Mandatory Falsecard

I played in a junior match today with ch00 that was especially fun because we were treated with great teammates... Roger Lee and Jeremy Fournier, another pair for or squad in Philadelphia.

Here is a slam hand from the match that contained a fairly common theme:



Take note of Roger's nice play of the Spade Nine on the first round of trumps. This gave North, Dana Berkowitz, a chance to misplay the suit by crossing to hand and finessing East out of a hypothetical initial holding of Jxxx, which resulted in a swing for our team when Jason made an overtrick. So what's the correct play?

The answer to this question--like many--is: it depends. If Roger Lee is sitting West, then you should play him to have started with an initial holding of J9xx. The reason is that a good player sitting in the West seat will always play the nine on the first round of trumps in this position, otherwise you can hardly go wrong. J9xx is exactly 3 times as likely an initial holding as stiff 9 since there are 3 ways West can hold J9xx and only one way they can hold a singleton 9; therefore, it's 3 times more likely that they're playing the 9 from J9xx. If a poor player is sitting West, however, then it's correct to play East for Jxxx since West would probably never find the falsecard even though this is the quintessential mandatory falsecard position. If the caliber of the player is somewhere in between, then you have to judge whether West will find the play of the 9 from J9xx more than 33% of the time before you can determine the correct play.

Nice play, Roger!

Challenge the Champs

Jason and I haven't been playing many hands lately. However, we have had the opportunity to bid a few Challenge the Champs hands, which are good practice to help straighten out the few areas that need straightening in a simplistic system such as ours.

Some time ago I was lucky enough to come into possession of a collection of old Bridge Worlds. I had some duplicates and sent them along to Jason.  The current batch of hands we've been working on come from 1978. Contestants include Becker-Rubin, Hayden-Kasle, the couple Capplletti, Woolsey-Robinson, Hamman-Wolff and Kemp-Rapaport (who had a nice run this year). This is from the period where the champs actually stayed on until they were defeated. The Master Solvers' Club panel was comprised of Billy Eisenberg, Edwin Kantar, Theodore Lightner, Marshall Miles, Richard Pavlicek, Alvin Roth, Ira Rubin and stalwart Carl Hudecek, amongst others.

Here are a few of kf00's travails from May '78.



Here is a hand where I need to have better judgment to make up for our partnership's lack of bidding agreements. The hand is centered around one card, the queen of spades. The top spot is 7S (which will succeed against no diamond ruff and spades 4-2 or better), but Jason and I arrived in 6D like both the contestant pairs, which was worth 5/10 Matchpoints. To make a long story short, if Jason doesn't have the spade queen we might very well be too high already. The contract's prospects most likely hinge upon whether he is 3163 or 2164. As such, I should probably bid either 6NT--in which I can count 12 tricks slightly more than 50% with the former distribution--or 6S, looking for grand if Jason does have the spade queen. I argued that perhaps Jason should have bid more, since I know he doesn't have the king of clubs by his failure to bid 4C when afforded the opportunity. I'm sure he knows the queen of spades is a very key card, but it may not be enough in his eyes to go higher.

The Fall of The Junior

Summer's coming to a close and the contest for the Ortiz-Patino trophy is less than 50 days away. This fall will be my last as a junior playing for the USA. It's been four years the the United States has won a Junior Championship. What else can I say? I want to win.

Jason and I finished putting together our WBF Convention Card last night. For anyone who's interested in seeing what a WBF CC looks like, you can find ours here. There are many features about the WBF card that are far superior to the ACBL convention card, in my opinion. These include:

1) A section for bids the opponents absolutely must know about.
2) A note about psychic tendencies (gasp!)
3) An extensive section on defensive carding, an area that is very poor on the ACBL card
4) Stress on defensive and competitive bidding.
5) Easy chart for common, uncontested sequences
6) The encouragement of including supplementary notes.

Items 3 and 4, especially, are key, in my opinion. These are the calls that opponents actually need to know during an auction in which they intend on bidding. Half of the ACBL card, it seems, is essentially a template for players to brag about how many conventions they play. These are bids that can easily be explained at the conclusion of the auction.

You'll notice that nearly the entire WBF card is devoid of an area in which you can tell everyone you play the latest Bergen gadget, or how many artificial ways you have to raise partner. It's not about conventions, it's about bridge.