[kgr]

Scoring: IMP

Bidding:
1♣-(1♠)-2♥-(2♠)
3♣-(P)-4♥-All pass

---

West did start ♠A, small ♠ for K of East and a small spade ruffed in South.
Now ♣ A and K (discard ♦ in South) and ruff a club. ♦ K and A and ruff a ♦.
♥A and 10 tricks claimed.
Great play!
..but why?
West was played for 3=4=3=3. Was it table-feel or was it played like this because it is great if it works

PS: How can you attach a lin file to a post?

[Walddk]

kgr, on Feb 20 2005, 07:51 AM, said:

Great play!
..but why?
West was played for 3=4=3=3. Was it table-feel or was it played like this because it is great if it works

I remember the hand well, because it was against Henri Schweitzer (ritong) and me 8 days ago. It was the last deal of the session, and after Fred saw dummy and planned the play after 3 rounds of spades, he said something like:

"I think it's ok to have some fun now that it's the last deal".

Whether that had any influence on his line I don't know, but maybe Fred will tell us about his thoughts when he returns to LV on Tuesday. I think his line was a good one, because he needed to score all his small hearts.

What he feared was a trump promotion (♥9) if he led ♥A and queen, and right he was. I was East, and after Henri had shown ♠A it was more than likely that I had ♥K considering my overcall. Since he knew spades were 3-5, it was with the odds to assume that hearts would break 4-2 rather than 3-3.

In that case a trump promotion would be there, unless I held exactly K9. I hope it's clear to see that 4♥ will go down if Fred had played ♥A and queen. Another spade from me would have promoted West's ♥9.

Let's hope Fred will reveal his thoughts when he is back in his office.

Roland

[cherdano]

kgr, on Feb 20 2005, 12:51 PM, said:

Dealer: North Vul: N/S Scoring: IMP

♠ Q43 ♥   ♦ AT94 ♣ AKJ865 ♠ A87 ♥ 9652 ♦ Q63 ♣ T94 ♠ KT965 ♥ K4 ♦ J75 ♣ Q73 ♠ J2 ♥ AQJT873 ♦ K82 ♣ 2

Bidding: 1♣-(1♠)-2♥-(2♠) 3♣-(P)-4♥-All pass

West did start ♠A, small ♠ for K of East and a small spade ruffed in South.
Now ♣ A and K (discard ♦ in South)  and ruff a club. ♦ K and A and ruff a ♦.
♥A and 10 tricks claimed.
Great play!
..but why?
West was played for 3=4=3=3.

I think Fred's line is not quite as specific as you say. Whenever ritong (LHO) does not have the ♥9, he is fine. Same if he is 3=4=2=4, or 3=3=3=4, or 3=3=4=3.

Other than that, I agree his line is more fun than ♥A and ♥Q early on

Arend

[inquiry]

Yes this was an exciting, and very close match. Fred's play was outstandig on this hand and caused a lot of interest among the kibitzers... there was so many of us, kgr, lukewarm, kickback, keylime, 2over1, rain, Marico, gerardo, myself and others.

I can't speak for fred (i am sure his logic is beyond me), but clearly Roland is correct, Fred has to have been worried about a trump promotion to choose this line.

What does he know? Roland held only 5♠. On first round of clubs, both henri and Roland played lowest club, indicating three clubs if honest. And if you were watching the previous 20 boards of this match, they had been highly honest in their carding (should we be this honest against players of Fred's ability?)

Fred needs the second club to stand up for a diamond discard, and after two rounds of clubs where good, the club ruff seemed safer than relying on 3-3 hearts or roland with specifically K9 doubleton if not (note if roland had shown out on third club, that wouldn't be so bad).

When the second club stood, roland is known to be 5-x-y-3, also from the bidding, it is fairly clear roland has the heart king. If he has singlton heart king, Fred is not making, and if he had five hearts to the king, he would have likely used michaels (and fred isn't making).. so he has to be 5-4-1-3, 5-3-2-3, or 5-2-3-3.

If fred plays the heart ace and high heart now, he will have to guess what to do on a spade return. If hearts are 3-3 he has to ruff high and pull trumps. If hearts are 4-2 with roland having the nine (no matter who had four), he had to ruff low. Fred's line eliminated that guess how to ruff by playing roland for 5323 or 5233.

Fred was the only declarer in hearts who got three rounds of spades to start off with who made 10 tricks. Those making 10 (or more tricks) were blessed with a heart or club opening lead (and one got two rounds of spades and then a diamond switch). Plays like FREDS are worth money to pay to see... and all of us got to see it for free...

Ben

[Flame]

I think it was a good play, he knew west has 3 spades, if west has only 3-2 hearts playing A and Q heart would work , but the chances of fred play to fail are low.
If west has 4 hearts freds line give him much better chances.

