Let’s assume East did bid spades in order to justify the QS lead. Declarer wins and the best bet for a 13th trick is to set up a spade winner somehow. Best odds would be to play East to hold 10S. You know he has the King unless West has fooled you with a very unconventional lead (and East’s spade bid would be bizarre). You also need to get to hand to draw trumps, so playing JS at trick 2 and ruffing East’s King looks like the right thing to do anyway.
Now the plan would be to draw trumps in 4 rounds, cross to the AD and play the 8S, planing to run it if East does not cover. However, trumps are 5-2, meaning that you do not have enough trumps to be able to ruff another spade. With the 5-2 trump break, I do not see any possible line other than the actual solution. However, this requires declarer to have spotted the line and to start discarding North’s top diamonds before even knowing about the bad trump break. I just can’t see even a top expert spotting that line in real life.
I think this is a “bridge problem” analagous to a “chess problem”; in the latter game a “problem” usually bears no relation to anything that would occur in actual play and typically has an artificial winning condition (e.g. White, to move, has an easy win if time is no object, but is required to mate in two moves from the given position). Problems where all four hands are known are referred to as “double dummy” problems and pre-date Bridge by some way - they used to be popular with whist players. The earlier problem I gave, though, is quite realistic and illustrates an important technique.
If we assume that E bid spades, I think declarer would be forgiven for assuming this guy wasn’t insane in bidding 1s on 3 points in his hand. I’d have at least given him credit for a club honor (if not both) even after seeing the diamond void.
You would expect East to have something in clubs (although I would bid on that hand at favorable vulnerability if North opened a strong club - which could not happen in the 1930s). However, playing for East to have a club honor or two doesn’t help - there are no possible successful lines when East holds the clubs.
Just thought I would share a fun hand I picked up in our beginners’ rubber bridge last night. It was game all at the time and we were 0 vs 90 below the line in the decider. I had just made a sacrifice of 2S to avoid the opponents making an easy part score, which unfortunately went up to 3S after partner bid 2NT - but only went 2 down, fortunately not doubled. We then defeated the opponents 2H contract to stay in the game. We decided the next deal would be the last whatever happened as a committee meeting was about to start, and I was delighted when my partner (who had picked up nothing all night) opened 1S with me holding the following:
S: K 7 6 5 4
H: 6
D: A
C: A K Q 9 8 7
Immediately I sensed a slam (I may be a beginner but I have read a couple of good books), so I bid 3H, vaguely remembering that in this situation I was supposed to bid the suit in which help was wanted, and I jumped to make sure my partner was aware this was forcing. On reviewing my books afterwards, I see that I should really have made the splinter bid of 4H (100% forcing), or perhaps I could even have gone 4NT (Blackwood) straightaway. As it was, partner responded 4H (presumably they thought I didn’t like spades), I then bid 4NT, and on hearing 5H needed nothing further to go straight to 7S.
The most amusing part for me was that my partner, who was competent but not that confident, found themselves playing the grand slam that I had bid with very little provocation! However, she had to admit on seeing dummy that I was right, and indeed 13 tricks were laydown (well, easy to say as dummy - I didn’t check very carefully and had I been declarer, no doubt I could have found a way to foul it up).
I think that ideally the bidding should have gone 1S - 4H - 4NT - 5H - 7S. Thoughts?
You can take immediate control and bid Blackwood yourself. All you care about is the AS and AH. Assuming you are playing that a 1S opening guarantees at least 5 spades, you do not even care about the QS. Hence:
I agree. In hands where you’re not certain where you want to go, it’s best to describe your hand and get information back from your partner.
Here, you don’t care what your partner knows about your hand. What you need is information from him, in this case, the two aces.
Think about it another way - and here’s a good tip to ALWAYS think about when bidding - “if I bid X, what are the most likely responses from partner?”
OK, so you bid 4H telling partner about your singleton. Now what? Will partner respond by telling you about his Ace of spades? No, because there’s no way for him to do so.
