[Phil]

Scoring: MP

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MPs from the club today.

1♥ - 2♣ - 2♦ - 3♣ - 3N.

Pard leads the ♠Q (standard) and you overtake with the Ace.

If you cash one high diamond you'll get the 2 from pard.

Any ideas here?

[JLOL]

If declarer has a club then he has 8 club tricks and 1 spade. It is almost impossible for him to not have the HA, his max would be something like the SK, the DQJ, the HQJ, and the CQ and thats still not an opener. So he definitely has a heart and we should cash out (at best we can break even by not doing so, and we lose immediately when he has AQ of hearts or Qx of clubs by not doing so).

If declarer does not have a club his 3N bid is very weird, with 55 he would bid 3D and with 6 hearts he would bid 3H, so the only possible shape would be 4540 in which case we can still wreck his communications by cashing our DK and playing a spade so we will beat him anyways, probably several, even though we might have beat him 1 more if we didn't cash out.

So it seems pretty trivial to cash our DK since it caters to very likely layouts.

[Phil]

Yeah that's what I did. I stopped the 12 tricks all right.

Declarer had Kxx AQJxx QJ9xx void. Poor pard had to make some agonizing discards on the run on the diamonds and pitched a heart. Good thing I controlled the spades, otherwise we would have let in 10 tricks instead of just 9.

I think this is a much easier hand at IMPs.

I don't agree with declarer's bidding but you can't argue with success.

[JLOL]

Ouch 553, they got you what can you do...

Even if you knew they might bid 3N with Kxx of spades and a club void and 55 (lol) it would still be clearly percentage to cash out.

[Trinidad]

Phil, on Jan 22 2009, 12:33 AM, said:

Yeah that's what I did. I stopped the 12 tricks all right.

Declarer had Kxx AQJxx QJ9xx void. Poor pard had to make some agonizing discards on the run on the diamonds and pitched a heart. Good thing I controlled the spades, otherwise we would have let in 10 tricks instead of just 9.

I think this is a much easier hand at IMPs.

I don't agree with declarer's bidding but you can't argue with success.

Even at IMPs you should cash out. After all, most of the time that you won't cash, you will give up an IMP. And only one time in thousand, you will beat 3NT by not cashing.

Say you have this hand 1000 times where you decide to cash out and your counterpart at the other table tries to beat the contract. You will loose 10 IMPs for not beating their game, but win between 500 and 999 IMPs for stopping the overtrick. Net win: between 0.49 and 0.99 IMPs per board.

It is a gros oversimplification that at IMPs your goal is to defeat the contract at any cost. If the cost is expected to be higher than the expected gain, don't make the investment.

In your case, playing to beat the contract would cater to a lay-out that is highly unlikely. You expect it to cost an IMP where the expected gain is 10 IMPs divided by a thousand.

Rik

[Phil]

Trinidad, on Jan 22 2009, 07:31 AM, said:

Even at IMPs you should cash out. After all, most of the time that you won't cash, you will give up an IMP. And only one time in thousand, you will beat 3NT by not cashing.

Say you have this hand 1000 times where you decide to cash out and your counterpart at the other table tries to beat the contract. You will loose 10 IMPs for not beating their game, but win between 500 and 999 IMPs for stopping the overtrick. Net win: between 0.49 and 0.99 IMPs per board.

It is a gros oversimplification that at IMPs your goal is to defeat the contract at any cost. If the cost is expected to be higher than the expected gain, don't make the investment.

In your case, playing to beat the contract would cater to a lay-out that is highly unlikely. You expect it to cost an IMP where the expected gain is 10 IMPs divided by a thousand.

Rik

Sorry I really disagree with this. At IMPs, a spade back is totally routine because if the clubs are running, we are hosed anyway.

[JLOL]

Rik your point is valid and good and I have a partner who calls me "Mr. Overtrick" because I go for it in imps a lot more than most people, but I think in this case the 1000:1 estimate is off. I agree if you're playing against good opps who will not bid 3N with 553 ever but as we see here we can't always rely on random opps so much...

[jtfanclub]

I apologize if this is a silly question, however...

What is the advantage to taking the first spade? Seems to me if you duck the first spade and duck the second one if declarer ducks, then life becomes very easy for partner.

[MFA]

jtfanclub, on Jan 23 2009, 01:57 PM, said:

I apologize if this is a silly question, however...

What is the advantage to taking the first spade?  Seems to me if you duck the first spade and duck the second one if declarer ducks, then life becomes very easy for partner.

Odds clearly favour cashing out here. Not cashing out is gambling on declarer being void in clubs. Not impossible but not very likely either.

Ducking the spade tends just to make the disaster of not cashing out even greater. Perhaps the hearts are running also along with the clubs.
And declarer might have a stiff ♠K .

[awm]

Agree with cashing out.

At IMPs there are two interesting questions:

(1) Is it realistic to beat this contract? If it's pretty implausible then cashing out is still right, because giving up one-two IMPs all the time will come back to bite you.

(2) If we can beat this contract, how? If declarer has a club, then if I return spade the contract must be cold. However, we might be able to set by running four diamond tricks (say partner has ♦Q9xx). It depends on exactly what you think about their bidding, but I'd suspect that declarer having weak diamonds is actually more likely than declarer having club void...

Combining these, I think cashing is right at IMPs too.

[JLOL]

Adam, obviously the DK is correct at trick 2 but when partner plays the 2 running 4 diamonds is not an option anymore. I think at that point (at imps) vs a bad/random opp whose bidding we cannot trust leading a spade back is probably better. Against anyone reasonable though I would def cash out.