[Flame]

Jlall, on Feb 20 2005, 10:11 PM, said:

yes im sure everyone on the forums would play it the same...

Didnt say that, only that i think it was the right line.

[kgr]

- Is it possible to attach a lin-file to a post?
- I never saw this kind of trump shortening to avoid trump pormotion described somewhere. Nice to see it live

Quote

Plays like FREDS are worth money to pay to see... and all of us got to see it for free...

Following sentence hidden. It should not be read by Fred :

Spoiler

Yes, I'm a fan. Even more after seeing this play

[inquiry]

kgr, on Feb 21 2005, 03:59 AM, said:

- Is it possible to attach a lin-file to a post?

Yes and no.

Yes it is possible, but only by board administrators

[fred]

The way I chose to play this hand was largely motivated by the fact that it was the last board of our "match", there were a lot of people watching, I did not want to sit there for a long time and try to figure out the odds, and because I thought the audience would get a kick out of the "fancy" line of play (especially if it turned out to be necessary).

There are 3 critical steps in figuring out how to play a hand:

0) Recognizing the danger
1) Identifying various lines of play
2) Deciding which of these lines of play is best

Step 0 was trivial - it was obvious that the only possible problem was losing 2 trump tricks and the threat of a trump promotion loomed large.

Step 1 was also pretty easy for me (mostly because I studied declarer play extensively when I was first learning and because I have seen problems like this one before). I suppose I have built up a mental database of techniques for countering the threat of a trump promotion.

Effectively recognizing the critical aspects of declarer play problems and identifying various ways to deal with them is most of the battle. Just about any person who is willing to put in the time and energy can develop the ability to do this through study and through playing a lot of hands (however you should be prepared for several years of serious work).

Perhaps the most common technique in the "countering a threatened trump promotion family" would, on a hand like this one, involve drawing trump by playing Ace then low (as opposed to Ace then Queen). That would have worked against the actual distribution, but it pretty obvious that this play would lose to several not unlikely layouts of the opps' cards (for example, whenever trumps were 3-3). So I suppose I pretty much immediately dimissed this line (though it's not like I have a clear idea of what went on in my head here).

Scoring your small trumps by ruffs (ie what I actually did) is another fairly common technique that you can use in hands like this one. Having been there before, I spotted the possibility of playing the way that I did and my instincts suggested that this line was worthy of serious consideration.

I then had to compare the line I took (and some minor variations like cashing the Ace of hearts early and continuing roughly as I did) with the "obvious line" of playing trumps from the top. This is the "step 2" that I referred to above.

Solving some problems like this one involves some pretty serious math. In fact, the math can be so serious (because dependent probabilities are involved) that I am pretty sure there is not a single bridge player on earth who can solve these problems at the table with any real degree of accuracy. About the best we can hope for is a "ballpark estimate" of the odds of success of various lines (though sometiems you get lucky and most of the relevant cases cancel out leaving you with very little actual math to do). If you are careful and your ballpark odds of the 2 best lines are, say, 5% apart, you can generally conclude that one line is really better than the other. Any less than 5%, however, and you might as well go with your table presence (unless you are a lot better at doing math in your head than anyone that I have ever met).

I was in the middle of trying to do a rough estimate of the odds of success of the 2 lines when I decided "I don't feel like doing this and no doubt the audience doesn't feel like watching me think for another 5 minutes so I am just going to take the fun and not-totally-ridiculous line of play".

A few more points that may be of interest:

I did make the assumption that spades were 3-5 based on the bidding and I thought it was very likely that Roland had the King of hearts (partly because he overcalled, but also because his line of defense had "trump promotion" written all over it - this is not a criticism of Roland - quite the contrary - his 3rd round spade play was very strong and turned out to be the only chance for the defenders on the actual layout).

So, although I did not know this for sure, I based all of my thinking on the assumption that Roland had 5 spades and the King of hearts.

I got as far as realizing that my line would always work whenever Roland had any 5332 hand (his most likely shape) and that I would go down on some of these layouts if I took the obvious line. I also knew that my line of play would fail if Roland had some 5422 hands (5224 with the 9 of hearts on my left for example) but that the "obvious line" would also fail in at least some of these cases. I didn't think Roland had a 5-5 hand (Henri would have led his singleton) and was just starting to think about Roland's various 5431 patterns when I decided that enough was enough. If I had been playing in a "serious real life tournament" I would have done some more thinking before making my decision.

One further point that may be of interest: for those of you who were watching, you may have noticed that I ruffed the 3rd round of spades almost immediately. It was after that point that I did my real thinking (and then, after making my decision, played the rest of the hand very quickly). This can be explained because I already had been thinking about how I was going to play if Roland returned a 3rd round of spades and I knew that, regardless of the general approach I ended up taking, ruffing the 3rd round of spades was the right play.

