            2 ⁽¹⁾         No         2
No             3              No         4

(1) Majors, weak or strong

As an aside, if you don't already, best to use 2-suited overcalls as weak or strong, but never intermediate. If you use Michaels etc with intermediate hands as well as weak or strong hands, Partner never knows whether to invite when they are intermediate themselves

West led the Ace of Diamonds, and this is what I could see

North (Dummy)
AQ854
AJ875
6
A5

South
K7
1092
J95
KJ983

West won the opening lead and continued with the King of Diamonds, ruffed in Dummy. What's our plan? Clearly if the Spades are 3-3 or one of the Heart honours are onside, I can take 2 finesses in Hearts, losing only 1 , 1 and maybe 1 . That's a decent enough plan for the time being: West opened the bidding, so there's a decent chance they'll have one of the Heart honours.

On the other hand, if the Spades are 4-2 and both of the Heart honours are offside, that plan could run into trouble, especially if East started with KQx, because when I take the second Heart finesse, East will be able to play a 3rd Heart and now I'll have to concede a Spade trick as well.

See what happens, though: At trick 3 I crossed back to hand with the Spade King and ran the 10 , losing to East's King. East switched to a small Club. What now?

Well if I was going to stick to the original play, I might preserve Dummy's Ace of Clubs as an entry, win the King and run the 9 , but I decided to hedge my bets. I inserted the 8 of Clubs and took West's 10 with the Ace in Dummy. I might have played the rest of the hand differently if the 8 had drawn the Queen from West, but now the presence of the 9 in my hand gave me a much better option:

I left the Hearts alone and played the Ace of Spades and a small Spade, ruffed by my 9. This might be overruffed if West started with 2 Spades and the Queen of Hearts, but now I still have 3 top trumps in Dummy to cope with a ruff, drawing trumps, and the rest of the tricks will be mine. If the Spades turn out to be 3-3, I still have the option of a second finesse in Hearts.

In practice West discarded a Club on the third Spade, which mean one of 2 things: Either West had no Hearts or none that could beat the 9, or this might have been a clever duck from an original holding of Qxxx. At the table, West didn't strike me as a player good enough to try that kind of gambit, so when I led a Heart and West played low, I hopped up with the Ace, placing East with KQx or KQ. The Queen didn't drop, but East did follow to the trick, but now I simply ran the Spades, which were all winners and East could take his Queen whenever he wished.

Bidding and making 4 here was worth 10 IMPs. Lots of people stopped short of game or only made 8 or 9 tricks, presumably having stuck to the original plan of taking 2 Heart finesses and hoping for 3-3 Spades.  West had started with J3, 64, AKQ102, Q1076 and East with 10962, KQ3, 8743, 42 so any attempts to develop the Clubs were also doomed to failure.

[kenberg]

Yep, nice line.
An added thought: It helps if declarer can think "upside down", meaning that 4 in a 5-3 fit usually is played with declarer holding the five card suit. Ruffing the third spade with the 9 establishes the suit. If the ruff is over-ruffed then that establishes the suit. If it isn't over-ruffed then a to the A  should work fine unless, as you say, W made a very clever duck.
If W shows out on the 2nd you are in trouble, since you already used one trump at T2, but I doubt there was  anything to do about that.  At least not anything reasonable.

I was kibbing you yesterday, I think it was yesterday, when a pick-up pair of opponents had the uncontested auction:

1 -1
1NT - 3
4 - 4NT

After which they went on to 6 in a 5-2 fit, making because spades broke 3-3 and dummy's long club could be established by two ruffs. So the bidding was such that they would play either in 3 or 6 , never 4 , the trumps split, and 6NT would not make because the ruffing play was unavailable.
The world can be very unjust!

[OliverC]

Yes. Like I commented after the hand: "Well that one didn't need much..." , just 3-3 Spades and Clubs no worse than 4-2. I wouldn't mind but East had jump-rebid his Spades (which is not forcing) on KQ1073, and West had scraped up a 4 bid on Ax and a flat 14-count, and suddenly East launched into BW. It was a very strange auction, all in all.


Buit then, this is BBO, where ridiculous contracts like 7NTXX -10 (when the rest of the world is making an overtrick in 1NT) happen on a nearly hourly basis

[kenberg]

Those 7NT XX on not much are usually someone showing their temper I think. It's not confusion, it's bad manners.

