[inquiry]

Scoring: Rubber

1♥-1♠
2NT-6♥
Pass

Typical rubber bridge bidding I guess.

Opening lead ♦5 (4th best), queen wins in dummy.

Your up.

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[nigel_k]

On some of these I am going to need an option that says '2.0 if I analyzed the hand correctly and 4.0 if not'.

[inquiry]

This was among the very easiest of all the hands I thought. I guess it was so easy, most decided just to vote and no one choose to comment. Reasonable because I guess you all saw the winning line.

I took this one as an intermediate hand. It has two mild points, both easily mastered by intermediates and maybe even beginners, and then one point that requires foresight that might bump this up to intermediate plus to low advanced.

The first question is do you have a spade loser. You have to answer this question before deciding how to play the trump suit. If you have a spade loser, you can not afford a trump loser. That is, if you must lose a spade, hearts have to be 2-2. So the iniitial part of the solution is to test spades before you touch trumps.

If the spade hook wins (it does), then you can afford to lose a heart. But here is the kicker, you can afford only to lose one heart. If hearts are 2-2 or 3-1 you are home after the spade hook wins. If WEST has four hearts, you have two heart losers and will go down. However, you can protect against 4♥ with east. Lead the heart 2 and if East plays low (that is the 7) insert the 9. This holds you to only one heart loser if east has all four. This was the hand as played on BBO....

This looks a lot like a book hand, but it was real world.

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[inquiry]

14 votes, low of 1.0, high of 3.5, average of 2.0. That seems just about right for this hand. I am surprized by the votes for advanced for this hand, but as others say, I expect too much bridge ability I guess. On the other hand, if I had been voting, as I noted above, I would have voted for 2.0, so once again I think the panel of forum members are doing a good job with the voting.