Partner has had the opportunity to bid No Trumps and has not so has an unbalanced hand unsuitable for NT. The reverse actually happened last night. I had a six card club suit and good points and a singleton in his suit and raised him to 3NT which he passed and made 11.
For me, 2D could be an Acol light opener - 10 HCP and 6 cards. 2N would be invitational, not forcing.
Absolutely it does. You knock out the Ace of Hearts and squeeze East for the 13th trick in hearts or clubs. Note that you have to play East for HAJxx. Play from hand to the Queen.
No, you may need to retain the King of Hearts as a second entry to the long clubs. The thing to do is start by running the diamonds for 5 tricks, East has to find two discards. If she discards a club, your clubs are good; if a heart then your fourth heart is good. And if East discards both Spades, your spade guard cannot be compromised and you can force a heart or club discard by playing your Ace of Spades. Then you play Hearts.
Something else: it depends upon the type of Bridge you are playing. Are you playing Teams or Duplicate or Rubber? Are you looking for the par score, the 60% score, or a positive score? In that second hand, at Duplicate I would be happy with 3NT + 3. Those who bid and made 6N would get 100% but some might go off, which would leave me with a 60% score.
No. Play it out card-by-card. Trick 1) Club, Trick 2) Heart Q and A. Trick 3) Club.
You have only ten top winners but need eleven for a squeeze. Down One.
Yes, you need a Roth-Stone partnership to avoid opening 1D, and those haven’t existing for 50 years. South has a fantastic hand and will push on to 6NT. I don’t see any way to avoid it, unless South bids 4NT or 5NT somewhere along the line giving North a chance to pass.
So now you need a bad lead, diamonds breaking and a squeeze to make it. I’m surprised that so many went for an aggressive lead against a NT slam in which they haven’t agreed upon a suit.
Let’s not exaggerate! On a passive lead you have over 40% chance just from the obvious JH on-side (you then just need 3-3 OR the right 4-2 OR spade finesse); and that’s before adding in additional chances from bad lead or good guesswork.
Anyway, to reiterate: I presented the hand becuase
(1) I was curious what the “normal” way to bid the hand was — curiosity unrelated to whether you should or will get to slam.
(2) I saw two (depending on lead) unrelated but interesting double-dummy successes: one of which should be found, IMO, if East leads a heart.
Assume a lead of a Heart, won by the Ace, and the return of a Spade, again won by the Ace. East now holds Sx HJ98 Dxxx Cxxxx. Now, 5 rounds of Diamonds. East follows three times, and discards a Spade on the 4th. But what does East discard on the 5th? Either choice is instantly fatal.
Assume a club lead. Two - not three - rounds of clubs. Five rounds of diamonds. What does East discard on the fourth and 5th diamonds? Perhaps the spades. Now cross to the Ace of Spades and what does East discard? Either choice is instantly fatal.
Septimus how did you separate the east-west hands in the second deal? In this quote, I see multiple spaces but upon preview they show as one space. And, after the preview the multiple spaces disappear and weirdly the capital letters become lower case!
Maybe I’ve misanalyzed this. But I strongly doubt it.
LHO probably comes down to 1 spade, 3 hearts, 2 clubs. You, declarer, have 2 spades and 4 hearts, I suppose (why didn’t you tell us what you pitched on 2nd club?) Dummy has Spade Ace, and Kxx of both Hearts and Clubs. Hey! That’s seven cards. It’s your discard from dummy, LHO has already discarded.
Is it really best to lead a spade to Ace trick 8? I think you’ll either lead Heart Queen at trick 8 to rectify the count, or lead to the Heart King. In either case You have only ten top winners but need eleven for a squeeze. Note moreover that you have zero entries to the closed hand and only one entry to the dummy unless you lead a small heart now.
