Aug
02

Slurp

My fondness for bidding conventions is no secret. It seems like most of the time when someone asks me what I would do with a particular hand at some point during my reply I find myself saying the words, “There’s this convention….” and then the listener’s eyes glaze over if they weren’t already. There is a particular class of convention that I particularly like but don’t spring on unsuspecting, inquiring minds and those are the conventions that introduce noise.

They aren’t allowed to be played except against artificial bids (e.g. 2♣ openers). Perhaps needless to say, due to limited application and opportunity I have little real world experience with them, but I love the idea in theory and I’m always on the look-out for hands on which one would have been applicable. Theoretically my favorite response to an opponent asking about a bid I’ve just alerted would be a shrug: “What does that bid mean?” “It’s forcing.” “And-???” *shrug*

One such convention that I play with the Mad Scientist (who else?) is called ‘Suction‘ and today it sucked, hard. My RHO opened an artificial, strong 1♣. I bid 1♦ showing either hearts or both black suits. My LHO doubled and now TMS bid 2♣. Because I was definitely going to be given the opportunity to take another bid I assumed that his bid was natural, probably a six card club suit and no interest in whatever my holding was, and for the record this was it:

♠ AJxx
♥ JT9xx
♦ Kxx
♣ x

Yeah, it really sucks, but I have five hearts and we’re not vul. against vul. and …. and …. and the name of the convention is “Suction” so ….

In retrospect, if I was going to bid at all, I probably should have bid 2♣ showing diamonds or the majors, but I didn’t. And now when TMS bid 2♣ I took it that that was his suit (naturally, since I have a singleton and I always have a singleton in his suit). Long story short, he was bidding 2♣ as pass or correct showing clubs and hearts and we played in our 4-1 club fit instead of our 5-4 heart fit and we were doubled, down six. But I still love this convention, in theory.

Jun
02

The Bad & the Ugly

Today I established two things: 1) Bach’s Stress Rescue Remedy spray doesn’t work. It tastes like flowers and watered down whiskey. Instead of clearing my mind and relieving my tension, it mostly just makes me wish I had a shot of actual whiskey which, incidentally, would do a better job of both of those things.1 2) I am on my way to becoming one of those cranky, frog-like bridge players. Any day now you’ll find me hunched over at the table, motionless save to play a card or catch an unsuspecting fly with a flick of my tongue. I’ve seen the future and it isn’t pretty. Ribbit.

I took the night off from work so that I could play in the World Wide Bridge Contest with Yin. We may not come in last out of the whole wide world, but it isn’t for a lack of trying. The slight headache I had going into the game kept getting worse and worse as the night progressed. There was a sit out after the third round and I wandered off to a quiet, remote spot in the club to meditate listen to music on my iPod and play Angry Birds — little did I know that was going to be the high point of my evening.

On the next round, I woefully underbid the first hand, then in a joint effort overbid the next one and finally underbid the last one. Three bad scores and we stumbled on to the next round.

The worst was yet to come though, we muddled through the next couple of rounds with only one major, readily avoidable defensive error (how hard is it to lead partner’s suit when they bid it?!), but the hand that will haunt me for days will be the very last hand of the evening. In third seat, vul. against not, I picked up:

♠ AKxx
♥ (void)
♦ AKTxx
♣ Axxx

This was by far the best hand I’d seen all night. Not surprisingly it got passed around to me:

P-(P)-1♦-(P)-
2♦*-(P)-?

The 2♦ bid is an inverted minor bid that shows 10+ points and diamonds. Since Yin was a passed hand this means his range is especially limited but, of course, it is more than enough to make game. The question is what to bid next. Any diamond bid is not forcing, so that’s out. 2♠ would be essentially natural and would show my spade holding, but Yin’s already denied having four spades and there’s really only one thing I care about on this hand and that is whether or not he has a club control. I contemplated how best to suss that out and hit upon a clever option. While 3♥ should be a splinter I think, I’m not 100% sure Yin would take it that way and I want to emphasize that I have a monster hand so I decided to bid 4♥ which I know he will take as a splinter bid and clearly I’m forcing to game no matter what he has. If he has anything in clubs he can show it to me without going past 5♦. This all seems very good.

P-(P)-1♦-(P)-
2♦*-(P)-4♥-(P)-
5♦-All Pass

I’m expecting him to be dead on arrival with a minimum for his already very limited hand and nothing to show me in clubs, but this is what I got:

♠ Qxx
♥ AJxx
♦ QJxxx
♣ x

Even a guinea pig could make seven on this hand (yes, I’m looking at you, Mr. Snuffles) and deep down I just knew I should go to six regardless of his dead fish response. But literally just minutes earlier both the Mad Scientist and Yin were poking fun at me for my proclivities when it comes to playing my partner for the perfect cards. After the hand, Yin criticized me for taking up too much room with the splinter bid and said that he had a minimum for his response (though I would argue that as a passed hand, that singleton makes his hand far from a minimum). I’ll grant you that the splinter bid took up a h_ll of a lot of room, but I didn’t need a lot of room. What if instead the bidding had gone:

1♦-2♦*-
3♥-4♦-?