I have to admit that I did not put much stock in the defenders' carding in clubs or diamonds. I knew that these particular opponents had seen hands like this before too, that they had no reason to give each other count on a hand like this, and that they had every reason to try to induce me to miscount the hand. I would typically pay a lot more attention to the signals of lesser players.

I still have not really made a serious effort to figure out if I took the "right" line of play on this hand. I suspect that I did, but since I didn't fully solve the problem at the table, I really don't deserve that much credit for solving the problem correctly (assuming my play actually was correct). However, it did turn out to be a fun hand to play (especially since a layout existed that made my line look good).

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[kgr]

fred, on Feb 22 2005, 06:29 PM, said:

Just about any person who is willing to put in the time and energy can develop the ability to do this through study and through playing a lot of hands (however you should be prepared for several years of serious work).

Fred,

What study do you recommend here?

tx,
Koen

[keylime]

I'm happy this hand was mentioned - I thought it was a sterling effort that very few could try to make, much less accomplish.

[fred]

kgr, on Feb 22 2005, 10:25 PM, said:

fred, on Feb 22 2005, 06:29 PM, said:

Just about any person who is willing to put in the time and energy can develop the ability to do this through study and through playing a lot of hands (however you should be prepared for several years of serious work).

Fred,

What study do you recommend here?

tx,
Koen

I read a few books that contained a lot of theory as well as plenty of example hands and some quizzes (Play of the Hand by Blackwood, Bridge Squeezes Complete by Love, and several books by Reese come to mind). I read each of these books at least a couple of times and really tried to learn the theory inside out. I personally found that having names for various techniques helped me to recognize hands that might be appropriate for such techniques. Bridge literature has not done a great job in terms on nomenclature. Sometimes I would make up my own private names for various types of plays.

But I read a lot more books that were eseentially collections of quizzes and tried very hard to never turn the page until I *knew* that I had the right answer. Kantar has 2 nice collections of quizzes that aren't too hard, Rubens has 2 (one not too hard the other very hard), Kelsey has many such books (and some good books on defense too). A recent new book by Julian Pottage, Masterpieces in Declarer Play, is the nicest collections of declarer play probelms I have seen in a long time. Card Play Technique by Mollo and Gardner is another classic.

The Bridge World magazine has 4 excellent problems every month (2 for experts and 2 for advanced players). The Bridge World has a lot of other great stuff too. In fact, if you are serious bridge, subscribing to this magazine is an absolute must in my view. The ACBL Bulletin has 2 monthly problems by Kantar that I enjoy. Probably most major bridge magazines have similar features.

I personally believe that the software medium is superior to books as far as bridge education goes, but I may be somewhat biased. I suggest you try the free sample problems available by logging in to BBO, then Explore Bridge!, then Bridge Master. If you enjoy these problems you might want to consider purchasing some of the non-free problems available there or a complete Bridge Master CD-ROM.

We have also created some CD-ROMs about declarer play with Mike Lawrence that I think are excellent, but I would describe the level of these as intermediate to advanced (whereas some of the material available in Bridge Master is much harder).

I am not sure what your level is, but most of the material mentioned above is intended for advanced to expert players.

Playing as many hands as possible and thinking over the hands after you finish each session helps a lot too in my view. There are a lot of players who are excellent at solving problems on paper, but more or less hopeless when it comes to doing so at the table.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[Walddk]

fred, on Feb 22 2005, 01:29 PM, said:

I still have not really made a serious effort to figure out if I took the "right" line of play on this hand. I suspect that I did, but since I didn't fully solve the problem at the table, I really don't deserve that much credit for solving the problem correctly.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

Nothing new; Fred is too modest to take the credit he deserves. Maybe he didn't have enough time to go through all aspects at the table and intuitively played the way he did, but I can assure you that he chose a line that is much better than any other.

Søren Christiansen (Danish international) is one of my assistants at the bridge centre. He and I went through the various options thoroughly. Fred's (successful) line was beyond compare. I suspect that most other world class players would have done the same, but I am also pretty certain that even some experts would go wrong.

This hand is far from being straightforward, so don't despair if you don't succeed if you have to play a similar hand in the future. It's not disgraceful to go down in 4♥, by any means. We have all seen more serious errors in the history of bridge.

Roland

[luke warm]

Jlall, on Feb 20 2005, 09:11 PM, said:

yes im sure everyone on the forums would play it the same...

he he he

i doubt i'd play it the same even after i saw it live *and* after having looked at it double dummy...

one thing i can say, at least now if i screw up a similar hand i'll remember this line