jack

Online bridge

Sat, 18 Apr 2020 20:16:21 GMT

We've been intermittently playing some casual bridge with Liv's sibs or ghoti and cjwatson, usually on an online bridge site with videoconferencing open in the background.

Would anyone else be interested in joining in if we arrange it again and it would make numbers work well?

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Bridge: Response showing strong support for an opening bid

Mon, 02 Jun 2014 13:03:20 GMT

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How to make an opening bid

Tue, 06 Aug 2013 10:42:31 GMT

On the train home from London, we joked that there should be a flow chart telling you what to bid in a given situation. (Obviously bridge-playing computer programs already do this.) As an experiment, I started writing one up, and even for the most systematic bids, the opening bids, it was surprisingly complicated. I don't think the result was actually very useful, but I thought the process was very instructive for what it told me about how I actually make the decision.

One thing is, most of the casual players I know pretty much have internalised everything below, even though there seems like an awful lot of it. There are occasional edge cases where it's easy to forget to do something which will make a difference three bids from now, but mostly, for anyone I play with/against regularly, I'd normally trust their opening bid to be accurate.

One of the things I find hard to convey is the different sorts of bids. Not just the next bid, but that you're choosing a strategy for the rest of the bidding sequence. If you have 2 points, you will almost always make the weakest bid available at every round (which is almost always pass, but not always). If you have 12 points, you will open the bidding but thereafter make the weakest bid available, because you've already told partner all the strength you have, and anything more you say would tell partner you have more strength. If you have 19 points (or 4-5 losers), you will open at the one level, not 2C, but if partner responds at all you know you almost certainly have the combined strength for game, so priority #1 is to make sure you bid game, and bids before that are only useful if they help you choose _which_ game, or help you choose whether to try to bid slam.

I include the list below, although:

I've deliberately simplified some things I didn't think I had room to explain, so do point out corrections and omissions if you think they'd be helpful, but don't assume I don't know them
I wrote the system I use most often, but didn't put it the differences if I play strong NT or strong 2s, etc
Given occasional omissions I don't know if it would be more helpful or more misleading for anyone actually trying to learn more

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Responses to an opening bid: 1NT and 2-of-a-suit

Wed, 03 Jul 2013 13:12:14 GMT

I was always taught the normal responses to a 1-level opening were:

- if you have a fit for partner's suit, raise it to the level you want to play at. [Good partnerships can bid a major first if the bid suit was a minor, and use a conventional bid such as 2NT to show a good fit rather than jumping straight to game.]
- if you have 6+ points, bid your longest suit at the 1 level (if you can)
- if you have 10+ points, bid your longest suit (at the 1 or 2 level)
- if you have 6-9 points and no suit you can bid at the 1 level, bid 1NT (it doesn't matter if your hand isn't balanced)

And I think most people I know play something similar (unless they're playing a completely different system).

The point I'm not sure of is the requirement to have 10 pts to bid at the two level. In other words, the idea that if you don't have 10 pts or a suit biddable at the one level you have to bid 1NT. I've found this very fiddly to explain to beginners, so have mostly dropped it from the early part of my unofficial curriculum.

But I know several reasonably good players who don't think that's a rule, and I'm not sure what the best convention is.

I assumed the logic of "need 10 pts to bid at the 2 level" is that if responder has good shape (better than 9 losers) but <10 pts, the partnership can have <20pts between them and may well have no fit, so if opener has a minimum, he/she can pass to play in 1NT, rather than bidding inexorably to 2-of-a-suit or 2NT. And also that if responder has shown >10 pts, opener can bid more confidently in competition. In other words, 10pts means 10 high card points that are useful in NT and in defence, not just the equivalent in loser count.

But maybe that's not necessary, as long as opener knows that responder may bid at the 2 level with 6 points.

Which is better?

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Bridge 4.30pm Sunday

Thu, 23 May 2013 09:08:49 GMT

For anyone not on the email list, come and play casual bridge with me and Liv at Cair Peverel. From 4.30pm this Sunday (bank hol Sunday) until early evening, probably with take-away food.

PS. I will also aim to be at the beer festival tomorrow night (Fri) and Sat afternoon.

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Worst trump break I've ever seen

Fri, 17 May 2013 15:11:59 GMT

Last night at the university bridge club.

I was defending when I saw the worst trump break I've ever seen: 8-0 spades. I had eight spades, and when RHO bid one spade, everyone passed. I couldn't double because it would have been takeout and I thought it might go down, but not at all certain, since I didn't have many high cards. In fact, opener had 19 points, and made exactly or one down.