I could bid 4♠ and then hope he comes up with a club cue-bid, but why would he on that sequence and not the one that we had?

I’ve caught flak from partners, especially Yin, for bidding on instinct or table feel or whatever the h_ll you want to call it, and rightfully so (I’ll note that the times my gut instinct has been right, I’ve not heard any complainants — is that really fair?). But I really am trying to do it the “right way” and just blindly guessing isn’t right. For instance, take his hand and give it two doubletons in the black suits and now I have no business being in 6 so even though my instinct was to bid six, I ignored it. Yin had a chance to show me a club control, he didn’t, I can’t assume he’s hiding it from me. Still I feel like I’m playing with one hand tied behind my back by ignoring my instincts on hands like this one.

Not surprisingly +640 was a lousy score because people are bidding and making overtricks in 3NT (which, I might add, is way riskier than bidding the diamond slam). Incredibly no one at our club bid the diamond slam. I just “knew” that I should, but I couldn’t prove it to myself so I thought I was doing the right thing by passing. Virtue is not always it’s own reward, good thing taking off from work is.

1 Veracity of claim evaluated by author via empirical trial.

May
26

Out of Order

I got off to a good start yesterday. On the second hand, I played a 3NT contract in a rather sneaky way so as to steal a twelfth trick. I discarded the queen of diamonds from my hand early on even though I had a small diamond left. I hoped this would convince the defenders to discard their diamond winners as I ran my long suits and it did, I scored the small diamond at the end. This play earned the coveted Mad Scientist Seal of Approval.

Unfortunately I undid all that good will with my lazy, sloppy defense later on and since the cards were definitely running in the other direction there was a lot of defense for me to mess up.

Before long the Mad Scientist was wondering aloud just where “that d_mned gerbil” had gotten off to.

“He’s a guinea pig,” I reminded him, “And last I saw him he was talking about learning Spanish and returning to the place of his ancestors.”

“Peru?”

“Well, that’s what I thought, but then he said something about not wanting to die without seeing Rio.”

“Rio? They don’t speak Spanish in Rio.”

“That’s what I told him, but he said when he wanted my opinion he’d give it to me. Anyway I drove him to the bus station and wished him a ‘¡Buen viaje!’.”

Guinea pigs suck at geography. I wonder how long it will take him to realize that New Mexico isn’t in South America. Speaking of people who have no idea what’s going on, there was a weird cluster of diamond sacrifices over spade contracts yesterday. I think we went to 5 diamonds three times over the opponents’ spades. Twice they went to five spades and made it. Once we got doubled, but I held it to down two for a good result: four spades was making, and the others playing in 5 diamonds were going down three (of course, one of them wasn’t doubled so they got the top).

The Troll was at the table next to us while I was playing that hand and the whole group was being exceptionally noisy, flat out ignoring our initial polite requests to quiet down. I’ve often been called out for talking or laughing too loudly, but my reaction is typically to apologize and then shut up, I don’t think I’ve ever just ignored the person making the request. Usually I feel genuinely bad for disturbing them. Finally, after their squawking had wrecked my concentration for what felt like the tenth time (it wasn’t the simplest of hands to unravel) I lost it and yelled at them to “Shut the h_ll up!” That got their attention, the Troll persisted for a sentence more but finally he too fell silent. He has no idea how close to death he came.

Earlier this week, I was playing against a pair when they had a new-minor forcing auction and failed to alert the “new minor”. I happened to be holding the KQxx of said minor and when the auction was over I asked if there had been a failure to alert. I was told there had been and that the club bid was artificial. I put the king of clubs face down on the table and asked my partner if he had any questions, he did not and I flipped over the king at which point my LHO noted that it was not my turn to lead.

I don’t often make leads out of turn, but she had me dead to rights. I wondered why she didn’t point this out before I flipped over the card. She insisted to the director that she should get to see her partner’s hand before she made a decision about what to do (which is a completely bizarre idea), but eventually she accepted the lead with a comment about how if I didn’t know whose lead it was, I probably didn’t know what to lead. I bit my tongue. I also bit my tongue when immediately after I left the table she matter of factly told her partner that my question about the club bid had been “leading” which might be a legit complaint except, obviously, I thought it was my lead because, well, I led. I really wanted to say something to that effect, but between her strange understanding of the laws of bridge and the fact that she was a 70-ish woman wearing a skimpy tennis dress to a bridge club I realized you just can’t reason with that kind of crazy.

