Invitational or competitive?

Yet another hand that shows why you need good partnership agreements ...

You hold a poor 4-count with both majors when partner doubles for takeout:

You bid 1H, but west competes to 3D over which partner bids 3H.

Is this invitational or merely competitive?

You pass and dummy hits with 19 points. Even if you had known that partner meant it as invitational, would you have accepted?

West leads the Ace of diamonds on which his partner discourages. He nevertheless continues the King. You ruff, and lead to the King of clubs.

What next? Can you make 4H if you had bid it? Try to plan out the play without getting all tangled up!

I think that if any two of the three suits break favorably (3-2 in spades, 3-2 in hearts, 3-3 in clubs), you can make the contract.  So, 4H is odds-on. My line is to take the heart finesse now (with the jack) and discard the third diamond on the queen of clubs. If the jack falls, I have a spade discard as well, so only one spade loser. If the jack doesn't fall, I play on spades and hope they split 3-2. The full hand:

Would your line have worked?

Know the scoring table

Another wild hand at the same club game (we are vulnerable against not):

West opens a weak 2H.  Partner doubles and I get ready to bid 3S when East bids 2S!  Discomfited, I double. That's the wrong call, of course. I should bid 3C now, getting my other suit in.  Anyway, partner now bids 5D.

East doubles.  Your call.  What do you do?

At the table, I passed.  Partner should be able to make 5D and I do have a good card for him. Partner did make his contract ... with two overtricks!  But 5DX with 2 overtricks is still less points than the minor suit slam.  So, it was only an average-plus board.

Partner doubled because he has at least two places to play (with a strong single-suiter, he would have just bid 4D or 5D).  As long as East was not psyching, his two places to play are the minors. 4NT might have been more descriptive than the initial double, but partner was probably concerned about losing all that bidding space. I should bid 6C now. A doubled game with overtricks is still not worth as much as a slam.  Just because they double you in a game contract doesn't mean you stop trying for slam.

The full hand (no I don't know what east was thinking with his bids either), but he did keep us out of slam:

Never put down a 7 card suit ...

... in dummy unless it's trump. On this deal, sitting South, I managed to pass three times with 7510 shape, with the predictable bad consequences. The first pass seems alright, with 5 spades: if partner bids spades at any point, I'm going to raise him to 4 in an instant. Also, RHO has already passed, so a 3 club preempt may just hit partner. The second pass is already very questionable (I was enjoying watching the opponents bidding out their misfit, but that shouldn't prevent me from making the obvious looking 2 club call). The final pass is the real culprit. It's clear partner is not going to enjoy this dummy, so time to correct to 3 clubs, the only reasonable contract. I had foggy thoughts about "not getting higher if the hand is a misfit", but here I have the club fit in my own hand already. Plus, passing violates the rule quoted above.

Anything is better than conceding

You are in 3NT. Scoring is matchpoints.  East leads the King of diamonds and when you duck that, he continues with the queen of diamonds, west discarding a heart.

How do you continue?

I didn't see any squeeze, since East can save his diamond winner and West his heart winner. So, I claimed 11 tricks.  Next hand!

Not so fast. It turned out to be quite a bad board because declarers who played it out often got West to misdefend. East tried to keep his heart honor guarded and let go his diamond winner, setting up declarer's diamond 8.  Playing against a disparate field, anything is better than conceding.  Play it out.

You need agreements on how to evaluate hands

Playing online with a trustworthy partner, but one with whom I have few agreements other than that we are playing 2/1 udca, I pick up:

What do you open?

I opened 1NT and heard back 2NT.  In the absence of any agreements, this should be invitational (9-10 high-card points).  Would you accept?

On the plus side, I have four prime cards and a 5-card suit.  The five card suit has no texture though. But since partner likely doesn't have the missing ace, he's bidding on quacks and that might be the reason for his reluctance. I'd love quacks! He may even have a bad 11 points.  I think I have talked myself into raising.

I raise to 3NT.  Lefty leads the 6 of hearts (presumably 4th highest) and I see:

Looks like partner has stretched his holdings as well. He doesn't have quacks. Only jacks. What are my chances? I decide to duck a spade into west's hand and hope for a defensive error.  It doesn't work.  East gets in, leads a heart through my king and we are down 1.

Where was the problem? Firstly, opening 1S would have worked out better. Partner would have bid 2S and you need to now pass. However, 3NT is itself not such a bad bid. Give partner the Queen of spades or the Queen of diamonds instead of the jack of hearts and 3nt has a lot of play. The problem is in the lack of agreements and I'm not talking about bidding systems. You and partner also need to agree on how you evaluate your hands. If one side is counting length points and emphasizing Aces and Kings, the other side should discount unsupported jacks. Contrarily, if one side is counting jack-doubletons in NT games, the other side should also stick to Milton Work's high-card points.

The Too Late Now moment occurred even before we sat down to play.

Don't signal with the setting trick

Partner and I are playing upside-down count, attitude and discards (low=like).

Click on the south hand (this covers up the other hands) and play along with me by clicking "Next".  Can you spot the card I should not have played at the time that I play it?

It was the discard of the 3 diamond -- I wanted to tell partner that it was safe to lead a diamond, but that discard gave declarer his second diamond trick. I need to throw away a club. Declarer can still make if he finesses the spade 10 and carries out a second spade finesse. But as he played it, 3H should go one down.

My discard of the 3 diamond cost 5 imps. I had enough information to have gotten a count of the hand at that point. partner must have 6 clubs and 3 hearts. If he has three diamonds, it doesn't matter what I do, but if he has only two diamonds, then declarer has four and I should keep my 4-card suit intact.

Not only was my signaling card ill-advised, the signal information was also wrong.  Partner should not lead diamonds. If we fail to capture an honor with our two diamond honors, declarer gets two diamond tricks.

Don't signal with the setting trick especially if your signal is also wrong advice!

Getting a child started with bridge

This may be a mishap, but I have started to teach my 9-year old bidding (we play a variation of whist at home already, so he's familiar with card-play) and this is a simplified bridge bidding system for beginners that I came up with.  It is based on 5-card majors and weak 2s (unlike classic Goren)  but has no artificial bids other than 2C.  The idea is to get to a decent contract in a total of 3 bids.

Comments on the bidding system are welcome.

p.s. In case you are curious, the variation of whist that we play with 3 players is as follows:

1. Deal out the cards in 4 stacks.
2. Everyone calls out their point count.
3. Whoever has the highest point count is declarer.
4. The 4th stack (remember that we play with 3 players) is dummy.
5. Declarer chooses a trump or no-trump.
6. I specify the level of the contract.  If they have 20 points, they have to make 8 tricks in a trump contract or 7 tricks in a no-trump contract. And one more trick for every 3 points above it (so 26 points would be 10 tricks if there is a trump or 9 tricks if there is no trump).
7. We lead and we play out the hand.  Declarer wins the hand if they make the level they "ought" to make. Defenders win if declarer doesn't.