May
31

Simply Complex

On Tuesday night I listened as the Mad Scientist offered a detailed, impassioned explanation of McCabe redoubles to his partner, Washington. Washington knows and, more to the point, understands more conventions than most players even if he spurns the vast majority of them. And while I’d wager that he plays more conventions with TMS than with any of his other partners, when the disquisition drew to a close with the phrase: “It costs nothing,” Washington’s reply was still, “We’re not playing that.”

Yesterday I set TMS off on more or less the same explanation when I arrived at his table and asked a specific question about the redouble. His partner today was another good player, again someone who knows more conventions than the average player, and again his description ended with “It costs nothing,” this time with a hand gesture indicating a zero and the reply was exactly the same, “We’re not playing that.”

While I wasn’t able to find an exact match for what he was describing (TMS has a well-established transfer fetish, so it seems plausible that he added that feature on his own — but it is actually useful to be able to give partner information on the quality of responder’s holding in his/her suit), Methods 2 & 3 here come pretty close. Both of those methods are indisputably simple.

This is the somewhat more complicated version that TMS was describing with transfers (translated from Madly Scientific Bridge-ese to just Bridge-ese, you can thank me later):

After ones RHO makes a take-out double of partner’s pre-emptive opening bid (I could make it more complicated than he was by noting that this could apply after a pre-emptive over-call and a negative double too, but I wouldn’t dream of it), a redouble shows the next ranking suit (either a single-suited hand or that suit plus partner’s or simply lead directing).

Any bid of NT is natural or systemic (i.e. typically 3NT is to play while 2NT is Ogust or feature asking).

Suit bids are transfers to the next suit in line and are also lead directing (again showing a single-suited hand or both that suit and partner’s or simply lead directing).

A “transfer” to partner’s suit shows the ace or king in partner’s suit telling them it is safe to lead (or even under-lead) their holding.

Lastly and leastly, a direct raise of partner’s suit shows length but denies having either the ace or king.

Okay, so that does sound kind of complicated, it’s simpler when one looks at an example:

2♥-(X)-?

XX = Spades or Spades + Hearts or Hearts wanting a Spade lead
2♠ = Clubs or Clubs + Hearts or Hearts wanting a Club lead
2NT/3NT = unchanged
3♣= Diamonds or Diamonds + Hearts or Hearts wanting a Club lead
3♦ = Hearts with the ace or king
3♥ = Hearts without the ace or king

3♦-(X)-?

XX = Hearts or Hearts + Diamonds or Diamonds wanting a Heart lead
3♥ = Spades or Spades + Diamonds or Diamonds wanting a Spade lead
3♠ = Clubs or Clubs + Diamonds or Diamonds wanting a Club lead
3NT = Unchanged
4♣ = Diamonds with the ace or king
4♦ = Diamonds without the ace or king

So does the McCabe redouble really cost nothing (aside from the requisite minimum of three disasters one has whenever adding a new convention)? Well, one gives up the ability to redouble for penalty after partner’s opening pre-empt but the value of that is so marginal as to be almost non-existent. (If one really had a penalty redouble, most opponents would be with it enough to bid something.) As conventions go, this is as close to cost free as one is likely to find.

So why is it that not all bridge players want to play every good convention that comes their way?

Those of us who engage in promiscuity bridge-wise do so at our own peril when it comes to remembering which conventions we play with which partner. So even adding a helpful, relatively easy to remember convention is tough if you’re only adding it with one of several partners.

Then there’s the issue that one person’s “simple” is another person’s OMGWTFBBQ?!?! But this isn’t a static characteristic. I remember when my bridge teacher first introduced us to Stayman. I was right there with him until he mentioned the existence of the garbage-variety. At that moment I remember quite clearly thinking that I was never going to be able to get a hang of it. My brain kicked the information it wasn’t processing into a deep, dark recess somewhere and a few months later something brought it back to mind and I went to my notes and there was Garbage Stayman and it seemed so simple and logical that I was surprised that a few months earlier I hadn’t understood it.