Apr
09

Snake Bit

Last night while mulling over the concept of some updated system notes (which is to say, I was not actually studying the notes themselves, I was instead just ruminating on the idea that I would need to spend time studying them — I’ve elevated procrastination to an art form), the thought occurred to me that for the next couple of months aside from whatever new conventions/system updates the Mad Scientist throws my way, I can and should dedicate most of my effort toward declarer play. Or, to put it another way, I thought that my defense had been pretty good of late, despite all the evidence (namely, my results) to the contrary. Of course, the moment I had this thought my fate was sealed.

I made two unspeakably stupid mistakes on defense in the first three rounds this afternoon. The first one was when TMS led a low heart, Qx came down in dummy and I played the king from KTx. Of course, TMS is not leading away from the ace of hearts and, perhaps more to the point, if in the worst case scenario the declarer has AJxx, then at least I can keep the queen from becoming an entry to the board. Of course TMS had the jack and my boneheaded play gave the declarer a trick allowing them to make their contract.

Next up, defending against 3NT, despite having a clear count on the club suit which contains the only possibly entry to the dummy for a running spade suit, I went up with my ace too early, way too early. When TMS realized I had another club (in fact I had three more), he looked bewildered then angry, “Have you completely lost your mind?”
“To ask if I have lost my mind suggests I ever had it to begin with, so NOW who’s the crazy one?”
“Still you.”
“Right you are!” *inexplicable puff of smoke*
“Were you supposed to disappear in that?”
“Yes, yes I was.”

Okay, so none of that actually happened … well, the club play happened, sad to say, that part was all too real. Later, when the Mad Scientist had regained his powers of speech (the club play in combination with the earlier heart one was so dumb it rendered him temporarily, if mercifully, speechless), he restricted his comments to calling me a “doofus” and mused aloud that he couldn’t decide which one of these plays was worse. I submit, that it was the club play. Reaching into a box in which one is very likely to find a snake is stupid, but reaching into a box in which one can see the snake and the snake is looking back is even more stupid.

Still, I did manage to fight back from these two mistakes to play like a human being for most of the rest of the session. Had I managed to avoid those two errors we would have had a very good game indeed, but as it was, we managed to scrape up a fraction of a masterpoint for our efforts.

Apr
06

No Escape

I’ve only ever found one solution for playing a lot of bad bridge and that is to play even more (bad) bridge, eventually something has to give. My alarm went off this morning and the first thought that entered my head was: It’s matchpoints; just do the best you can one board at a time, one card at a time.

Sounded simple enough, but in practice it was anything but. There were a number of strikes against me from the get-go, the first being that my immune system is trying to sneeze me to death; second, my allergy medication allows me to wander around not sneezing (much) but does so by stuffing my head with cotton and third the cluckier of the two hens was sitting nearby with a different partner who was also quite clucky (Where does she find these people that are so easily provoked and yet tolerate her?!) so I had to tune them out as well.

In that very first round I hit a simple three-card ending that my brain simply refused to unravel, I probably spent 30 seconds on it, which for me is an eternity, and then I played the wrong card. The sickening thing is had I not given it any thought at all I would have played it correctly. There really is nothing like making the wrong play after careful consideration to make yourself feel like a complete f_cking moron. The Mad Scientist was nice about it, but was clearly flabbergasted that I could have made such a brain-dead play at all, much less, after thinking about it. If after my performance on Monday he still thought there might yet be hope for me, that play removed all doubt. Time to bring out the guinea pig.

We seemed to be having a lot of weird misunderstandings with the bidding today and were stumbling along with mixed results. Finally I told TMS that my new goal was not to give the Troll any good boards. The bridge gods must have heard me, and as much as they hate me they love the Troll, so on the second board in I made a bad discard and as a result we gave them an overtrick in a contract they had no business being in in the first place (looking at the hand record, I have to admit I would have bid it the same way, but it wouldn’t have worked for me) for a cold top. The discard brought up some interesting issues though, one of which is when playing odd-even discards and one is stuck with a hand full of bad options, which is the least encouraging, encouraging signal one can make? For reasons I’ve not explored, I’ve always felt that an odd card in a suit is a stronger “come on” than an even card in a suit I don’t like.