I realize that the statement I’ve re-emphasized is an over-generalization. It was my old partner, M.B. who was the squeeze expert, not me. In fact I was worst at card play of anyone on our Team of Four. Still, I’m not quite as stupid as some of you might assume. I was a near-expert bidder, though with a 45-year old convention card. How can I make this claim? I must have been a good bidder since, despite that I was the worst card-player of the Four, we did place second in two different Regional Knockout Championships. (And Grant Baze did once call me “a pretty good player.”)
Indeed it does. I had not considered the second part until after I wrote the first, then did not go back and correct it.
A further thought on the defense of cashing AH and switching to a spade. Now you have a squeeze which works if the defender with 4 (or more) clubs holds either KS or JH. Rise with AS (obviously), cash KH, QH, then all the diamonds. North comes down to QJ, 10, -, x. South has -, -, -, AKQx. No defender can keep 4 clubs and one of the major suit winners.
In the olden days I’d use CODE to align the text nicely. But those were the days when dinosaurs and bugfree message-board “skins” roamed the earth, with at least the skill to borrow BigT’s tweet-sized css patch.
I could continue to use CODE for this formatting, which continues to work properly under v3.7.3, or with BigT’s patch present… But I’m afraid some of you are using the Sultan skin :mad: … So I laboriously typed a long string of (no spaces ) ’ & # 1 6 0 ; ’ which is ordinary magic for ***Give me a space god-damn-it, a frigging real SPACE – don’t you know what that is? ***
I’ll paste the code before every word.
Yes, K364, the VB renderer demotes the good space to an ordinary (useless) space. :eek:. I suggest you do Ctrl-V/Ctrl-C if you want to use the Preview option.
ETA: :smack: I don’t know why I thought that & # 1 6 0 ; would be preserved inside CODE.
EETA: :smack: And I managed to destroy what little was left with an Edit!
Well, of course it makes if East misdefends that badly. If West leads a heart, East inserts the 8 (or jack if you play 10H from dummy). Now how do you make it?
On any lead that does not give a trick (i.e. anything but a spade from West and anything but a heart from East) there is no squeeze no matter when you play diamonds because East can discard a spade and a heart.
A heart. You now have Q, Q1072, -, - in dummy. -, Kxx, -, Qx (or -, Kx, -, Qxx) in hand. East holds -, AJ9, -, 9x.
Yes. An ordinary double squeeze. It works because the cashed Ace gives you two heart winners, so Eleven top winners altogether. Quartz can’t squeeze – he has only Ten winners.
It is not a double squeeze because only one opponent is squeezed. You just don’t know which one and you are executing two different simple squeezes at the same time, also without knowing which one works. If South had AKQx clubs and both opponents held 4, then if the JH and KS were in different hands, that would be a double squeeze (but one that is broken up if the defense can ever play a club).
And I agree that Quartz’s squeeze does not work. It is possible, though, to make 12 on a squeeze where you only have 10 tricks - on a triple squeeze. Give East KS (and take away North’s JS so he can’t just finesse) and now he is squeezed in three suits after declarer plays a heart to queen and ace, wins the return, cashes AS and runs five diamonds. East is caught. Discarding hearts concedes two extra heart tricks. Discarding a club concedes two club tricks, so East discards KS. North now plays QS to squeeze East again in hearts and clubs.
I just realized that there is an alternate, strip (unrectified) squeeze on Hand (2), if West’s opening lead is a Spade.
Win QS, lead to HK, Cash AS (essential), Cash five diamonds. Before the final diamond lead both East and South will have two hearts and four clubs, but East must discard first.
New hand.
Just finished a session. So many disasters to choose from. :eek: Only this one might be interesting:
9 AQT873 8764 Q7
Nobody vulnerable. Partner deals and bids One Diamond. RHO passes; you bid One Heart. The auction continues One Spade - Double - Pass.
(1) What do you call now?
Assume (pleading Tourette’s Syndrome if necessary) that you bid Two Hearts. The auction continues Pass - Two No Trump - Pass.
9
AQT873
8764
Q7