[mikeh]

Practice match, expert opps. 1C was normal for us, although light. 1H showed 4+ spades, 1S showed 2-3 spades 2D was art gf and 6N was agricultural but expecting to have play. The lead is the club king

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The first decision is easy…win or duck?

If playing mps and if we had any hope of an overtrick, we might win but, here, we have no chance of more than 12 tricks…indeed, this isn’t cold at all!

In these situations, it’s good and standard practice to duck. You might learn something useful now or later, plus we will have rectified the count in the unlikely event of a squeeze

RHO follows low and LHO persists with the queen, which we have to take….and we get some news right now as RHO pitches a small diamond

Time to think…LHO has five clubs, RHO one. Perhaps more saliently, what does the diamond tell us?

He might be 4=4=4=1 but he can’t have anything to keep in hearts so he won’t hold Jxxx in diamonds….he’d never surrender that suit so early. Diamonds are likely breaking, but he could have Jxxxx or xx.

If he has Jxxxx, we can pick this up….while unblocking in diamonds is not essential, it’s good technique because on many hands, with a similar issue, we may not have our abundance of entries back and forth.

What if he started with xx x in the minors? Now LHO has the diamond guard….and we can’t make taking just 7 major winners and three diamonds plus a club…but LHO can be squeezed.

We can cash two top diamonds, unblocking in dummy. If RHO shows out, we place him with ten major suit cards so he is very likely to hold the spade jack. We’d test hearts, preserving the heart King as a late entry and then play on spades, hooking RHO for the Jack. If that won, we’d cash four spades then play our last heart to dummy, crushing LHO in the minors.

Meanwhile, if RHO held Jxxxx, LHO will show out on the second round and we can cross in hearts to finesse RHO out of the Jack.

All of this is a good exercise but becomes moot….diamonds are 3=3, LHO having Jxx.

On the third diamond, RHO takes some time before pitching a spade. His next pitch, on the fourth diamond, is a second spade, as LHO pitches an irrelevant club.

Time to reflect. Obviously the key is the spade suit, but what holding could RHO have to throw 2 spades away?

Could he have xxxxx? Or Jxxxxx? With the former, a finesse of the 10 is a disaster, since we can simply drop it from either hand. With the latter, it’s essential. Could he be trying to look like Jxxxx while holding xxxxx? He’s capable of it…the hand is close to an open book on the auction and play to date. For him, anyway.

We can find out some more info by testing hearts.

We play AQ and another.

Three things happen. Both follow to all three rounds. LHO plays the 10 on the third round, suggesting a three card holding…..but even online there was a slight…slight…hesitation as if he was playing low and then realized the 10 might mislead me.

Plus….is there a hand on which RHO, holding xxxx in hearts, wouldn’t throw one?

I can’t think of any.

But if he had 6=3=3=1, he can’t throw a heart, since he’d show out on the 3rd round of the suit and I’d have a 100% claim….cash the spade King to extract LHO’s only spade and take the marked finesse.

Hence the pause before the first spade pitch…he was working out whether to throw a heart. Sometimes, it’s easier to play against good players than weak…one can trust their thinking

So we have two reasons to think that spades are 6=1….the slight BIT by LHO on the third heart and the refusal by RHO to pitch an ‘irrelevant’ heart earlier.

As it happens, if LHO is 2=3=3=5, RHO is now 5=4=3=1 but has reduced to three spades and we can play for the drop. However, if he’s 6=3=3=1, playing for the drop fails…we need to finesse.

Again, sometimes good opps are easier…here, I can reliably infer why RHO never pitched a heart. So I play him for Jxxxxx in spades…..and make the slam.

While the hand wasn’t particularly hard, I thought that setting out the thinking processes involved might interest a few readers.

One of the characteristics of an expert is the use of inferences at various levels. This was one I haven’t seen often before…why didn’t RHO make the seemingly obvious (at the time) pitch of a heart?

Also…the importance of playing in tempo. LHO is one of Canada’s finest players…we’ve been teammates a number of times and I’ve always admired hi game: his flinch in hearts was uncharacteristic….I very much doubt he’d have done it live, but BBO is a different experience.

Hope you enjoyed this

[akwoo]

Very nice. Just one comment on the remarks before dropping the diamonds - if RHO has Jxxxx then you'll still have a tough decision about the spade Q - does RHO have it, in which case you might need to finesse it, or does LHO have it, in which case you need to squeeze it out of them (or, rather, recognize that you already have)? If hearts are 4-3 either way, you won't have much to go on.

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Now the rest of this is about me. Skip if you don't want to read.

As I was reading through that, I was thinking - but if RHO started with xx in diamonds, I wouldn't know that until I cashed the third diamond, which I can't do because I might need it for a finesse!

And I read it again, and I was still puzzled.

And then by the time I got around to all the hearts being cashed, I was still puzzled and too tired to think anymore and figured since RHO started with most of the spades, they were quite odds on to have the Q and I'll just finesse even if I haven't figured out whether the spades are 5-2 or 6-1.

Now, five minutes later, aided by knowing that I must be wrong because mikeh wouldn't have screwed up something this simple, I realize that RHO discarded a diamond, so they would show out of diamonds on the second diamond trick if they started with xx.

At the table, I'd see RHO discard a diamond instead of reading about it, so it'd register better, but somewhere around 20-25% of the time at the table, the whole thing just won't compute, and, even after thinking about it for a minute or two, I'd still be wondering if RHO started with xx, having seen them play 3 diamonds.

Boards with this kind of problem show up a lot, both declaring and defending, so if I get them wrong 25% of the time that's an automatic 2 zeros a session in a strong field... No one manages to make up for 2 self-inflicted completely avoidable zeros a session without being fairly lucky (or a lot better than the field otherwise).

