[gnasher]

Perhaps part of the reason that I think I should have bid six is that it would have worked.

I think there's a decent chance of finding two useful aces opposite - the opponents' bidding makes it less likely that they have them, and partner has bid when he didn't have to, even though he had short hearts. He had already shown an unbalanced hand, so was under slightly less pressure to bid than in standard methods. Whilst slam might still go down opposite two aces, it will usually have play.

Other reasons to bid 6♥ are:
- They may well save when they shouldn't (though on the actual deal bouncing them into a save would have worked out badly).
- If I bid only 5♥, the opponents may well compete to 6♣. If that happens I'll probably bid 6♥ anyway as a two-way shot. That means that 5♥ lets them control the auction - they can pass when they think I'm making slam, or bid 6♣ when they think 5♥ is the limit. I realise that there is a flaw somewhere in this argument, but it works for me.

[JLOGIC]

Ok, if you want to bid 6H for pokerish reasons I'm on board with that depending on a bunch of things of course, jumping to slam r/w is always an option with weird hands in this type of auction.

That said for constructive bidding purposes, I think bidding 5H can work out well since you get to hear partners opinion if LHO bids 6C (effectively, you got to slam try), and you get to pass if RHO saves. In my mind they will be the ones who have to guess when they're bidding 6C, our decision will have much more accuracy since we can pass some more info imo.

Of course they might then believe us and save in 7C when we give more info and bid 6H, it's a much more believable story (rightly so), it would be pretty funny to bluff in that manner lol.

On this hand I would not be so sure defending 7C X would be better than playing 5H even if we make 6H. I'm all for pushing them around and getting them to 7 r/w, but a hand with such little defense is a good prototype to me to go against that and go into buy it mode.

Yes, you will lose an extra 200 or 300 when you defend 6C X rather than 7C X when slam doesn't make but they woulda taken the push, however if slam doesn't make and they will NOT take the push you lose a fair amount by playing 6H down rather than 5H making or defending 6C X.

Of course the competitive nature of hands like this make it really complicated and to me there are a lot of factors to account for in estimating "how often are they going to save over a direct leap to 6H?" such as your reputation, previous boards you've played vs them, their image, the state of the match, etc etc etc.

To take one extreme example, Joe Grue was playing against Kalita/Kotorovich in a junior world championship. They had bid and raised to a high level w/r, and he jumped to slam. It was (relatively for the tempo of an auction like this), passed out extremely quickly. Turned out joe was on a hook, and it was on. However, he did not take the finesse, and tried to drop a stiff K missing 9! Why? Well, he reasoned they would have strongly considered saving in passout seat if they had their actual hand (no defense). The only way you'd pass it out quick there is if you had stiff K. Ok, nice reasoning, why did it fail? They told him after the board that their team had talked about the americans tendencies in past championships, and especially joe, to try and bluff them into saving by jumping to slam r/w.

To take another extreme example, I was playing against someone who had told me a hand the day before (no joke, this is NOT a lamford story) where they didn't save over a jump to slam by someone r/w, and it was right, and they told me they thought it was always right, it's just good insurance. I then jumped to slam against them r/w on the auction 3D p 5D lol. I had a pretty good hand but by no means a lock, I mean if this was an actual poker player they would account for this previous, and the person did start laughing, but I genuinely believed they were so torn up about their previous decision that they couldn't live with themselves if they didn't save and it was wrong. Turns out I was cold and the save was correct, but my partner happened to have a really good hand for me.

Whether you've been steamrolling them in the match, just a bunch of factors contribute to this kind of decision in a real match to me. Obviously part of the equation is to figure out first how often you are making slam, how much their save will go for (like in this case maybe playing 5H for 680 is better than defending 7C, who knows), stuff like that, but the part of the equation that is really player dependent is how often they will save over a jump to 6, and it's obv hard to quantify on an internet forum.