cartesiandaemon
cartesiandaemon |
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Plus the SA will win a trick
At that point, even with your helpful italic explanations, I lost the thread. How do you know the ace of spades will win a trick, if clubs are trumps? Is it not possible that one of the defenders will be void in spades and discard a club triumphantly on your SA? Or is the point that this is a sufficiently small risk that analysis at this stage of the game can get away in the long run without taking it into account?
On the first round of spades, you play the SA. It is possible that one of the opponents starts with a void, but that means the remaining 11 spades are split between two hands. A priori (and on most deals a posteriori) this is unlikely^n.
Sorry, yes, what arkannath said. This is partly why I even tried to explain things to non-bridge-players, because I thought it might be interesting.
In fact, when you're estimating what level to bid at, you generally gloss over risks larger than that (eg. that if you have eight trumps, then the trumps are 3-2 or maybe 4-1 in opponent's hands). Because (a) you are rewarded for reaching a certain level (3NT, 4S, 4H, 5C, 5D or 6 or 7 anything), so it's worth taking a small (or indeed large) gamble to reach that and (b) there are lots of other details you can't predict for sure, many of which might go in your favour. (For instance, even if left-hand opponent has six spades and right-hand opponent has none and >=1 club, left hand opponent might guess wrong and lead something else instead. And then I can win all my clubs until no-one else has any left.) Does that make more sense?
Tricky - your hand is too strong for a pre-emptive 3C open (you've got 16 high-card points, as well as the killer suit). In the absence of the mis-bid 1S from partner, I think you open strongly, but go quiet once it becomes apparant partner has f-all.
Yeah. I had a quick experiment with an online random dealer, and it looks like very few hands don't have a good chance at 5C, and very few hands make the grand slam. And partner will almost certainly respond with any hand that makes 5C.
So I can risk opening at the one level, and if partner responds at all, expect 5C and ask about aces to see if there may be a slam. (And if opponents bid, can pre-empt then in 5C to stop them finding any major suit game.) Unfortunately, we normally play roman key card blackwood, which would tell me about the king of his suit, which I don't care about now. So I'd have to try cue bidding, and then I'd never find out about the ace in the suit he bid. So maybe it doesn't work. My other concern was that if partner has a diamond stop but nothing else, we should actually play 3NT. But the random deals show that quite unlikely. So in fact, it looks like one of those awkward hands where you feel it ought to be possible to find out for certain what to do, but in the end, you have to make a best guess and move on.
This is a lovely description and really conveys the shenanigans going on in this game. 5C is going to be very dodgy; I think you're better off defending a doubled game. I think if you didn't get the psych to respond to, you could maybe go straight in with 4C, though it depends on your conventions (and whether I've remembered correctly when you're supposed to do that). It's weird to have a hand that is unbeatable if partner has anything at all, but not quite strong enough if it's genuinely unsupported!
But, um, on the gratuitous pedantry front: your hand has 14 cards!
This is a lovely description and really conveys the shenanigans going on in this game.
Oh, thank you! Normally when I try to explain things like this, I just get a big pile of words and it turns out I was explaining at the wrong level and most people don't get anything from it at all. For no particular reason, I find it very sweet that you choose to respond to this post tonight, I'm glad :) 5C is going to be very dodgy; I think you're better off defending a doubled game. I think if you didn't get the psych to respond to, you could maybe go straight in with 4C, though it depends on your conventions (and whether I've remembered correctly when you're supposed to do that). Agreed, dodgy. I was certainly happy to defend 5Dx. But I'm not sure if I want to defend 4S or 4H or not, if they're bid; if I have 16pts they may or may not make. 4C is a possibility, but I'm not quite convinced. I'm used to a system where an opening pre-empt bid has 2-3 tricks less than it contracts to make, in which case this hand is too strong. By considering natural actions rather than conventions, I thought of another possibility. Open 1C, and if partner responds, rebid 4C. (FWIW, I'm used to 1C-p-1S-p-3C showing a strong opening hand and a six card suit.) That seems to convey something like this. You're plainly ruling out the possibility of any other suit but clubs, and you wouldn't have bid so high unless you were inviting him to raise to 5C. And 5C definitely needs several aces, or you lose several tricks at once. You really should have two aces for that raise. It should be clear you have very few cards in the other suits, so only A and AK are likely to be useful to him. So he should raise to 5C with one ace and something else, and can probably raise to six with A and AK. Which is more or less what you want. Hm, I'm not sure, is that a plausible story? But, um, on the gratuitous pedantry front: your hand has 14 cards! Whoops. It's just a typo, but I really should have got that right, the length really does matter :) (Edited: unsurprisingly, I got the club 'x's wrong. I was going to write "AKQ xxx xx" but I wasn't sure if that was clearer.) |  | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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