[fred]

AKxxx
AKx
xx
xxx

Qxx
xxxxxx
x
Axx

You arrive in 4H (well bid!).

The defense leads 2 rounds of diamonds (oops!).

Dummy's x of hearts is bigger than at least one of declarer's.

How do you play?

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[fred]

Jlall, on Dec 18 2006, 06:46 PM, said:

cash 1 heart, queen of spades, spade to king. If they break you can play king and a heart and claim. If someone ruffs you can also claim by winning the return, cashing a heart, and ruffing out the spade. If they refuse to ruff just keep playing spades. remember to keep your small heart.

Justin - you are a never ending source of problems for me.

First, you keep murdering me at the bridge table.

Second, you get the right answers to all of my bridge problems quickly (though I disagree with your characterization the weird squeeze on the other problem as "simple" - it may be "simple" in the sense of being "not complicated", but to me "simple" means "a 2-suit 1-loser squeeze").

Third, you keep editing your profile on BBO and people keep complaining about it to me "stars must include their full real names and proper countries blah blah blah". I have to answer their e-mails and this is not exactly my idea of fun.

I have no doubt that you will only get better at bridge (scary thought) so I expect continuing problems from you in that regard, but can you please put your real name and country back in your profile?

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[Mr. Dodgy]

Is there anyone who DOESN'T know and DOES care what 'jlall*''s real name is? sheesh.

[inquiry]

Mr. Dodgy, on Dec 18 2006, 05:57 PM, said:

Is there anyone who DOESN'T know and DOES care what 'jlall*''s real name is? sheesh.

Most bbo gold stars have agreed to use their real names, because they represent their countries in international play. The first huge group of them, however do not have to use their real name as the agreement was not there initially. I think Justin might fall into that group. However, since you get your gold star for representing your country, probably justin flying a flag other than the US is a double problem. He might be taken as a gold star from china, or peru, or whereever, when he is not. So I would think all gold stars should at the very least fly the proper flag.

[EricK]

Jlall, on Dec 18 2006, 11:32 PM, said:

inquiry, on Dec 18 2006, 06:25 PM, said:

The first huge group of them, however do not have to use their real name as the agreement was not there initially. I  think Justin might fall into that group.

Correct. Anyways...

This hand has a good theme. When trumps are your only entries to a long suit in dummy that may need to be set up, you should keep a high one in dummy and test the long suit. On the flip side the defense's goal should be to tap the dummy in order to kill the dummy (not possible on this hand).

Which brings me to a question I have been meaning to ask here for a while:

How does an expert decide how to play a bridge hand?

eg. How much of it is pattern recognition? Do you think of lines of play and then see how many distributions they cover OR do you think of likely distributions for the enemy hands and then use that to deduce a line of play to deal with them OR do you go back and forward between these methods? How often to you reassess your initial thinking based on information received in the play? etc etc

[fred]

EricK, on Dec 19 2006, 08:00 AM, said:

Jlall, on Dec 18 2006, 11:32 PM, said:

inquiry, on Dec 18 2006, 06:25 PM, said:

The first huge group of them, however do not have to use their real name as the agreement was not there initially. I  think Justin might fall into that group.

Correct. Anyways...

This hand has a good theme. When trumps are your only entries to a long suit in dummy that may need to be set up, you should keep a high one in dummy and test the long suit. On the flip side the defense's goal should be to tap the dummy in order to kill the dummy (not possible on this hand).

Which brings me to a question I have been meaning to ask here for a while:

How does an expert decide how to play a bridge hand?

eg. How much of it is pattern recognition? Do you think of lines of play and then see how many distributions they cover OR do you think of likely distributions for the enemy hands and then use that to deduce a line of play to deal with them OR do you go back and forward between these methods? How often to you reassess your initial thinking based on information received in the play? etc etc

This is a complex subject, but the "expert thinking process" for the hand in question is fairly simple.

It is obvious that cashing 2 rounds of trump and then playing on spades will result in an easy make if either hearts are 2-2 or spades are 3-2. It is equally obvious that this line will fail if neither major suit breaks.

So you should ask yourself "is there a line that guards against 3-1 hearts and 4-1 spades?".

Pattern recognition makes it easier to come up with the answer - if you have played or studied the game long enough you have seen hands like this before. If not, then you still have a chance, but it will take some more work to see the winning line.

This is a relatively simple hand with only a few reasonable play sequences. On hard hands experts would typically spend more time going through the sort of mental gymnastics that you suggest.

In general I find that pattern recognition is very important mostly because this helps an expert to streamline his thinking process. Furthermore, as Inquiry suggests, learning names for specific positions and techniques is a good idea - it is easier to recognize a pattern if you have a name for it.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com