A BRIDGE TOO FAR

I'm not good... I'm actually extremely mediocre

But you know the old saying: "Those that can't do teach"

I do have lots of knowledge and experience about the game, so feel free to pick my brain.

We'll pik away. Let's not forget, this is a debate forum, so if anyone disagrees let them step up and fire away.
Thanks so much Mezzie

My pleasure

And remember, there's a danger in debating about bridge bidding, for the simple reason that different people play different systems, and both sides might be right (or wrong!) within the framework of their own system!

Yes, that describes our political discussions perfectly

hehe, nice observation

TAP TAP TAP

Oh Mr Bridge Guru!

Yesterday I was playing in a tournament and the following occurred:

My p opened with a pass. I had 6sp, 5cl, 2d's and a void in hearts. I bid a spade. My LHO bid 2H. Pass pass and I in a moment of clarity bid 3H's! My p bid 6 spades and we made +1. A TOP!

My discovery of the cue bid leads me to ask you. What are some guidelines to cue bidding? Points , shape etc

Wow, nice result

What was the high-card distribution of your hand? And the loser count?

The reason I'm asking is because a lot of people misbid shapely hands with weakish suits.

ie.

Holding:
KQJTxx
-
xx
AKxxx

Sure, it's only 13 HCP, but you only have 3 losers, and you want to be in game with this hand, so a 3-heart cuebid was a creative way to get your pd's attention. Others would have simply bid 4C, to both force game and describe the shape of the hand. Note that since you want to be in game for sure, 3C is NOT a good alternative. Also, note that this hand is NOT a strong 2C opener. You'd get in a lot of trouble more often than not by opening this 2C.

On the other hand, if you held something like:

AQTxxx
-
Kx
KJTxx

Again, 13 HCP, but this time your spades are not self-sufficient, so you don't want to force game with this hand. A simple 3C would have been a better option.

Now to move on to your question about cue-bids.

Cue-bidding is a HUGE topic that obviously can't be covered in a simple post.

There are two major uses of cue-bidding in the sense that you're asking:

1. To show strength
2. To show a particular control

Sticking to 1. for the time being...

When to cue-bid?
- when you want to tell your pd you have a strong hand and you want him to keep bidding either for at least one more round or until game is reached (usually the latter)

ex 1. Cue-bidding as responder

You hold:

KJxx
x
AJxx
Qxxx

Your pd opens 1S, and the next player overcalls 2H.

1S-2H-?

In this situation, you know you want to end up in game at least, and maybe slam. Bidding 4S directly says: "I want to be in game, and that's it. I have no slam interest". Bidding 3S could mean a couple of things depending on your system, but usually it's interpreted as either a limit raise (11-12 points and spade support) inviting game, or a weak bid trying to steal the auction, with no game interest. Of course, 2S would be out of the question. The alternatives are: bid a new suit, or double. Here, what you really want to tell your pd is: I want to be in at least game, and I'm interested in slam, and I have spade support. Bidding a new suit doesn't get that job done, but cue-bidding opponents' suit does. So bid 3H, and your pd will get the message.

ex. 2 Cue-bidding in a search for 3NT

Sometimes, you know you want to be in game, but your fit is in a minor suit, so you'd like to aim for the 9-trick 3NT game instead of the 11-trick minor-suit game.

You hold:

Kxx
xxx
AKxx
KJx

The bidding goes:

1D-1H-?

Here, you have no suit to bid, you can't bid NT, and you don't want to raise diamonds just yet. The solution? Cue-bid 2H, showing a game-going hand and asking your pd if he has a heart stopper. If he does, he can bid NT. If not, he'll bid another suit or rebid diamonds, and you can next raise the diamonds, likely ending up in 5 or 6 diamonds.

Note the difference between the minor-suit and major-suit auctions!

ex. 3 - Cue-bidding as opener to show a huge hand

In this situation, responder has passed throughout the auction, but opener is still interested in keeping things alive. Typically, opener wasn't strong enough to open 2C (or whatever strong bids you use). He'll usually hold a 2-suited hand, and doesn't feel simply bidding the 2nd suit says enough.

In general, it's unwise to open 2C with a 2-suiter, by the way, because there's too little room to find your best fit.

The example for this one would be the auction you gave in your question and my comments at the beginning of this post.