The play was very hard work, with me and declarer volleying trumps back and forth to each other. I don't think I played it the best I could have done, but I think we got the best result likely, against fairly good opponents.

The next hand -- I could barely believe it -- was the second worst trump fit I've ever seen: 7-0 spades. This time they got to 3S, and I was praying for them to bid to 4S and get to a contract I felt safe doubling, but they stopped in 3S (which was already ambitious). Again, they just made after a lot of work from both sides :)

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Stayman, Transfers, and replying to 1NT

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 11:14:00 GMT

When partner opens 1NT, you know quite a lot about their hand. You know it's balanced, and you know how many high card points it has within quite a narrow range.

Thus, you should already know about what contract you want to play. The most common options are:

* We have 25+ points between us, we want to play in 3NT.
* I have a four or five card major suit and want to find out if partner has a fit for it
* We don't have enough for game but I'm happy to play in 1NT
* Agh! I don't have any points, but I have a 5+ card suit, playing in two of that will be

What you almost never need to do is convey any information to your partner. Since you know everything about her hand, and she knows comparatively little about your hand, most of the potential bids are directed to finding out something quite specific about the 1NT hand (eg. "does it have four spades" or "do you have 14 pts or only 12") or just to bid the final contract.

Stayman 2C response to 1NT

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Bridge: opening hands

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 22:31:17 GMT

I did this a little before, but I thought I'd try to set down a little of the system I usually end up playing, which is a strange hybrid of what-CU-bridge-club-plays and what-ex-ncipher-people-play, leaning one way or the other depending on who I'm playing with.

Not as a definitive guide, but at least, as an attempt at introspection at what I do do.

Targets

Evaluate your hand with high card points and loser count. For a 3NT game, you need approx. 25 high card points between you and your partner. For a 4H/4S game, you need to have a trump fit, and then 14 losers max between the two hands.

For a 5C/5D game, you need 13 losers max, which is quite hard to find -- in practice you often need to be even stronger than that to avoid losing three tricks. Because I play a lot of duplicate bridge, I almost never actually try to bid a minor suit game unless (a) 3NT is definitely a bad idea and (b) we clearly only have 13 or 12 losers. However, it's a bad habit to never look for minor suit games, if it's the right contract, ignore me and bid it.

When to open

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Teaching bridge

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 14:47:15 GMT

When I was talking with Liv, one thing I found surprisingly helpful was to deal a few sample hands, practice bidding them without any interfering bids from opponents, and talk through what we'd expected. That seemed useful for rapidly coming to a consensus about the most common things, without requiring either of us to guess what the other person might do differently and ask about it.

Conversely, there's the question of, if you're playing casually, but actually keeping score, how long should you go on feeling able to pause and say "ok, what's the convention for this situation"? I think it's similar to letting someone take a move back in chess, or playing with a chess clock, or accepting mild kibitzing from spectators, except that in Chess, those are practically the ONLY possible sources of interference, whereas in a partnership game with hidden information, there are millions of possible infractions. Some people say it doesn't matter if you ever progress to the point where you're playing "properly", but most people I know deliberately want to improve. Others are scared of never improving and think everyone ought to be held to club standard from the beginning.

I'm normally happy to let people go on being casual as long as they need (as long as they're not blatantly taking advantage). The rules for "what you should do when partner forgets a convention or lets something slip in their expression to avoid taking advantage" have accrued for good reason, but I think people who think they're comprehensible to complete beginners are deluding themselves. Yes, you shouldn't go to a club until you're able to cope with that, and you should recognise the sorts of things you should avoid, but the actual competition rules are as complicated as the bidding rules themselves (or more so, and more subjective), so recognise that beginners have to be taught, and aren't born knowing what it means if you say "oh, you did [bad thing X you don't understand] so the score will be [X for no reason you understand" :)

It's good to progress to the point where you DO understand what partner's bids mean, but you if you don't yet know some basic things, it's plausible to not play at all (though I think it's less fun) and it's plausible to just let people say "hang on, is that weak or strong", but I don't think getting tragic miscommunications on 80% of hands actually teaches people anything. (I think this happens when you have a beginner pair and a somewhat-better pair, and they both HOPE they can play together without a big culture clash, and don't realise that what's most helpful to one may not be as helpful to the other.)

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Beginners' bridge convention

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 12:48:23 GMT

I've played bridge sporadically for the last few years. A few times I've had a spate of going along to the university bridge club, but often I've been playing casually with friends. In fact, most people I know fall into the "learned a fair amount of it at some point, but are really rusty" category.

