"Worldclass" on BBO

At BBO you can set your own skill level in your profile. Many people just put "expert" or even "world class" while they can't play a single card right. Yesterday I encountered a "world class" on this hand:

Dealer: East Vul: Both Scoring: imps	♠ AK86 ♥ AJT8 ♦ T63 ♣ Q2
♠ 92 ♥ 974 ♦ 9875 ♣ AJ74		♠ Q43 ♥ KQ3 ♦ KQJ42 ♣ 63
	♠ JT75 ♥ 652 ♦ A ♣ KT985

We were bidding quite agressively:
1♦ - pass - pass - Dbl
pass - 2♠ - pass - 3♠
pass - 4♠ - pass - pass
pass

Our WC needed a long time before he passed this out. I think he wanted to double... GIB says the contract can only make after a ♣ lead (which is very unlikely), otherwise it's always -1.

So LHO starts with a small ♦ which immediately takes away an entry to set up ♣s. Still they are our source of tricks, so after taking ♦A I immediately play a low ♣ to the Queen. LHO hesitates a moment but plays low. Now I cash ♠AK and play a small ♣ to my T which loses to the Jack. LHO correctly continues ♦, but a ♥ would also have worked. I ruff, and play ♣K, covered by the Ace which I ruff in dummy. Now we get our world class action: RHO overruffs without a thought! 4♠= and 12 imps for the good guys.

All our WC player had to do is count some HCP and some trumps, which is the biggest step from beginner to intermediate. If he would've done that, he'd know that I can only have ♠J in my hand, without another trump. So that's the entry to my hand. If you think for a second you'll realise that you need to discard and ruff the next ♣, just in case I have 5 of them (why would I accept the invitation with 8HCP?). There's no way to my hand anymore, I can only discard 1 ♥ in dummy, and you still have ♦ for exit cards. I'm going down -1 for sure.

Funny one from friday

I've had a lot of work lately and I didn't get any really interesting hands as well, so I skipped a week to post...

Friday we had a funny one again. The auction went:
1♣! - pass - 1♦! - 1♥
2♦ - 2♥ - Dbl - pass*
3♦ - pass - 3♥** - Dbl
5♦ - all pass
(1♣ is 15+HCP any hand, 1♦ is negative)
(*) This pass is a poor choice imo, at the ** moment LHO clearly showed she was ready to bid 3♥, so she better did it right away.

Now we get following hands:
♠ Tx
♥ x
♦ AJT9xxx
♣ AKQ

♠ AJxx
♥ xx
♦ Qxx
♣ Txxx

LHO starts with ♥A, gets a high ♥ from partner, so switches to ♠Q. This is really annoying since I don't have a safety play anymore (♣J will probably fall somewhere on AKQ, so cashing ♦A would be the best play if LHO continued ♥).

So here we are, at the crossroads. Our communications have just been destroyed, and you need to play ♦ for no losers. 2 lines of play possible, only 1 will work, one of them is percentage (let ♦Q run) while the other one is not (cash ♦A). However you get the feeling that ♦K is stiff offside, and I trust my intuition pretty much since I know I'm more right than wrong in such situations (I once read - I guess from Fred Gitelman - that you should test if you can trust your feeling, and never trust it if it fails you too much, or trust it when it's right most of the time). If this is one of those few times that I'm wrong, I better have some argument to play like this...

While I'm thinking about what I'm going to do, I hear my RHO sighing cause she's bored. So imo she knows that the contract will either go down anyway, or that it doesn't matter, or she just hopes that I start to play and take a poor decision. I know both my opponents pretty well, so I guess she has the ♦K. Not good enough for an argument obviously, so I decide to let LHO help me out a bit. I play ♦Q and LHO hesitates a bit before playing a low ♦. I still know my opponents, so I'm quite sure she would never hesitate with Kx. So I took my ♦A dropping the King! :-) The rest was easy: ♣ 3-3 and I still had a ♦ entry to discard the ♠ on ♣T. 5♦+1.

Afterwards we had lots of fun at the bar because of the fact that I based my decision on RHO sighing. In Dutch we call a stiff King a "naked gentleman", so the dual interpretation caused a lot of laughter.
I think next week everyone will start sighing against me. :-)

Dangerous Doubles

Here's a hand from a while ago. I held:
♠ AK842
♥ 9875
♦ 5
♣ AK6

Partner North starts the auction (we're at unfavorable):
1♦ - pass - 1♠ - pass
2♣ - pass - 2♥! - Dbl
pass - pass - ???
(!) 4th suit GF

Now what? Partner doesn't have anything useful to mention over our 4th suit forcing (the Double gives us more possibilities), so partner will either have Ax or xx, perhaps even xxx imo. So I decided to pass, since it was unlikely we could get a game score ourselves, but we can probably manage 8 tricks in a 4-2 fit on hcp-power.