----------------
General guidelines for cue-bidding to show strength:

1. You are forcing your pd to bid, so you must be strong enough to be forcing to that particular level.

For example, in your auction, you were essentially forcing your pd to the game level, so your hand should have been strong enough to make game all by itself, assuming a doubleton of trump support.

As responder, your pd has already opened, so you needn't have as much strength. Limit-raise strength or better is necessary to be cue-bidding.

2. Don't cue-bid if you have a better alternative!

If you know what you want the final contract to be, bid it. If you want more information from your pd, cue-bid.

3. Regarding shape, if you are responder and your pd has opened a major suit and opponents overcall, your cue-bid shows EITHER: a game-going hand with good trump support, OR an AMAZING hand without trump support necessarily, but no other good bid.

----------------------------

Other topics we could discuss:

1. Cue-bids in control-showing auctions
2. Michaels' cue-bid (shape showing bid)
3. Doubling and then cue-bidding

Let me know

TBG

Oh, one more thing. I just looked back at the auction you gave...

If it really went

p-p-1S-2H
p-p-3H-p
6S-p-p-p

then your pd must not have evaluated his hand properly. I would guess that your 1S opener improved his hand significantly, and after the 2H overcall, HE should have cue-bid 3H right then and there, to show a limit-raise+ hand in support of spades. If that did happen, then that would have initiated a CONTROL-showing cue-bidding auction, and you still could have reached the slam.

TBG

Whew...gonna take a little while to digest, but I found it very clarifying. I think Michaels is gonna be a good topic because it seems to me that it gives a ton of info in one bid. Until next time:

Thanks Bridge Guru!

Mezzie- Welcome to a2k. Your brother is one of my favorites... quite a character. Hope you hang around. I'm glad he invited you here.

In college I minored in bridge (heh heh) and played duplicate every Monday night for at least two years. I even had a tiny percentage of Master points. Geez, I was so proud of my little card! Then I hardly played at all for a gazillion years until this February when Mr.P and I spent most of our vacation in Mexico playing with my sis & her husband. They're still in the learning stage but know just enough to be scary. It was fun. Mr.P is a good player and very easy-going (which makes it a little odd that we never play). I did have one desperate moment where I ended up playing a contract in clubs after I had tried early on to ask my sis for hearts or spades. Had to give up trying to get her to stop bidding those durn clubs and just left the contract at 5 Clubs, which was down 2, or maybe 3. She LOVED those clubs! Later it turned out she had a four-card major suit, but didn't want to bid it because, she said, she felt uncomfortable playing with only four cards. LOL So I played with, I think two little ones in my hand.

When I played duplicate bridge there were some people who argued that nearly every contract should either be in a major suit or no-trump... they'd only bid minor suits if there was no other way.

In duplicate the most important contracts were bidding those slams correctly. In contract bridge it seems like the importance is on the game and who is vulnerable... concepts I still don't quite get, but n'mind. I don't really care who wins as long as I play ok.

I agree that any reasonable system should work most of the time as long as you and your partner are playing the same one. My old partner & I used to bid 2C as a high point hand, leaving 2 in the other suits for long holdings -- that was quite a new approach. <grin> My favorite book then was The Play of the Hand. I loved the concepts of transportation and promoting tens.

Do people still say that the team lined up with the bathtub is the one with the luck?

I remember that if I had four or more in a suit, I was supposed to play my fourth card first and that somehow cued partner as to who had what. Can you explain that?

My pleasure

TBG

Way over my head all of it.

Hi Piffka,

sorry I didn't notice your post sooner, we must have overlapped!

I'm glad to hear you're back into bridge

Let me say a couple of things about your post:

1. Find an easy-going person (and group) to play with!

You're lucky Mr. P is easy-going because in general it's advised that married couples don't play together to avoid friction.

2. Remember bridge is a partnership game!

In other words, don't fall too much in love with your own hand! Just because you have a long suit doesn't mean it should end up as the trump suit. Listen to your partner's bids! In general, if you open a suit and rebid it, you'll have 6 or more (occasionally only 5 if it's a minor). If you rebid a suit 3 times, then you'll have 7. When you simply respond to your partner's bid, you'll have 4+ and rebids confirm 5, 6, etc.