Do I just not have enough talent? Am I doomed to rarely be able to make the second day of an open NABC event? Should I just give up the game now and take up something I might be better at (but then what would that be)? I gave up chess quite quickly because I quite quickly got tired of losing by screwing up on things I knew well enough to not do but did anyway. Is it going to end up being the same for bridge?

[Gilithin]

akwoo, on 2023-July-29, 01:38, said:

Do I just not have enough talent? Am I doomed to rarely be able to make the second day of an open NABC event? Should I just give up the game now and take up something I might be better at (but then what would that be)? I gave up chess quite quickly because I quite quickly got tired of losing by screwing up on things I knew well enough to not do but did anyway. Is it going to end up being the same for bridge?

Don't underestimate level of competition as a factor. Whenever I take a line of play based on reasoning like this, my partner chastises me for trusting the opponents. If you are not playing against opponents of Mike's quality, the nature of inference you draw from various plays is completely different. Some of those inference are more reliable but many are less, to the point that you can more or less forget about them. So you really need to be playing against expert+ level opponents regularly to be able to draw expert+ level inferences reliably, and very few non-expert pairs have the opportunity for that. In other words, go easy on yourself a little. Whether it be chess, bridge or almost any other activity, it takes a lot of practice and training to reach the level you want. You cannot expect to be there instantly. Even with perfect information, sometimes a chess GM will inexplicably drop a piece or a forced checkmate from nowhere. In an imperfect information partnership game like bridge, expecting to get things right all the time is just setting yourself up for constant disappointment.

[mikeh]

Gilithin, on 2023-July-29, 06:04, said:

Don't underestimate level of competition as a factor. Whenever I take a line of play based on reasoning like this, my partner chastises me for trusting the opponents. If you are not playing against opponents of Mike's quality, the nature of inference you draw from various plays is completely different. Some of those inference are more reliable but many are less, to the point that you can more or less forget about them. So you really need to be playing against expert+ level opponents regularly to be able to draw expert+ level inferences reliably, and very few non-expert pairs have the opportunity for that. In other words, go easy on yourself a little. Whether it be chess, bridge or almost any other activity, it takes a lot of practice and training to reach the level you want. You cannot expect to be there instantly. Even with perfect information, sometimes a chess GM will inexplicably drop a piece or a forced checkmate from nowhere. In an imperfect information partnership game like bridge, expecting to get things right all the time is just setting yourself up for constant disappointment.

I had to quit golf last year due to chronic back issues so earlier this year I started playing club bridge after playing maybe ten sessions in the past 20+ years (and at most a game a week for the previous 20 years).

I’m also playing with non-expert friends as well as more often with expert friends. We’re lucky…in a town of maybe 400,000 people, we have (post Covid) two clubs that cooperate and have been averaging around 16-18 tables per game, with as many as 23 on at least one occasion.

The quality is not great, although last week an opp remarked to me that we had 7 Grand Life Masters in the game….actually only six were there but I think she thought I was one (which I’m not and am not close to being due to several extended breaks from playing and many years of rarely travelling for bridge due to other demands on my time) so it’s more accurate to say that the quality is variable

The other day I was in 3N after my LHO made a vulnerable 1H overcall. My hearts were KQ8x with Ax in dummy.

In the end game I had to play on spades where I had started with Jxx in dummy and AQxx in hand. By then the only missing honour was the king and I knew that LHO had bid on 97xxx of hearts! Her partner had shown up with J10 and the club king.

LHO had shown only the diamond ace so I ‘knew’ that she had the spade king. I tried a low spade towards the Jack, hoping to sneak it through….RHO won it.

LHO had overcalled red on xx 97xxx Axxx xx!

Now, RHO had a good club to cash, holding me to 9 tricks, but she didn’t cash it…she returned a spade so I made an overtrick.

Had there been no adverse bidding, on the (appalling) defence I got early on, I would have played for a black suit squeeze on RHO and made 11 tricks…instead I drew an inference and should have been held to nine tricks ( when I say appalling….by the time LHO won her diamond trick I was reduced to Q8 in hand and she had 97x…..she exited the heart 9, giving me 4 heart tricks!)

So, believe me, Gilithin is 100% correct…drawing inferences at the table depends entirely upon the skill level of one’s opps…as I wrote in the OP, sometimes experts are easier for experts to play against than are weak players!

On balance, weaker opps give one a lot more gifts, and in my experience at the club this year the opportunity for the sort of inferences I described above arise rarely. So while I encourage everyone to try to learn how to draw these inferences, I recognize that for most, your opps may simply not be good enough for it to be safe to do so😀

[akwoo]

I'm not complaining about the inference which I was too tired to draw anyway. I'm complaining about wondering if RHO started with xx in diamonds when I already saw them play 3 of them!

[gszes]

akwoo, on 2023-July-29, 01:38, said:

Very nice. Just one comment on the remarks before dropping the diamonds - if RHO has Jxxxx then you'll still have a tough decision about the spade Q - does RHO have it, in which case you might need to finesse it, or does LHO have it, in which case you need to squeeze it out of them (or, rather, recognize that you already have)? If hearts are 4-3 either way, you won't have much to go on.

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I was still puzzled and too tired to think anymore

The amount of "edge" we lose decreases at differing levels for everyone. MIKEH might have to be almost comatose before being unable to work through this problem while we mere mortals might only have needed to eat one biscuit too many at dinner to put this hand out of reach. Do not be too hard on yourself when you are TIRED. Oh yeah I forgot to uptick a very nice post from MIKEH.