The full hand was:

Dealer: North Vul: EW Scoring: imps	♠ JT ♥ K4 ♦ AQJT6 ♣ J873
♠ Q963 ♥ AJT62 ♦ K ♣ 542		♠ 75 ♥ Q3 ♦ 987432 ♣ QT9
	♠ AK842 ♥ 9875 ♦ 5 ♣ AK5

According to GIB a small ♥ lead defeats the contract by 1 trick, all other leads let the contract make. Opponents made a mistake in their defense and I made 2♥D+1 for +570.
As the cards lay, 3NT is laydown, but I didn't expect ♥K in partner's hand. The Ace was possible, because partner may want to rightside the contract when I have Qxx.

Doubling on such low level is dangerous, especially if you don't see an immediate way to defeat the contract. With the West hand, you can hardly see 6 tricks coming in (♦K wrongsided, too many ♠s, and no great trump holding), so it's probably safer to pass and trust on partner's lead skills to defeat the contract. You might even get another chance at 3-level.

Worst bridge of 2006

Since we're all celabrating, I thought it was time for a laugh and post the worst bridge hand I've encountered in 2006. It happened quite recently and it's unbelievable what errors happened. If you know the site poorbridge.com (the name speaks for itself), this is one which is even worse than what you get there!

Here's the hand, I'm sitting South as usual:

Dealer: South Vul: EW Scoring: MP	♠ x ♥ QJ8x ♦ 976 ♣ T9864
♠ Tx ♥ K9xx ♦ Kxx ♣ AJxx		♠ QJ97xx ♥ Tx ♦ QTx ♣ Kx
	♠ AK8x ♥ Axx ♦ AJ8x ♣ Qx

It looks pretty innocent, but wait until you hear what happened with it.

It all begins with the auction:
1♣! - pass - 1♦! - 1♠
1NT - 2♠ - 3♣ - pass
3NT - all pass

I have an easy opening, since we're playing a strong ♣ system. My partner shows 0-6HCP and RHO intervenes with ♠. I have no problem with a rebid, and here we get our first two blunders: LHO supports with ♠Tx while Vulnerable!!! Quite amazing since you know all ♠ finesses will be wrongsided and you don't even have an 8 card fit, but some people will do anything. Next mistake is the 3♣ bid from my partner. Since we play Lebensohl here, 3♣ shows a good hand while he intended just to fight the partscore battle. Dbl or 2NT would've done the job a bit better. Now obviously I like my ♣Qx and raise to 3NT since I'm quite confident that I'll make it when ♣s come in.

Now you better imagine (or put up) some music from horror movies.

LHO leads the ♠T and I duck. It's a hopeless contract, but why not try to make the best out of it. A ♠ is continued and I take my Ace. Next step was imo to try and cash some ♥s so I play ♥A followed by a small ♥. LHO hesitates, telling me where the K is, and decides to play low. This is the only thing that's done right, but includes the error of giving the position of the K. I'm in dummy and let ♦6 run for LHO's King.

Lets make it a bit of a quiz: can you figure out what card West played now?
For some reason she decides to return a diamond right into my finesse! Thanks, but I'm still nowhere. What else is there than to play another ♥? LHO takes her ♥K.

Here comes blunder number 5, can you guess it?
She returns a heart to my J in dummy! Dummy was completely dead, so that's another trick for the good guys. I discard a ♣ and RHO has discarded 2 ♠s by now. Still not home, I play my 2 remaining ♦s and RHO gets it in her mind to discard another ♠! Probably she trusted her partner's raise too much, but this meant my ♠8 got promoted to my 9th trick.

Unbelievable: it took 1 mistake from partner to get me to a hopeless contract, and it took 4 and a half blunders from the opponents to actually make it! Only 1 thing was done right, but if LHO made the mistake of taking ♥K immediately she wouldn't have had the opportunity to give dummy an unreachable trick. I prefer the latter for this article. Also my play was proven to be poor by GIB's double dummy analyzer.

