oops oops and oops. I originally posted the wrong link, I will leave it be and also post the right one!

Thw wrong one:
http://tinyurl.com/ldbflpl


The right one:
http://tinyurl.com/mn2nt8k


My comment that was directed at what I now call "the right one""
Maybe Moss should have got this right, maybe not, but it's of interest to see that the forced ruff at trick 2 made it more difficult for him.  As mentioned, time is tight for the next several days so I'll leave it at that.

As to "the wrong one":   See "Challenging hand". I cleaned up the exposition there a bit.

On this hand, I believe the thinking should go as follows:

There are two ways for declarer to take 10 tricks. Make use of dummy's clubs, or else just take 2 club tricks. If he takes only two clubs he needs 8 more. The hear Ace and the diamond K are 2 of them. Where are the other 6? Three ruffs in dummy, 3 trumps in hand. So that gives two possible ways he can make ten tricks, we have to block both. I think it can be done. Or more precisely, GIB says it can be done and I think I see how.

Mostly I find thinking about such things to be fun.  Something like this requires far more time than would ever be allowed, and I am looking at all four hands,  but it is a demonstration that thought can help. In simpler situations thought can also help, and with practice maybe it can on some hands be done in a reasonable length of time.

On the shown hand, I think E can beat it as follows: Take the heart K at T1 as he did, and shift to either the J or 9 of Ds. This much Gib shows.
Declarer must win, else he loses two diamonds, the heart and a spade.

So declarer wins the diamond K. Playing three rounds  of trump won't work, since E will win the third round and they take some Ds, three in fact. So suppose S wins the diamond K and plays a diamond. E wins the diamond and plays a heart, N wins the A. If declarer tries for three ruffs it won't work: Club to Q, ruff a heart, club to J, ruff a diamond, now declarer is on the board. He still has a red loser in his hand, but he cannot pitch it on a high club because W will ruff. He also cannot ruff back to his hand with the spade 4 because W will over ruff. So he ruffs high back to his hand and then ruffs his remaining loser on the board as E pitches a heart. Everyone has three cards. S has KQ4 in spades, E has  A87. A club is led from the board, E trumps low, E gets two spade tricks. 

Ok, maybe after S wins the diamond K he leads a heart to the board and then comes off the board with a diamond. E goes up and leads a small spade. This kills the possibility of three ruffs, and I see no way for him to cope.

So I think the diamond play at T2 does it.  I have not gone through every variant in detail, but it seems clear that to come to  ten tricks he either needs three clubs, and the third club  cannot be played before spades are drawn, or he needs two clubs, a heart, a diamond and six spades. With that in mind, I think any approach he tries can be countered.

All it takes is a half hour or so of thought while looking at all four hands!


There are many such hands. The reason I thought the IAC forum would be good for this is that we all, to some extent, know each other. So I thought it could be more relaxed. One could just put something up that might be of interest.

Added: An early thought was that after the D switch, if declarer went up (as he must) and then played another diamond, winning and then playing a small spade would be right. Declarer can cope with this if he reads the situation. He wins in hand, ruffs a D, which leaves E with no Ds. Declarer then leads a spade. He intends to draw trump and run clubs, and the defense cannot stop him from doing so. When E takes his Ace he has no more diamonds to lead, the heart Ace is still on the board, and declarer has adequate transportation via clubs.

Also, if you look at the play as it actually went, the possible result switched back and forth a couple of times. E won the heart . Now declarer can make it: lead a spade to his hand, ruff a heart, lead another spade. Thanks to the 3-3 split and the onside D ace, declarer will be able to draw trump and run clubs. But declarer did not do this, at trick 3 he led a D from the board. Now we are back to where the hand can be beaten.

It is often like this. Players make their best estimates of how the cards lie and what will work. Even the best players cannot see around corners, and so Gib, who peeks, can see that the possible outcome shifts back and forth.

 

This hand was board 2 on Sunday in the USBC. (Finals, round 5). Given the very different contracts, it's got to be amazing that the swing was one imp.


http://tinyurl.com/mu6xzlu


http://tinyurl.com/kq4hhcv

The play and defense is delicate.

Bridge takes various forms. Yesterday yleexotee and I played maybe 16 hands, some  against helene_t and shatha, some against helene and dee10.

Now for me, this is bridge in the way I first learned it back in my grad student days. Four people got together, pulled out a deck of cards, and played for a while. A while means for a while. After a wile life got busy and I stopped playing altogether. Then, in my late thirties, I started playing at clubs and in tournaments.

