jack

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?

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

( Read more... )

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.

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

( Read more... )

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.)

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.

Went along to the university bridge club for the first time in ages. It was quite good. I played with Ben, who's very confident, but was very sleepy this week; but that probably worked out well as I hadn't played in a club for ages, and so without a lot of fussing about details we generally seemed to know what the other was doing as well, and to guess if not the right contract, at least a good guess at it, most of the time.

* Early hand. 2H. 4D. p. 6D. p. p. p. Ben bids 4D, forgetting 2H is weak. I know not, tonight, to expect him to have picture card points tightly restrained to the range I expect, but correctly interpret his hand as weak, with many diamonds, and don't really care how weak. I have five diamonds and five clubs, and four aces and a couple of kings, and the bidding is already in quite a weird situation. My responses are expected to be "it's all doomed" or "can we make game?" but in fact, with this hand, the question is, "can I make slam?". However, we plainly can, and I bid 6D. Which is a really fast auction.

Of course, Ben lays down the hand on the first trick, claiming every trick. (So we could have chanced bidding all seven, although in fact, unsurprisingly, opponent not-on-lead has a void, so could trump clubs if they were led. There were a lot of fun 7 and 8 card suits tonight.) And everyone's bidding ended up in the same place in the end, I was just pleased that we were able to get there with a good guess in a weird situation, which is always very valuable.

* Late hand. Ben opens 3NT, a conventional "gambling 3NT". (If you don't know, the convention is that one doesn't need to open 3NT to show a hand with balanced suit lengths and 25+ high card points, since most people can do so by making an artificial strong bid of 2C, and rebidding 2NT. So 3NT is assigned to mean hands with AKQJxxxx (approx) in one suit, and nothing else. Then partner should know which suit is meant, because it's the one she doesn't have any picture cards in. And (a) if she has enough high cards in the other suits to stop opponents taking the first five tricks in that suit, pass, and play in 3NT, winning whatever suit the opponents play, and then scoring ~eight tricks in the big long suit or (b) if not, bid something else.) In this case, I have Qx in spades, not enough if opponents play A and K and then three more. So I bid 5 diamonds, which is a good place to be. But 3NT happens to be better because partner actually does have Kxx in spades anyway. But I'm mainly excited that I'd never actually seen a gambling 3NT before, and it works as it was supposed to.

I'm disappointed, the grand slam was a nice result, and I was the only person in either B team to bid it, although all the A team did. But our overall result as compared to other pairs was not very good: ok, but a lot worse than last time. Not just in absolute terms (since we may have been playing better people) but worse compared to people we did much better than before, which is a shame.

I think we played pretty well, but had several little mistakes that I wasn't sure if would drag down the result, but probably did. There were at least a couple of game contracts and slam contracts that we could have bid, but missed mainly because there were details in our system we hadn't discussed.

I've oft commented how every time you try to play bridge, there's some theme that permeates the evening. Of course, in any statistical process, you expect clustering, but the more specific it is, the funnier it is.

That night's theme was "Playing a 3NT with a strong hand and a void in dummy." The first time, 3NT, I had a void, I was dummy. The following hand, 3NT, I had a void, I was dummy. The hand after that we broke the pattern -- the opponents played 3NT with a void in dummy instead.

Come to think of it, is that so bad? Obviously an unbalanced hand is a lot better in a suit contract. But if declarer has shown a stop for the void suit, and there's a good chance that the partnership will have nine or ten cards in one suit, it might work. (Better if dummy has entries, of course.)

Whenever you play bridge, someone always mentions the bridge in the menagerie books. These are mostly waaaay out of print, but a few have been reprinted, and all seem to have a timeless charm.

The characters play in their gentleman's club, nicknaming each other after various animals.

The characters

The Hideous Hog is the best player, and aggressive, arrogant, and obnoxious with it, he's almost always right, and always in your face about it.

( Read more... )