Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Can you trust partner's signal?

First of all, a lead problem.  The bidding has gone:
W
West
N
Partner
E
East
S
Me
1
21
3
3
5
All Pass
(1) weak
You hold:
S
South
Axx
A10x
xxx
xxxx

What do you lead?

I reasoned that a passive lead was probably unwise, since West's clubs rated to be very good.  Partner having shown 6  hearts, it appears to be reasonably safe to lead the ace of hearts.  Dummy comes down:
S
Me
Axx
A10x
xxx
xxxx
.
Lead: A
W
Dummy
Qxx
x
KJxx
AKQJx
Under the ace, partner plays the 8 of hearts. Your agreements are quite simple: upside down count and attitude.   What is partner trying to say?


In this case, partner's count and attitude are both already known. He has 6 hearts and any heart continuation is going to be ruffed in  dummy.  So, it must be suit preference.  I am a little doubtful though, because we have not quite agreed on suit preference situations.

I decide to trust partner to be signaling suit preference and I plop down my second unsupported ace. The ace of spades.

Under the ace of spades, partner plays the 8 of spades. What is partner trying to say?  What do you do next?

At the table, I decided that partner had probably forgotten about suit preference and was emphatically discouraging both hearts and spades. Ergo, he must be void in clubs. I led a club, hoping for a ruff.

That was not the right move, because declarer now proceeded to make his contract:
.
Vul: E-W
Dlr: West
N
North
KJ108
KQ8xxx
x
xx
.
W
West
Qxx
x
KJxx
AKQJx

E
East
xxx
J9x
AQxxx
xx
.
S
South
Axx
A10x
xxx
xxxx
.
Partner had not forgotten.  The 8 of spades was his lowest spade and he was encouraging as best  he could.

The thing is, once he'd given suit preference for spades, his job was done. I need not have looked at what he played under my Ace of spades. Put another way, with a club void, he'd have played low under the Ace of hearts.  That is, if he and I are agreed to play suit preference when dummy has a singleton in our bid and raised suit.

What are your agreements regarding suit preference? Are they complete enough to avoid a mishap like ours?

3 comments:

  1. When a player has pre-empted and shown a 6+ suit, then it really makes sense to change your signalling methods independent of whether there is a singleton in dummy or not.

    A MIDDLE card should be encouraging in the suit. A HIGH card should be suit preference for the highest suit and a LOW card suit preference for the lower suit. This is 'expert standard'.

    In this case, partner can play the queen of hearts to demand a spade switch. Then you should not go wrong.

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  2. Although I agree with what Paul says, I prefer a different set of agreements. Why? Because it is often confusing for partner to remember when the exceptions to our normal methods apply; even in this situation, is it clear that partner might not have made a NV WJO on a five card suit?

    I prefer agreements that eliminate any suit preference signals in other than the standard situations of showing entries for ruffs against suit contracts or for running an established suit against notrump contracts. Instead, I prefer for partner's third hand Trick 1 signal to be attitude toward the "obvious shift" suit. Even if you and partner have not detailed the definition of that suit, in many cases, as in this case, the identity of the obvious shift suit (here, spades) is clear. Accordingly, my preference would be to play my most discouraging heart in order to welcome a spade shift.

    I have to admit, though, not many of my partners agree with my preferences for the signal to be obvious shift and not suit preference here.

    An aside here: I find reading the chosen script for proving that I am not a robot very tough. Is there a different option available to you, Lak, that makes the interpretation of the script a little easier?

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  3. Jeff, the script to prove you are not a robot is something that Blogger added; I wasn't aware that it was enabled for my blog. I have now disabled it. Let's see if there's a ton of spam now that word verification is disabled.

    ReplyDelete