What do people now like? It's hard to know if they don't say. I enjoyed the four person pick-up game. I couldn't make last light's tournament, we were at a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert. (I'm probably more the Pete Seeger type, or Duke Ellington if he could be re-incarnated, but Becky says she wants Free Bird played at her funeral.)

Anyway, I just enjoy playing some hands. When I was young I played Uncle Wiggly, Chinese Checkers, various rummy games. Later I played canasta, hearts and poker. Later I played bridge.  Playing bridge in an environment where I get to know people, even if only in an  internet sort of way, seems like a nice idea.

But if people are not interested, I have no good ideas on that.

I read Sally's post and figured I would put up my thoughts.

Online play is iffy. Here are two extremes;
1. You play with a fully worked out system that the two of you have discussed at length. I have played that way (well maybe not thoroughly worked out but in general terms yes) in f2f but online I find the distance to be an issue.
2. Just play whatever with whomever. Ok, but it lacks something.

I was thinking IAC might work well, sort of a middle road. People get to know one another so that they have a reasonable idea of what each other's bids mean.

Sally mentioned that she is not up for precision or for the weak no trump and the same goes for me. I have played, briefly and a long time ago, the weak no trump. I have no quarrel with it, I just am not interested. I have never played a big club system. Too artificial for me. I just wouldn't enjoy it. Actually I find the play far more interesting than the bidding anyway, and so I prefer reasonably natural bidding. Supposedly a man came up to Charles Goren a long time ago and said "I agree with you Mr. Goren. When a man bids clubs a man ought to have clubs, as God intended."  Religious authority aside, I am in general agreement with the sentiment.

I am fine with negative doubles, support doubles and for that matter more exotic things such as snapdragon doubles. If agreed though, if agreed.  Competitive auctions need agreements, some of them artificial. But I see a lot of hands get tangled up  in artificial sequences where the partners have differing ideas of what means what, so my preference is to keep it simple and use the energy saved for the play.

So I was and am hoping for a place where  we often rely more on our judgment, rather less on exotic conventional agreements.  Then play the hands as best we can.  Later maybe more complexity can be introduced.

Why, and what can be done, are related questions. I am not sure I know the answer.

Possibly I had some role in encouraging Joe, (yleexotee) to write up his sheet of suggested defaults for play. I am sure it took time, i don't see that it is much used. Perhaps Oliver's creation of this Forum was partly motivated by a suggestion I made. Oliver described it as easy enough to do, but still it took some time. We can see how little it is being used. So what's up?

I play bridge because I find it interesting. This interest spills over into enjoying discussion of hands. Not everyone does. When I first started playing duplicate I took a series of lessons on conventions, lebensohl and such. There would be a lecture and then supervised play. There was this one woman who, when we first started and also as the several weeks of lessons came to an end, would begin the supervised play by asking "Partner, do you ay the short club?".  That was it. Leb? Not a chance. Why she took lessons escaped me.

So I had in mind some discussion. Not happening.

Here is the first board from the Sunday tourney:

http://tinyurl.com/k9z8gss


We agreed to use Joe's notes (with exceptions) so 3D was understood as Bergen despite the double. Myself, I would have bid a direct 3H (and I would do the same if we were not playing Bergen since after the X it is weak). But whichever ne chooses, we have a ten card fit and it is hard to imagine us not going to 3H one way or another.


Is this a good contract? That's where it gets interesting. I have five obvious tricks to lose. The opening lead was the spade T, I took my Ace. Surely I shouold have played the diamond J at T2. Maybe lho will duck, maybe he won't, but he might. Instead i led a heart after which they took their clubs. later their diamond and a spade. I long ago accepted that I make mistakes, and I actually take satisfaction in spotting them afterward. This was an error. It might not have made a difference, but it was still ab error.

There are other interesting points. This was mps and  optimal  spot for NS is 4D (or 4C for that matter). They can take five clubs, four diamonds and one heart, and there is nothing we ca do about it, at least I do not see any defense. And +130 outscore +50, and outscores +100 in 3HX. Now 4m, when it is right, is usually tough to get to and nobody did. Some were in 5C off 1.

How about LOTT? We have ten hearts, they have none diamonds, LOTT says there are 19 total tricks We can take 8 tricks in hearts, they can take ten tricks in diamonds, LOTT is off by 1. LOTT often is a bit off, and anyway they don't know we have ten hearts, we don't know they have nine diamonds. I regard the L part of LOTT (Law) as being a serious overstatement.

It score badly. Which is very different from saying one of us should have done something different. Except I should have led the diamond at T2.

I find such things interesting. Clearly, many others don't find this interesting.  If people are not interested, they are not interested. My wife has a friend who loves watching golf on television. I pass.