After leaving the club, grateful to have cracked 50% (my expectations are realistically low at this point), I went to the grocery store. I’d forgotten it was a holiday and the place was packed. Mostly I just wandered around trying to remember what I needed besides pickles and anti-allergy eye drops. At one point I glanced up from staring lustfully at a display of cakes in the bakery and came face-to-face with the Troll! I took that as my cue to get out of there before the Hen showed up too, I mean, throw in Mr. Snuffles and that foursome would make for the perfect bridge game in h_ll. Speaking of h_ll, I’ll be back at the bridge club tomorrow screwing it all up one board at a time, one card at a time, only this time I’ll be wearing bunny ears.

Mar
24

“What have they got that I ain’t got?”

The following comic strip has been hanging on my refrigerator door for some years now:

I’m quite prone to err on the side of overbidding rather than under; for reasons I can’t quite explain, it bothers me FAR more when I’ve been cowardly. I’ve always said, and it’s true, that I’d much rather be -50 than +170. But today I failed to bid a very cold grand slam even though I had an absolute monster and the Mad Scientist opened the bidding.

My hand:

♠ AT
♥ AKJxxx
♦ Axxx
♣ K

He opened 1♣ which is either clubs or a big NT (very little doubt in my mind which it was). I transferred to hearts showing 4+ hearts. He showed that he had long clubs (surprise, surprise). I bid 2♦ which shows something in diamonds, but is mostly just noise (and forcing) on this auction. He now bid 2♥ showing three hearts. I jumped to 4♠ which is RKC Blackwood. He showed one ace. I asked if he had the queen of trump and he responded that he did and that he also had the king of diamonds (denying that he had the king of spades in the process).

Clearly, I would never have bothered to ask about the queen of trump if I wasn’t interested in seven, but in the moment of truth, I faltered and signed out in 6♥. I couldn’t count 13 top tricks, but was failing to take into account the fact that he would almost certainly be able to set up his clubs with my holding the stiff king even if he had to ruff a couple of them to do so. I had been worried about the diamonds, but he can’t possibly also have long diamonds on the auction. TMS humored me a bit by not claiming at trick one, but even the opponent wondered aloud why we weren’t in seven. “I’m a chicken,” I said. “It isn’t just that you’re chicken,” said TMS, “but I question your mental acuity.” “I’m a stupid chicken,” I squawked and he agreed.

On an unrelated note, I stopped for a chicken sandwich on the way home. It was delicious.

Mar
09

Counterintuitive

Today at the club I played with the Mad Scientist. At the end of the game he congratulated me for holding my colossal screw-ups to two. I had counted four, but there didn’t seem to be any need to correct him; I do so love praise, even when its faint, inaccurate and undeserved.

One of my screw-ups was forgetting that oft forgotten convention, Drury. Of all the conventions I play with TMS this might be the only one that I play with all of my regular partners. Granted, we play a somewhat modified version, but it wasn’t as if I forgot the modification; nope, I forgot that 2♣ was artificial.

She did WHAT?

The second mistake was just completely ridiculous. On the opening lead, TMS led the king of diamonds (showing the ace and giving his count as “odd”). The dummy hit with the: Jxxx. I played low from Q9xx to encourage. Declarer played low so now I know that TMS started with three and the declarer started with a doubleton. He played the ace, dummy played low, I played low and declarer followed with the ten. TMS continued the suit, dummy played low and I played the … queen. So despite the fact that I had at that point seen all of the diamonds, and my Q9 was over the dummy’s Jx, I still set up the jack so the declarer could get a crucial pitch. TMS grumbled, “Where is that d_mned gerbil?” “Mr. Snuffles is a guinea pig,” I reminded him.

And that segues nicely into an example of a brilliant defensive play that was, not surprisingly, not made by me: The Aces on Bridge — Respectable Genius.

Jan
29

The Replacement

The sheer number of bridge books in existence is pretty remarkable. My own collection has swollen to over 130 titles and that isn’t even the tip of the iceberg. What I find particularly difficult to believe is that there is actually a whole sub-genre of bridge-themed mystery novels. I’m a thoroughgoing bridge addict with a longstanding crush on the character of one Sherlock Holmes and I still can’t muster any interest in such a thing. The only bridge mystery that I have any interest in solving is the motives of anyone who would want to play with the likes of me.

At least the Mad Scientist’s motives are perfectly clear, he wants someone to experiment on and use to test drive new conventions. I am his guinea pig, though I have reason to suspect he may soon be replacing me with an actual guinea pig. Yesterday at the club I could have sworn I saw a pair of beady little eyes staring out at me from beneath the Mad Scientist’s bidding box. Once while I was playing a hand I even heard a little snuffling coming from that side of the table, which everyone knows is the guinea pig equivalent of maniacal laughter. While Mr. Snuffles may be a better declarer and defender than me, there is one area in which I have him beat. That rodent will never be able to bid as well as me, mostly because he lacks opposable thumbs and getting the cards out of the bidding box is going to be damn near impossible without them.