I attended some classes held by one of the experts at our club. I have a huge amount of respect for him as a player, but he isn’t big on teaching conventions even though he is hugely knowledgeable about them. At some point he was talking about doing away with all the unnecessary conventions that partnerships have. His argument was these would really only help on something like 5% of the hands that one would face … or about one per session. I guess I had my poker face on because he called on me to see if I had something to say about it. What I said was that I wasn’t in it for just twenty-four boards or even a thousand, but that I was in it for the hundred-thousand hands I’d play in my life time and then whether or not I played those conventions would really make a difference. (A conservative estimate of how much I play puts me reaching that 100,000,000 mark in just over 15 years whether or not I’ll actually play that long mostly depends on when one of my partners finally snaps and kills me, but I digress ….) I want to play all the good conventions because I don’t want 5,000 bad results that would otherwise have been avoided. Other people, do not feel as I do.

Mostly it boils down to the same old problem of convention tolerance. My tolerance for filing away new conventions is high because my brain is relatively good at that. I would much rather learn new conventions than, say, work on my declarer play (and it shows). In fact, outside of my adventures with TMS, it is relatively rare for me to forget a convention. But it still happens once in awhile, my partner looks across the table and instead of the usual cool, calm collected girl throwing her bids on the table in an instant sees this:

"What do you mean we play
snap-bunny pancake doubles?"

But it is safe to say that typically (again the big exception is when I’m playing with TMS) my partners are far more likely to forget conventions than I am which makes me very reluctant to thrust the conventions I want to play on them. Even playing mostly (or only) the conventions they want to play, it’s happened repeatedly that they’ve forgotten. One of my favorite examples was with a partner who has a real thing for Puppet Stayman and wanted to play that 3♣ was Puppet over both 2NT and 1NT. I agreed while internally noting that I was going to have to watch for the 1NT-3♣ sequence, lest I forget it. A few rounds in, he opened 2NT. I bid 3♣. He failed to alert my bid (which made me a bit nervous) and bid 3 of a major, long story short, we ended up in a 4-3 fit that didn’t play as well as 3NT would have. I mocked him mercilessly for forgetting his pet convention because I’m mean and he’s particularly fun to mock. But my point is, people forget conventions, even easy conventions and I won’t be introducing McCabe to any of my regular partners anytime soon, but maybe one day because, after all, it doesn’t cost anything.

May
15

Risk

Considering the fact that it rates it’s own line on an ACBL convention card, I continue to be surprised by how few people actually play a gambling 3NT. Perhaps it’s the name, which is actually a misnomer. Gambling is typically frowned upon by bridge players, but the fact is the risk with this convention is minimal and the rewards are substantial. It doesn’t come up that often, but when it has it has almost always been a good result (the exception was once when it came up and my partner passed without stoppers turning the bid into a real gamble — which lost).

To review, a so-called “gambling 3NT” bid is an opening bid of 3NT with a hand that has seven (or more) running cards in a minor suit (for example, AKQJxxx or AKQxxxxx) with no other outside entry1. The idea is that if the suit splits as expected one will take all seven (or more) tricks in that suit; as I’ve said to a lot of students, there are two things that take tricks: high cards and long suits — don’t underestimate long suits. The 3NT bid specifically asks partner to pass if they have stoppers in the other three suits AND at least one card in the suit itself.

How does one know which suit partner has? Well, it will probably be obvious. If responder has one of the top honors in a minor, it isn’t that one. If you are void in a minor, it probably is that one. If you aren’t able to tell, you shouldn’t pass. If as responder one does not have a stopper in one of the other three suits, then one should bid 4♣ asking the opener to pass or correct. If one is void in a minor, one should bid 4♣ asking the opener to pass or correct. If one of the opponents (especially the one on lead) chooses to double 3NT, one should usually bid 4♣ once again asking the opener to pass or correct.

There are uses for bids like 4♥ or 4♠, but this is the gambling 3NT in it’s simplest form — which is to say, it’s not really gambling at all because one can always escape to four of the minor, which if not playing a gambling 3NT, is how most people would have opened their hand to begin with. And now, when one does choose to open their hand 3 or 4♣ or ♦, their partner knows the suit is not solid, but is probably missing one of the top three honors (e.g., KQJxxxx or AQJxxxx). Playing this convention gives one an awful lot of information directly as well as by negative inference.