I don't like speedballs at all. Bridge is based on thought. It's not chess or go, but still some modest amount of time for thought is expected. By me.

Also I was hoping Joe's notes would reduce the frequency of misunderstandings.
 An auction:


1H-(2C)-2S-(P)
P-(P).

I was the spade bidder, with a 15 count and five spades. I am aware of the Negative Free Bid convention, but it is a convention. An alertable convention, at least in acbl land. Apparently more common in Europe, see http://bridgewinners.com/article/view/negative-freebids/

As it happened, the  result was not all that bad, although both 3NT and 4H can be made.  Good karma, I guess. Whatever one thinks of the merits of Negative Free Bids, clearly it is not good when one partner is playing them and the other isn't. The link above has other links, and discusses variations. It also mentions that NFBs work best within a big club system where the opening bid. not 1C,  is limited to 15 highs.

So discussion is good.  Or at least I like it. I think I will put up a few more hands from time to time, maybe it will catch on. Or not. We will see.

I was using Chrome last night when I attended your talk. I clicked on the link Sanya sent. No audio. Later, someone else sent me a message asking if I had audio and I said no. He (or she) didn't have it either so thre were two of us at least. I have the latest Flash.

These things seems to vary in unpredictable ways. I used to happily use Firefox. But the online version of BBO does not seem to work well with Firefox, at least not on my computer (Dell computer on Windows 10) .  So I have been using Chrome more. Now there is a new issue. Yahoo seems to be very resourceful in inserting itself. As of today, when I open a new tab it announces itself to be New Tab by Yahoo. I had learned how to banish Yahoo on Firefox, I have not yet figured out how to do it on Chrome. I generally distrust any application, or whatever it is called, that does things that I had never, to my knowledge, asked it to do. Ok, probably I clicked something, but I did not intend to.  Yahoo is at the top of my list of programs that seem to make choices for me, I don't like that, so I banish it whenever I can.

Anyway, back to bridge. Precision and I are probably incompatible, some marriages just don't work, but I would very much enjoy the opportunity to play against it more often than I do. This club seems like a good place for it to happen. And for chat.

I know you advocated keeping 1D-(2D) as Michaels but do any play it  like a weak jump overcall? There is no jump of course, but something like KQTxxx with a bit outside. With a serious overcall, such as KQTxxx and a decent amount outside, one can afford to wait a round and come in with diamonds later if it still seems right. My thinking for an immediate 2D on the WJO sort of hand goes like this. The 1D is on a hand unsuitable for 1NT, wrong shape or wrong count. Fairly often it is wrong shape.  Often, not always but often, such a hand then would have quite long or quite short diamonds. Sometimes four diamonds and the wrong range for 1NT, but it often more shapely, either long or short.  When opener is long, second hand will seldom have the KQTxxx so this will not arise. When opener  is short, then such a six card holding in second hand  is a good deal more likely. And, at non-Precision tables, the auction might well begin with 1C, over which the call will be 2D. If it is one of those hands where opener has four diamonds but the wrong count for 1NT, we may still survive if we have a decent six card suit and the four diamonds are on our right.
No doubt this has been thought of by others,  and maybe the cost in giving up Michaels is just seen as too high, but it seemed like a sensible idea.


Added: Maybe this depends on how often a hand is opened 1D with short diamonds. Suppose opener has one diamond. If he had five in a major he would open 1M. If he is 4/3 in the majors and has five clubs does he open 2C? If the only time the hand is opened 1D on a stiff is when he is exactly 4=4=1=4 then my thinking is not so good since the case will not arise often. [Ah, I looked it up. Could be longish but weak clubs, so thus no 2C opener.]

Hi all,

I am often cautious, and of course this has good points and bad.

Last night I joined Oliver's presentation of defense against Pecision. Sonya provided a link to an audio site. I clicked on it and I thought I had opened it but I did not get any audio. Anyway, I was looking at it today and thinking of installing whatever it is that has to be installed. This is where the caution comes on.

See
https://www.enigmasoftware.com/myradioaccesstoolbar-removal/
and
https://www.pcrisk.com/removal-guides/9248-myradioaccess-toolbar


Since I never got the audio going I am not sure if there was an audio part to the presentation or not. I am uncertain just what to do, I generally go with caution on web things. I know I miss out sometimes, but otoh I have never been hacked. On occasion I have had some slightly weird things go on, but not so severe that I couldn't cope.

Anyway, I am asking what the experience of others has been with this site.

Or maybe I somehow I ended up at some weird site all on my own? This can happen.