I learned a little bit at school and went to some lessons with the university bridge club when I was at university, but never took it up regularly at the time. The first time I played with friends it had been years since I played, and I was really nervous -- nearly shaking -- because playing badly doesn't just mean you lose, it's generally really tedious for partner and everyone else too.

Since, I've got a fair amount of practice, probably less rusty than many of my friends who play sometimes, even if they may have had more experience long-term, and just about good enough to play with a pick-up partner at the university club without horrible miscommunication. Although I'm still very diffident at suggesting how things should be done.

And I've intermittently thought about the best ways of playing with not-complete-novice-but-not-played-for-years people. There seems (to me) to be an unfortunate tendency for everyone with some amount of experience to spontaneously offer helpful advice to anyone who seems to need it, which unfortunately, for the recipient, often feels like "everyone yelling at me". It's hard to avoid, because every piece of advice is helpful, so it's hard to not say it, even if there's little point giving more information than someone can absorb at once.

The previous weekend with Liv's family, and this Sunday at Naath's, things were surprisingly productive: I think people played fairly well, and more to the point, people seemed to improve by talking to each other with a minimum of feeling awful for not being perfect...

I think one problem is that people often get presented with heuristics without actually understanding the reasoning behind them, which is understandable when you're trying to teach someone quickly, but if you get things like "bidding stayman over an opponent's 1NT instead of partner's" it's a clear sign that you've not really explained to someone what they're doing.

( Conventions )

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Bridge

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 11:24:29 GMT

Last night I went to meet non-blond non-Irish non-Chinese Dave at the university bridge club, which I used to go to on and off, but haven't been to for ages. It went fairly well. I don't think we did especially well[1], but we didn't have any really major miscommunication, and I felt I was familiar enough with the conventions to mostly understand what the default was, and feel more confident with playing with someone else from that group without going over the conventions with a fine-tooth comb first to make sure there was nothing gigantic I was missing.

I doubled someone playing 3NT. I'm still very nervous of doing that -- it's not usually a good idea because people usually only ever bid 3NT with the recommend amount of high-card strength so even if they go down, they're normally only one or two tricks short, and even if one defenders hand looks bad for declarer, all that often means is that he/she has all the cards and his/her partner doesn't have any.

But I had AJxx, AKx, JT98xx, -, so I wasn't certain I'd be able to make tricks with the long spades without any high cards, but it seemed a good gamble, and they went 5 off (1100pts). Dave worked out which suit to lead, and a queen to go with my spades, so we had two rounds of spades[2] which declarer had to win with the AK, and then declarer made a small mistake trying to get tricks in diamonds and let me make my outside J before taking his tricks in clubs where I was void, and I was able to win the rest of my spades and my AK of hearts.

In fact, I felt a little guilty for doubling, because implicitly doubling seemed to suggest that opponents should have been in 4S or 4H instead of 3N, and that if they knew what they were doing, after doubling, they might still bid that, but I didn't expect them to try to change the contract. But if 3NT was wrong, and it was probably either making or going off 5, then doubling isn't likely to make a difference, but might just be rubbing salt in the wound of a bad bid. But I was by no means that certain: it's still likely that another pair plays in 3N, or even that another pair sitting in the same position as Dave and I make 4S, in which case double is the only chance of getting more points than them.

[1] The variance is really high at the university club because there's a mix including of people including people who are still not very experienced, and including people who are quite good but not as consistent as people with 30 years of experience trying out really crazy systems, and because there's often a complicated movement for a weird number of people, so lots of boards have only two or three people playing them. So making just one overtrick compared to everyone else who bid the same contract is less common, but losing out to someone who gambled a crazy slam their system helped them find, or getting a gratuitous high score because your opponents didn't know what they were doing and stopped in 1S when they could have bid 4S, or apparently randomly gambled on making 6S when they didn't have a chance, is more common.

[2] In fact, I think he held off playing his K for another round, letting me make my J first, in case Dave didn't have any more spaded, but did have some of the other high cards (so my spades would be high, but Dave would win the trick instead of me and not be able to play any spades). Which is probably correct, but didn't make any difference, because I had all the high cards, which was why I doubled, and Dave did have another spade anyway.

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Bridge 3pm tomorrow (Sunday) at Cartesian Heights

Sat, 13 Aug 2011 12:14:38 GMT

Colin, Kirsten, Naath and I will be playing bridge tomorrow afternoon from 3pm at mine, anyone else is welcome if they'd like to join us (though let me know first if you can).

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