[lamford]

 Bbradley62, on 2015-January-29, 11:38, said:

<snip> Director spastically thought <snip>

As Tiger Woods found to his cost, the adverb therein is not regarded as any more appropriate in today's world than Benedict Cumberbatch's recent use of "coloured".

[lamford]

 dickiegera, on 2015-January-28, 17:26, said:

Clubs had never been played up to this point.
East was dealt a stiff J of clubs.
North and South never discarded any clubs.
Don't know if west had discarded any clubs.

One of those statements has to be untrue, and I suspect it is the last. If the first three are true, you know that West began with five small clubs and must have discarded at least one. If you had written, "Don't know if West had discarded more than one club", then that could be true.

[TylerE]

 barmar, on 2015-January-29, 09:30, said:

I suspect the idea is that the only "normal" play starts with cashing a high club in the North hand, at which time the stiff J will appear. So even though declarer couldn't actually know that the clubs would run at the time he made the claim, the distribution is such that it doesn't matter.

But the claim statement suggests that declarer also thought the spade was good.

I more or less agree with that and I still think 4 tricks for declarer is probably right, I'm just a bit less happy about it. My general view on claims is that the purpose is to speed the game up in uninteresting positions and I generally support the idea that that means play high cards first and anything that turns up turns up, not that a claim is an excuse for the local SB to go nuts.

[blackshoe]

 lamford, on 2015-January-29, 12:11, said:

One of those statements has to be untrue, and I suspect it is the last. If the first three are true, you know that West began with five small clubs and must have discarded at least one. If you had written, "Don't know if West had discarded more than one club", then that could be true.

"Don't know if west discarded any clubs" has, I suspect, more to do with memory than with whether West must have discarded at least one.