Will partner get excited and bid blackwood, hoping for slam? Unlikely. Look at your hand. You have all the high cards. It’s unlikely partner’s going to go exploring when he doesn’t have diamonds or clubs controlled.
Will partner cuebid? If so, the best case scenario is a 5d bid which tells you nothing about what you really want to know: hearts and spades.
No. No response to 4H would ever get you what you want. So just bid the bid that gets you the information you need.
Big assumption about the five-card spades if you’re playing Acol. :dubious: At times like this it’s helpful to have the 5NT Grand Slam force in your arsenal. Then you can bid 4NT and after 5H, you bid 5NT which tells partner to bid 7S if they have two of the top three trumps, 6S otherwise. This avoids the queasy experience of finding that you have to guess where the Queen is with nine trumps.
Note that you should only bid Grand Slams which are heavily odds-on to make - if you go one down you’re not just conceding the penalty points for one under, you’ve also pissed away the game (or the rubber) and the small slam bonus.
3H, in the system I know, is forcing to game over 1S and shows a Heart suit…
When I played Acol, I still played 5-card spade suits. However, I see that Dead Cat has a UK location and therefore might well be playing Acol with 4-card spade suits.
Unfortunately, 5NT after 4NT is not the Grand Slam Force - it asks for Kings. There is a solution, though - best is to play 4NT as Roman Key Card Blackwood, where there are 5 “aces” - the 4 aces plus the king of trumps, and you can find out about the queen of trumps. After 4NT, the responses would be:
5C = 3 or 0 aces
5D = 4 or 1 aces
5H = 2 aces, without the queen of trumps
5S = 2 aces with the queen of trumps
Playing 4-card major openings, the situation gets trickier. If opener has a 5-card spade suit, then you do not need the queen of trumps. Axxxx opposite Kxxxx will play for no losers 78% of the time, which is good enough to bid a grand slam on. And if partner turns out to have the jack, then the odds rise to 89% So you could possibly try something else first (e.g. 3C) to see if partner shows a 5-card spade suit. However, the danger there is that partner bids 3NT and now you have a problem - he does not know about your spade support and if you bid 4NT now it would be natural, not Blackwood.
Note that if you choose to bid 4NT immediately over 1S, then partner could choose to show the QS even if he does not have it, if he has extra length to compensate. However, there is some danger in that on this hand as you could only have 4 spades, so would partner want to pretend to have the QS and get to a grand with Axxxx opposite Kxxx? That’s not good odds.
I don’t play enough to have a regular partner and a convention card, but I’ve seen RKCB and the Grand Slam force used together[sup]1[/sup] - you just have to decide in advance that you’re not going to play 5NT as King-asking. With the given hands, RKCB would be just the job as you need only know about the missing Aces and Queen of trumps - you already know about the only Kings you’re interested in.
Would odds of 78% be good enough for the grand? The payoff’s less than 2-1 better than the small slam…
[sup]1[/sup]One of David Bird’s bridge-playing-monk stories had the Witchdoctor forgetting the convention and landing the Parrot in a grand slam with an ace missing and a shortage of kings, thinking the Parrot was responding to regular Blackwood instead of RKCB/Grand Slam force. The Parrot made it anyway…
While you could have that agreement, I am not sure why anyone would. RKCB includes a queen ask. If you have 2 “aces”, the presence of the queen is shown also. If you have any other number of aces, a bid of the next suit up asks about the queen of trumps.
1S - 4NT
5D - 5H (have you got the trump queen?)
5S (no)
5C/D/H (yes, and the K of the specified suit as my lowest King)
At duplicate, yes. At rubber, I really don’t know - I never play rubber bridge. I suspect the odds have to be better for a grand slam in rubber than duplicate teams, because in the latter the IMP scale compresses the margin. It’s even harder to assess for matchpoint pairs.