Keeping all that in mind, let's say your partner opens 1H and you hold:

S KQxxxx
H xx
D AQx
C x

Of course you respond 1S. Then let's say your partner rebids 2H. What next? Well, what do you know about your partner's hand? When he opened 1H, he promised 5. Since he REBID hearts (instead of bidding 1NT or 2 of a minor), he MUST have at least 6. How many combined hearts do you have? Since you have 2, then you have 8+ combined hearts. That's a trump fit! So forget about your spades, and just bid 4H. There's absolutely NO REASON to repeat your long suit once you've found another major-suit fit. All it does is confuse your partner and give the opponents unnecessary information.

3. At duplicate, avoid minor-suit games!

Duplicate is a very different animal from contract bridge. Since every table plays the same hands over the course of the evening, the only score that matters is how well you do compared to everyone else HOLDING THE SAME CARDS. So let's say you're sitting N/S and you bid and make 5C non-vulnerable. That's worth 400 points at duplicate. But let's say that at every other table, the N/S holding the same cards bid 3NT and make 4 (10 tricks vs. 11 for making 5C). They get 430 points. What does that mean? You might think: well, that's not a big deal, it's only 30 points! Unfortunately it's a HUGE deal. The way scoring works at duplicate, your scores are compared to the scores of those at other tables, NOT your own opponents! You get 1 point for every other N/S pair you beat, no matter by how much, and 0 points for those that beat you (1/5 point for those you tie).

In the above case, let's say there were 6 tables, and the scores for the N/S pairs were:

You: 5C making 5 - 400
table 2: 3NT making 4 - 430
table 3: 3NT making 3 - 400
table 4: 3NT making 4 - 430
table 5: 3NT making 5 - 460
table 6: 5C down 1 - -50

So you beat 1 pair and tied another, for 1.5 points. Notice the pair at table 5. They beat all 5 other pairs, for 5 points. That's the maximum, or "top" score on a hand in a 6-table game. Your final score is calculated by dividing your points by the total # of available points. On this hand, you'd get 1.5/5, or 30%. That's a terrible score An average score is 50%. Total scores usually range from about 40%-60%, with 60% winning and 40% coming in last.

Since minor suit contracts require 11 tricks to make game, and NT contracts only require 9, it's often the case that if you can make 11 minor-suit tricks, you can make 9 or 10 NT tricks, and 3NT+1 is worth more than 5C making 5, or even 5C making 6! Also, if you're in 5 of a minor, you're really gambling that slam CAN'T be made. Many pairs, if they find themselves in 5 of a minor, will often just bid 6 because they know they're not going to get a good score.

Hope that all made sense!

4. Leading 4th best

If you hold a long, broken suit, then consistently leading your 4th-best gives your partner information about what you and declarer hold. Think of it this way, let's say your partner leads 4th-best, say the 4 of clubs, and dummy shows:

S xxx
H Kxxx
D Axxx
C 59

And let's say you hold:

S Kx
H xxx
D xxxxx
C KT7x

OK, so your partner led the 4 of clubs. Since that is your partner's 4th-best, he must have 3 clubs higher than the 4. What are the clubs higher than the 4? They are: 5 6 7 8 9 T J Q K A. Dummy holds the 5 and 9, and you hold the K, T and 7. That leaves the 6 8 J Q A. Let's say you play the king, and declarer wins with the Ace. That leaves the 6 8 J Q. Your partner must hold 3 of those! That gives you a ton of information.

The simple way of calculating is just subtract the number of the card led from 11. Here, that yields 11-4=7. 7 is the total number of that suit higher than the card led left in everyone else's hands. Since you have 3 of them and dummy had 2, that means declarer has 2 clubs higher than the 4, one of which ends up being the ace.

Note that 4th-best leads ONLY apply when your suit is broken. If your suit is: KQJxx, DON'T lead 4th-best, lead the king! Always lead the top of touching honors: K from KQ, Q from QJ, etc. Also, at SUIT contracts, NEVER underlead an ace!!!

Hope that all made sense

TBG

Thank you bridge guru. Let me just add that some of these answers might not be fathomable right now but since they enter a thread vault they are easy to bring up later, perhaps when you understand more. Also, there has been confusion as to the title of this thread and I would like to change it to "Ask The Duplicate Bridge Guru" if there are no objections.