Lets see how it went trickwise:
- If I duck ♠T I have a possibility to go -2. Otherwise I can go -5 according to GIB!
- 2nd trick has to be taken, what I did. That's 2 things right, but now it starts...
- My only chance for -2 is to go for the ♣s which I didn't do. This costed me 1 trick.
- ♥ to my Q was another trick I threw away.
- Now I got back a trick with almost every card I played.
So basically I should've gone -4 thanks to my poor play as well. However, taking the right line of play to go -2 would never bring my contract home...

All other tables made 1NT-1, I made 3NT= in the same direction.

That's it for 2006, I hope you've enjoyed my articles (why doensn't anyone sign my guestbook?), I'll probably keep encountering lots of interesting material to post on my blog next year, and you all have my best wishes for 2007!

Too greedy

Here's a fun one, too bad opponents made lots of mistakes or this would've been a candidate for hand of the year:

Dealer: West Vul: EW Scoring: imps	♠ 432 ♥ J54 ♦ K9 ♣ AT432
♠ JT8 ♥ AQT8 ♦ T5432 ♣ 5		♠ Q65 ♥ 32 ♦ AQJ86 ♣ J76
	♠ AK97 ♥ K976 ♦ 7 ♣ KQ98

The bidding was quick and simple:
pass - pass - pass - 1NT
pass - 3NT - all pass

Some might not agree with the 1NT opening, but ok... So you're declarer in 3NT by South (nicely wrongsided): do you see any chance of making this? I guess not, but at least you get a little chance after the lead of ♠J. The dangers are quite clear: ♦, but also ♥ for communication between the hands or an entry. There's still not much chance of making this, except if opponents mess it up (or if both Aces are onside, but still risky). The lead told me the location of ♠Q, so there might be some endplay possibilities. The hands aren't played double dummy, so mistakes can still be made. Lets give opponents some opportunities ;-)

I took ♠A and started immediately with cashing 5 ♣s. West discarded 4 small ♦s and East ♥2 and 3. They played standard carding, so both Aces would be wrongsided! Chance for success now seemed very low, but opponents made huge errors during their careless discarding! They were both too greedy, they both wanted to make all their length tricks (which is impossible anyway) instead of just trying to defeat the contract. I still wasn't home, but if RHO would make a mistake in ♠ I could endplay him. So I played small ♠ and luckily I saw East play small (which gives me the contract). ♠K was easy, followed by a small ♠ to the Q. Poor East only had ♦AQJ86 left, and decided to play low to my King (it doesn't matter what he plays, because he'll get it back later). 8 tricks were there already, and I had to find another one. ♥ is the only chance, and to my big surprise RHO didn't follow. So LHO had kept ♥AQT8 and would be endplayed as well! The King was covered by the Ace, but West couldn't do anything else than playing ♥ giving me ♥J as my 9th trick.

3NT= obviously was a miracle: nobody bid it, and nobody made 9 tricks in their partscores.

I hope my opponents learned something from this hand, which is never to be too greedy in an undoubled NV contract with imps scoring.

Silly falsecarding

Lots of people hear about falsecarding when they reach intermediate level. They already saw it at the table when a good player 'fooled' them (or so they think), but never got more into it in detail. These days I see lots of absolute USELESS falsecarding. Here are some of the mistakes most made:
- they ALWAYS play their HIGHEST card -> that's 2 mistakes ;-)
- they play a high card too soon
- they play high-low every time they have Qxx in front of AKJ
- they make 'impossible' falsecards
- ...
All mistakes lead to the same result: it reveils the position of a certain suit to declarer, which can't be the purpose.

A few examples:
- You have a void in dummy, and AJxxx in your hand. You cash the Ace and you ruff a small one, RHO discarding the KING! It's quite impossible that the suit splits so badly, so you ruff another one and see RHO playing the TEN! Guess where the Q is... This is a foolish falsecard made by one of the best players in one of my local clubs, I really didn't knew what I saw.
- Another one of those: Jx opposite AKxx, you start with AK and see LHO play the Q. Now you ruff a small one and LHO plays the 9! Tnx for reveiling the 4-3 split.
- You play 4♥ with AJTx opposite xxxx. RHO leads a small ♥ (you try the J) and LHO takes with the King. LHO wouldn't lead from Qxx and when he has Qxxx you can't win. So you can just cash the Ace dropping the Q. If RHO would've played the Q, you can't make this conclusion.

There are some very good books on the subject. I haven't read one, but that's next on my personal list, because it's interesting to see WHY some falsecards really work.