If we just look at the points awarded in duplicate scoring, and assume we are vulnerable, bidding 7S gets 2210 versus 1460 for 6S+1, a gain of 750 points. If 7S goes one down (undoubled) we lose 100 points instead of scoring 1430 for 6S. Hence we have risked 1530 to gain 750. This suggests that we would want the grand slam to be better than 67%
You can play Grand Slam force in conjuction with royal keycard blackwood. But the key is that 5NT is the first bid made, skipping 4NT entirely. It’s not made to go after 4NT for two reasons
after 4NT you’re asking for kings with 5NT
with RKCB, you’ve ALREADY asked for their top three in the trump suit. Because there are already ways to determine whether your partner has the King of trumps or the queen of trumps through RKCB and if you’re bidding 5NT after 4NT and you’re unsure of that information…you’re doing something wrong.
Finally, grand slam force is exceedingly rare. I’ve bid it exactly once in the 15 years I’ve played bridge. It just comes up in books and everyone knows about it because it’s a cool gadget, it’s not hard to remember, it doesn’t take the place of another convention, and authors love showing hands where you’ve got tons of points. But you’re about 500 times more likely to need to know about your partner’s kings than you would need to employ the GSF.
Thanks for the responses. I think that I may have mis-stated my spades - I have a feeling that I actually had QS instead of one of the small ones, which would explain why I was so confident of the grand slam after partner’s 5H response to Blackwood. But sticking to the hand I originally posted, thanks for the tips there. Yes, I play basic acol so partner could have had only a 4-card spade suit. However, if they did they likely had 15+ points (otherwise they would have opened 1NT with 4 spades, I would think) which would help to compensate. As it was, I knew we had at least a 9 card fit, likely 10.
Good point about the splinter bid being redundant in this situation (and I have already said that 3H was clearly wrong - it was intended to be a splinter, but I got the level wrong). The only good thing about it was that at least it didn’t prevent us reaching the right contract.
I will “upgrade” to RKCB at some point but at this stage in my bridge career I don’t play very often, and there is loads of other more basic stuff I need to learn before I add gadgets that only crop up rarely.
Bonus question on a different subject: if you are declarer with 9 trumps including the AJ in one hand and K10 in the other, should play out the AK for the Q to drop, or finesse against the Q? My basic analysis tells me that if the opponents have not bid and you do not know which way to take the finesse, it becomes 50-50 for the finesse, and the drop is better odds than that. But if one of the opponents has bid, might it be worth finessing through them on the assumption that they are more likely to have the Q?
If there are no other factors, the drop is slightly better than 50% However, you should also take into account what you know about the opponents hands from the bidding and play of the cards so far in the hand. For example, if you are missing 12 points and one opponent has opened one 12-14 no trump, clearly that opponent holds the Q.
Similarly for allowing for distribution. Let us say you are playing in spades after right-hand opponent has opened a weak 2H, showing six of them. LHO leads a heart and you see that you and dummy have five hearts, so LHO has two. LHO has 11 unknown cards (or “vacant spaces”) and RHO has 7 vacant spaces. LHO has more space available in which to hold the QS, so you should cash the first spade trick in hand and lead towards dummy. If only small spades have appeared so far, you know that LHO had 2 hearts and at least 2 spades, leaving 9 vacant spaces that could be the QS. RHO has 6 vacant spaces as you now about six hearts and have seen one spade. At this point the odds are 60:40 in favour of the finesse.
There’s a cute saying: eight ever, nine never.
It’s basically a shorthand for saying that if you have nine trumps, it’s better to play the AK in hopes of the Q dropping than to try to guess which way to finesse. Mathematically, it’s more likely that the split will be 3-1 rather than 2-2. But since you don’t know who has the 3 and who has the 1 (it’s just as likely to go either way), the best chance you have is to play for the drop.
Now, there are exceptions to this, including counting out the hand or points, like amarone stated. Another exception is when you need to keep a particular opponent off the lead, so you finesse into the other opponent accepting the risk that you may be giving up the Q when it’s 2-2.
But most of the time, the premise is going to hold true: eight ever, nine never. Stick with that and you’ll never be terribly wrong.