Hi Mezzie!
I'm not really back into bridge... we haven't played since we got home... but it is fun to talk about. I'm unlikely to play either until I visit that sister again! I did enjoy it though and remembered most things.

I'm a cautious bidder and would be very unlikely to rebid a suit that my opening partner had ignored unless I had honors and six or more. (Oh, wouldn't that be a pretty hand?)


I forgot this... and I might continue to forget it unless you tell me a good reason why I shouldn't. My memory is horrible and I'd rather use it to be counting cards than keep things straight about how good my honors are if I keep the higher(est) of any touching honors.

Thanks for the explanation of the 4th card drop. What confuses me is why it is 11? And that should only be with a first lead? What about a first drop?

I do think I like duplicate best to "hone" the game, but contract is (or can be) more fun.

So... tell us more about teaching bridge. Where, why, when?

Piffka

Feel free to change the forum name to whatever you like I'll just be dropping in from time to time, so the discussion should be able to range away from just asking questions to me...

---------------------

Piffka, here's a bit more on opening leads:

1. Leading top of an honor sequence.

When you make an opening lead, you may have 1 of 3 objectives:
a. set up winners in your own hand
b. set up winners in your partner's hand
c. lead passively, so as not to give up an unncessary trick

We'll ignore (c) for now, and concentrate on (a) and (b).

Let's say you have no idea what your partner holds (ie. no clues from the bidding), and you have to make an opening lead against 4S.

You hold:

S xx
H KQJx
D Qxxx
C xxx

(a) setting up your own winners
What do you lead? Well, you have 2 suits with honors, but your king of hearts is SUPPORTED by the queen, so it's a stronger holding. What do I mean by SUPPORTED? Well, let's say you lead the king of hearts. Someone else will win with the ace. But you now have the Q and J set up as winners. Yay!

Now let's say you led your 4th best heart instead. Oops! Unless your partner has the A or T (10), you have just given the opponents a cheap trick!

The moral of the story... When you lead an honor, make sure you have the next lowest honor! A nice corollary is that if your partner leads a king, you KNOW he also must hold the queen, so you can lead the suit again later to cash your trick.

(b) setting up your partner's winners
Now let's say instead that your partner has bid diamonds at some point during the same auction, so you want to lead his suit. Which diamond do you choose? You might think you could lead an honor here, because your partner has bid them. Think again! Say the diamond suit is like this:

Jxx

Qxxx ATxxx
Kx

If you lead the queen, then declarer gets 2 diamond tricks (try this yourself with real cards!). If you lead low, declarer only gets 1 diamond trick.

So, to sum up, lead top of touching honors if you have them, otherwise lead your 4th best.

2. Why 11?

Every suit has 13 cards: 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 T J Q K A

Let's say you hold: KT852

Being a good partner, you lead the 5 (4th best).

The rule says: Subtract the value of the card led from 11, yielding the number of cards the other 3 players hold higher than the led card. 11-5=6.

Notice that there are 3 cards lower than the 5 and 9 cards higher than the 5. Of those 9 cards higher than the 5, you have promised 3 exactly (your lead was 4th best, remember?). That leaves 6 for the other 3 players. So we know our rule works, but why?

Well, there are 12 cards in the suit besides the one you led. So why not subtract from 12 instead of 11? Because aces are high. The lowest card in each suit is a 2, not a 1. If you played aces low (please don't!), then we would have the Rule of 12 instead of the Rule of 11, and it would be much more transparent

3. When does the Rule of 11 apply?

As long as a lead is 4th best, and no-one has made any discards, the rule applies. It could be the opening lead, or any other lead afterwards.

As for discards, the Rule of 11 doesn't apply at all. Rather, the very first time you have to make a discard, throw a high card in a suit you like, or a low card in a suit you don't like. Obviously you won't throw your highest card (like an ace!); rather throw the highest SPOT card you can afford without costing a trick (2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 are spot cards, T J Q K A are honors). If you have a suit like: KQJT98, you can throw the K to promise the Q and all lower honors; DON'T throw the 9 in this case.

Make sense?

Hope so!

TBG

Why eleven? My approach would probably have been the Spinal Tap philosophy: "But this goes to eleven."

Jeez Cav, You're ranging particularly far today.

Checking in, although I'm in need of Bridge for Dummies. It's been 15 years since I played and I never learned how to bid effectively.