Perhaps all of this seems overly obvious, but it doesn’t seem to be well understood because I’ve won a lot of IMPS and matchpoints on this bid. On second thought, don’t listen to me. It’s a terrible convention. It’s WAY TOO RISKY and no one should play it (unless, of course, you’re playing with me).

Yesterday one of the exceptions came up. The Mad Scientist opened 3NT and my RHO doubled. In this case I had all three suits well and truly stopped. I was just the tiniest bit nervous about my Qxx in hearts, but now I had a sneaking suspicion where the AK were so I chose to pass. My RHO led the ace of hearts followed by the king and TMS collected his nine tricks for +750.

The opponent who had doubled seemed momentarily confused about how I could always know which minor it was and I explained that holding the AQx of diamonds made it obvious, but that if I had been unable to tell I would have run to 4♣. I also noted that if I really thought he might beat 3NT, I would have been able to run from the double as well. As I said to call it a “gambling 3NT” is quite inaccurate, I make far riskier bids on a regular basis.

1 The first cousin to the “gambling 3NT” is the opening bid of one of a minor followed by jump to 3NT which shows the same quality minor suit, but now with an outside entry. Presumably the opener has 8 tricks in their hand even if partner is void in the minor.

Mar
24

Kaboom

The preemptive nature of playing a weak (12-14 HCP) NT was working like a charm yesterday, keeping the opponents out of their fits on hand after hand that belonged to them. There was only one small problem: the reason it was their hand was because the Mad Scientist kept turning up with nothing and I kept going down too many because the opponents weren’t actually making any games their way. It seemed like every hand I opened in NT ended up in a zero.

Throw in a handful of other bidding mistakes and the fact that even when I did manage to make a contract, the result was mediocre at best, and it was the worst game I’ve had in a long time. As readers of this ‘blog will know, that’s really saying something.

Medic!

Lately there has been some grumbling at the club about the system that TMS and I are playing. The vast majority of the complaints are coming from experienced players and really amount to little more than, “You’re doing this to confuse us!” What follows is addressed to them:

Just how did you think the bidding in this game evolved?

Perhaps when the bridge gods tire of watching us wander around in the desert of “standard” bidding, they bless us with new agreements that rain down from on high?

Or maybe when two bridge players love each other very much … and nine months later a stork appears with a bundle of new conventions dangling from its beak?

Everyone knows that bidding is the part of this game that changes and that it does so almost constantly. It’s a language and like language it evolves. The fact is that “Standard American” isn’t the same as it was ten years ago and it won’t be the same ten years from now. You can wax nostalgic all you want for the good ol’ days of the Goren Bidding System, but that dog won’t hunt. There’s a reason almost no one in duplicate plays that way any more and hasn’t in many years. Any reasonable bridge player can see that while the bidding has become more complex over time, it has also vastly improved.

Since clearly, you’ve never given this any thought, I’ll enlighten you. The way in which bidding systems improve is that there are always a handful of stone-cold weirdos out there playing something new and strange. Some of the things they play will work better than what everyone else is doing, but most of them won’t. Eventually the good players will stop laughing just long enough to cherry pick what’s working and incorporate it into their own systems.

And, for the record, as demonstrated by yesterday’s results, this “crazy” system (which isn’t actually all that crazy, it’s mostly just transfer bids — you do know how to compete over a transfer bid, don’t you?) is much more likely to bite us in the ass than it is to damage you; so when you see us getting into yet another muddled sequence your best bet is just to kick back, relax and collect your matchpoints. You may even catch a glimpse of the future.

