Just found a wonderful bridge blog and ezine from Maggy Simony, a 91-year-old who is interested in bridge history and how to keep people playing our wonderful game. She has some very good ideas. Check it out http://bridgetable.net/e-zine/
Playing with a new partner the other night I bid 2NT in competition in this auction:
RHO me LHO partner
1!C Pass 1!S Double
2!S 2NT Pass
If you were my partner what would you think that meant?
I recently wrote a suit symbol plugin for WordPress which is active on this site. Put an exclamation point in front of the suit letter: C, D, H, or S in your posts and comments to get a pretty suit symbol – !C !D !H !S .
I have moved all the free Bridge lesson material that was in the Bridge area on KittyCooper.com to this site. Well almost all of it. Let me know if you miss anything. It is all free to use, just credit me.
For those of you who enjoy my lectures at Western regionals, my next one will be “Preempting” at the Scottsdale regional in October 2011.
I spent ten years in the 1990s teaching two or three club series a year (now called the ACBL Bridge Series) to adults in NYC (Greenwich Village) and really enjoyed it. I did it as a ten lesson series, stretching the first lesson into two lessons to add more play time and including point count at the end of the new second lesson. I also took lesson five, finesses and opener’s rebids, and made it into two lessons. First I did opener’s rebids using the hands from lesson two in the diamond series. Then the following week, a bidding review, followed by finesses using the lesson five club series hands. Most adults find finesses very difficult so we needed to spend a lot of time on it.
Bridge Winners includes an online ACBL convention card editor! Articles on the nationals, pictures, beginner and intermediate articles and much more … it is a social networking site for tournament bridge players with 3800 members as of today.
And for those of you who did not know this, my other job besides bridge is web developer (I own Open Sky Web Design) and we helped build that site. Some of the features there, like suit symbols in posts, will be available here and for sale (inexpensively) to add to your own blogs.
Everyone knows the adage “eight ever, nine never” which refers to finessing for the queen of trumps. I recently received this question about it, which is answered below.
Why do you play for the Queen to drop when you have nine trumps, isn’t a 3-1 split more likely than a 2-2?
It is true that when you are missing four cards, a 3-1 split is more likely than a 2-2 split. However a specific 2-2 split is more likely than a specific 3-1. When you cash the Ace and lead towards the KJ and everyone follows, there are only two possible cases left, the 3-1 where the queen is finessable and the 2-2 where the queen is dropping. Read on for a fuller explanation of why the 2-2 is more likely.
I. Controls plus Tricks can produce slam on less than 33 points
Point count is not very accurate with unbalanced hands that have a good fit. Tricks and controls, or controls with distribution and lots of trump are the hand types that make slam easily with less than 33 points. Here are the two hands from the post on slam bidding repeated to illustrate this point. Notice how the well-placed shortness makes slam on both of them.
| West | East | West | East | |
| !S AJ3 | !S KQ10987 | !S AJ987 | !S KQ1065 | |
| !H KQJ1085 | !H A97 | !H 4 | !H A9854 | |
| !D A3 | !D 965 | !D A7652 | !D 5 | |
| !C85 | !C6 | !CA7 | !C63 |
I. Responding to partner’s one of a major opening
When partner opens one of a major and you have three cards or more in support then you know you have an eight card fit. When you first learned bridge your teacher undoubtedly told you to raise your partner immediately when you know you have a golden fit and show your point range at the same time as follows:
|
Point Range |
Category |
Raise to the |
|
6-10 |
Minimum |
2 level |
|
11-12 |
Medium |
3 level |
|
13-16 |
Maximum |
game |
This is all well and good, but for slam bidding, having a nine card or longer fit is more likely to produce the extra tricks. Also when you have four card support, you have more trumps to ruff with, so a trump lead can no longer hurt you. Thus more advanced players change their stronger responses to discriminate between having 3 or 4+ card support. This means a limit raise, the raise of the major to three, requires at least four trump. So with only three card support, you bid a new suit first and then jump raise.
II. Making a Game Forcing Raise: Jaoby 2NT
With game going values or better and four card trump support, we use a special convention called the Jacoby 2NT. It was invented by the great games player Oswald Jacoby. The bid of 2NT in response to partner’s opening bid of one of a major shows at least 4 trump and 13+ points in support. This leaves the whole three level and much of the four level for exploring for slam. Now you can use the immediate raise to four of the major for preemptive hands, hands with five or more trump and not the high card points for game
I SLAM TRIES IN SUIT AUCTIONS: CUE-BIDDING
Point count is not very accurate with unbalanced hands that have a fit. Tricks and controls, or controls with distribution and lots of trump are the hand types that make slam easily with less than 33 points. For example, the following two deals both make slam and neither has the required points.
| West | East | West | East | ||||||
| !S AJ !H KQ10652 !D A3 !C 85 |
!S KQ10987 !H A97 !D 965 !C 6 |
!S AJ987 !H 4 !D A7652 !C A7 |
!S KQ1065 !H A9854 !D 5 !C 63 |
||||||