On this one, it was confusion. After 1 - 1 - 1NT it seems very likely that responder thought 3 was forcing with 5+ instead of invitational with 6. Opener has a max for his 1NT rebid so he he "accepts the invitation" and accepts it in spades because he expects six.  Then responder bid 4NT, and opener paused a bit before responding with whatever it was.  My guess is that he realized that they were not on the same page, but figured that of responder had intended 3 as forcing and now wanted to here about aces, so be it.  And he presumably still thought that responder has a six card suit so he saw no reason to convert to 6NT.

Sometimes luck is in.

I have a copy of Goren around somewhere, maybe in Goren 3 is forcing. Or maybe somewhere it is forcing.  But Goren has been dead for quite a while.

[OliverC]

Goren died in the early 90's (or did you mean that the system was dead?). I don't think you will ever be able to say that the system is truly dead, since most modern bidding uses elements of it (particularly where hand evaluation is concerned).

[kenberg]

I meant it  in the metaphorical sense.  I have since found my 1957 edition of Goren's New Contract Bridge Complete.

On page 107, hand 30, we find the auction:

1 - 1
1NT - 3

This is described as forcing to game.

Presumably, on this crazy 6 hand  at your table,  your right hand opponent  plays his 3   as gf, just as Goren says. I am not sure if Goren played the 3 as promising a six card suit but I am guessing that he did not. The 1NT rebid sets a fairly narrow limit on opener's values, and in Goren it promised on pain of death that opener has at least two spades. Goren liked straight forward auctions so my guess is  that with six spades and game forcing values he simply rebids 4 .  If he had a really strong hand with six spades he would have bid 2 over 1 . So your rhi had a completely correct 3 call, if he was playing with Goren.

There is a point to this: I'm not willing to take on Goren's ghost in a debate about whether 3 should or should not be forcing. The important point is that it should be understood, and very, very few people play it as forcing anymore. Making a call that perfectly describes a hand in a system that the bidder is playing but his partner is not playing creates problems.

incidentally, Goren strongly objected to "Goren system". He insisted it was the "Goren method".   He also insisted that opening 1 on a 3 card club suit was not a conventional understanding but rather a convenience. We used to joke that we played the "short club convenience" rather than the "short club convention". And yes, 1 on 3 cards was a short club.  Opening  1 on a 2 card suit was presumably not even up for discussion.

I remember a Sports Illustrated article in which Goren changed his mind about the auction 1M-3M. In the 1957 book, it is game forcing. In SI, he re-defined it as invitational. The 1M only promised four cards, that remained the same. Actually he later modified his methods to include having 1 M promise 5. As I recall he did not recommend this, he merely said that if you wanted to play that way, here is how to do it.

There are many other such items. Opening 2   was natural and game forcing. Overcalling 2NT after rho opens 1 M was natural. He included the Unusual No Trump as a convention,,but insisted that it only applied if the previous auction made it clear that the 2NT bidder could not possibly have the hcps needed to make the call natural.

So the game has changed. That was really what I meant.  Goren/Sobel won a lot of tournaments.

Since I am rambling on a bit, I'll quote from the Wikipedia about Sobel who should be better known than she is.

"She is said to have been the "greatest woman bridge player of all time"[2] and "may well have been the most brilliant card player of all time."[3] She won 35 North American Bridge Championships, and was the first woman to play in the Bermuda Bowl. She was a long-time partner of Charles Goren."

More at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Sobel_Smith

The above includes an anecdote I have heard before, although I don't know if it is true:

"Once Helen Sobel wearied of a female kibitzer who was all but sitting in partner Goren's lap. When the woman asked Sobel, in the middle of a hand, 'How does it feel to play with an expert?' the best female player in bridge pointed to Goren and said: 'I don't know. Ask him.'

— Jack Olsen, Sports Illustrated[11]
"

[OliverC]

You have to remember that 1957 is a LONG time ago. The real deal of approach/forcing bidding was in its infancy back then.

[kenberg]

Yes. Your right hand opponent was bidding in a 1957 style. Or perhaps just in his own style. I am far from having a well-defined meaning for every bidding sequence, but I think a partnership should try to get two things straight: Which beds are forcing and which are not, and which bids are natural and which are not.  At your table they benefited greatly by not having a clear understanding. Nobody intentionally gets to 6 on their combined hands, it's just that everything was lying right. This happens, but it is not the usual way for it to go.