Jan
23

The Talking Cure

Yesterday when I walked into the bridge club, almost immediately my teacher stopped what he was saying to his class to tell me that he had installed a couch in the back in case I needed to lie down and talk. Clearly, he had checked the scores from the day before. I said I’d have to book him for at least three hours. He offered to bring the Mad Scientist in for a joint session, but I figured TMS would probably need three hours of his own just to vent about me. Suffices to say, I played the first seven boards and managed to get us a zero on four of them. It didn’t help that I couldn’t get The Rainbow Connection out of my head, “Have you been half asleep? And have you heard voices? I’ve heard them calling my name.” Of course, in at least one case, the voices I was hearing were those of the opponents trashing me as soon as I walked away from the table (people seem to forget that not everyone in a bridge club is losing their hearing); and, let’s face it, it wasn’t as if I’d just given them a bad board.

During that last session we had a somewhat complicated auction utilizing the Mad Scientist’s system (it comes up so rarely that it was notable just for that reason alone) which enabled me to thoroughly describe my hand so that when TMS eventually put us in 3NT, he was not guessing that it was the right spot (he may have been wondering if I knew what the hell I was doing, but that’s another story). Of course, everyone else got to 3NT too, no doubt by way of a much simpler auction. On the bright side, had 6♦ or 4♠ been the right contract our maddening methods would have gotten us there, while everyone else would have been in … 3NT. I don’t know if the opponents were at all impressed when my dummy was precisely what TMS had said it would be when explaining the alerts (and it was pretty damn specific), but I was impressed that the system worked so well. Still it was a struggle just to get to an average result; it was that kind of a day.

Yesterday the results were better, but it was still a struggle. In this case, I was mostly wrestling with a system I know, but that I don’t really get. We’re playing a weak NT and whenever one opens 1♣ or 1♦ it is either a strong NT (15-17 HCP) or an unbalanced hand that is likely to be weak. That’s all fine. The part that throws me is the rebid by opener when there is competition. With no fit and no interference, rebidding 1NT with the big hand and 2♣/♦ with the weak, shapely hand makes perfect sense. But here’s a hand from yesterday:

♠ xx
♥ AQxx
♦ xx
♣ KQTxx

It seems pretty clear to me that this hand should be opened (especially at favorable vulnerability) and that it is better opened 1♣ than 1NT. So the auction went:

1♣-(1♦)-X-(1♠)-
?

Partner had made it very clear that any bid including raising hearts or passing at this juncture would show the 15-17 NT type hand so my only option was to bid 2♣ which goes against every instinct I have. Not surprisingly the bidding continued:

1♣-(1♦)-X-(1♠)-
2♣- All Pass

And, of course, I end up playing in the 5-1 club fit instead of the 4-4 heart fit. Regardless of the fact that 2♣ made giving us a top (other pairs were in 3♥ off one), and partner confirmed after the fact that my bid was systemically correct, 2♣ just isn’t where I want to play that hand.

On an unrelated note, when I first came across a reference to 5-suited bridge I was immediately intrigued. The possibilities for the extra bidding room are particularly interesting to me. Recently on eBay I won an auction for a “Royal” suit that was produced to be added to a regular deck of cards specifically for the purpose of playing five-suited bridge:

Royal Suit for Five-Suited Bridge

I think these are pretty neat. Of course now I want to track down a deck of cards produced by that company with the same back as these, even though I’m not likely to ever play with them, in part because doing so will help me narrow down just when these might have been produced. The work of a collector is never done.

Speaking of bridge oddities, for the bridge hostess who has everything:

I know what you’re thinking, “Are those 80 year old sugar cubes shaped like playing card symbols?” Yes, yes they are.

Mar
10

Bridge Ephemera

I find myself perusing eBay looking for pieces of bridge ephemera, tangible evidence of a bygone era in which everyone and their mother played bridge.

I just won an auction for a piece that I especially like, a wirephoto of a televised bridge game:

I adore that there is a distant predecessor of the VuGraph in the background. This also strikes me as a particularly poignant testament to a time when bridge was popular enough that there might be some interest in televising a match. This isn’t quite like ESPN showing Scrabble championships as this particular photograph dates from 1957, an era well prior to the existence of hundreds of cable channels. I should note that Championship Bridge with Charles Goren was on the air from 1959 to 1964.