Category: Slam Hands

Online bridge update 18

So the holiday season has finally arrived and many of you I know are already dotted around an array of exotic locations enjoying some time away from your previously locked down homes. Bridge in Oxford is no exception and I am going to taking a break from the regular cycle of seminars and online coaching for most of August. I am glad that we have been able to help keep you playing – and learning – for so many weeks since the pandemic forced an end to our enjoyable face to face sessions in Wytham.

This week will therefore be the last week for the seminar series. The series will however resume on August 31st with a host of new topics. You are to welcome to send me suggestions for other topics you would like to see covered (or revised). This Monday’s seminar will be a wrap up/review session of slam bidding, including bidding a slam in the minor suits, with a series of hands for you to bid through and play with me (no use bidding them if you cannot make them!). To sign up please use the payment buttons in the sidebar of the website, or email if you have difficulty in doing so.

The Tuesday morning play session also continues this week as normal. There will be definitely be no Tuesday morning play session the following week, and at most one more in August (details to be confirmed). I hope that you will continue playing amongst yourselves so that we can all resume at the end of August refreshed and ready for more regular play in September. By then who knows it may be possible to reintroduce face to face play in some form in Wytham, although it still looks unlikely at this point.

As for the group coaching sessions, they will also continue this coming week, although some have already been interrupted by holidays and other enforced absences. If you are in one of these groups, I will be contacting you separately to see what if any dates might be possible until we resume full-time in September. I would like to say that these sessions have been hugely enjoyable for me and the general view seems to be that they are a successful and efficient way to practice and get better.

I rather suspect that the online format we have adopted for group coaching will remain popular even when face to face bridge resumes. I know of at least one group which is about to start playing together (suitably distanced) using ipads and Bridgebase Online instead of cards. That would make it very easy for me to continue offering advice via Zoom in group sessions without the need to travel around the county to be at the table, agreeable though that experience has been.

If so it will be a good example of how the pandemic, for all its other distressing effects, will change the way that we lead our lives. Playing bridge face to face at a card table in good company will always be the best form of the game, as far as I am concerned, but for teaching the game the Zoom + BBO format has undoubtedly been a positive breakthrough. The group coaching sessions will definitely therefore be resuming in a few short weeks, so make sure to let me know if you want to continue, as there are not enough slots to satisfy everyone who wants to be part of one.

There will be another post next week before I sign off for the holidays.

Play sessions continue

This is to confirm that we will be continuing to run our two regular morning sessions throughout March, one on Tuesday mornings at The Trout and the second on Friday mornings at the Terrace Room in Islip Village Hall. The Trout sessions have now been running for more than two months and are proving popular, with everyone entering into the spirit of an open-minded review of each hand played.
Last Friday’s inaugural event at Islip was also well attended and the feedback on both the venue and the play session itself has been positive, so do please come and try one of these events if you can. They are a great opportunity to play real life hands and discuss them afterwards, both at the table and under supervision from Annabel and myself. Each session runs from 10am to 1pm.
If you are interested in coming it would be helpful if you could update your likely dates on the Doodle polls for each event. I don’t take these as a binding commitment on your behalf, but they are a useful indicator of core numbers. We can also normally accept you if you simply turn up on the day, with or without a partner. So don’t assume that just because the numbers on the poll look lop-sided you won’t get a chance to play – there have been more people coming than expected every week so far.
The links to the Doodle poll are as follows:
The Trout
Islip Village Hall
Each session consists of a series of real life pre-dealt hands, selected by me to bring out important points of interest. Here is one hand from Tuesday’s session which showed how bidding a slam does not depend solely on the number of High Card Points you and your partner have between you. The shape of your hand is just as important. Do you have the methods to bid Six Spades if these were your two hands? We discussed exactly how that might happen at various tables.
6S hand from The Trout March 2019
Details of the next series of bridge courses will be posted to the website any day now. My expectation is that the next round of courses will start after the school holidays, but with some one-off seminars on specific conventions and play topics between now and then. So please watch this space……..

Bridge tales: a bold sacrifice

January 2nd 2019

It is always a pleasure to play bridge with the very best experts, as I am able to do from time to time. Last week I played in the EBU’s annual End of Year festival in London with Robert Sheehan, one of the most technically proficient of all the great players of the last few decades and a stalwart of the England bridge team for many years from the 1970s onwards. On this hand from the Open Pairs event he benefited from a daring manoeuvre with what was by far the worst hand at the table.

This was the deal, with NS (our side) not vulnerable against vulnerable opponents. These are often the best conditions in which to attempt tactical manouevres. In duplicate events of this kind, your score is determined solely by how many other pairs playing the same cards you are able to outscore. Every trick and overtrick therefore is crucial. Unlike in rubber bridge, you can bid and make a small slam but still score nothing if everyone else with your hand has bid and made a grand slam.

EBU 7S down 1
D = the dealer. V = vulnerable. NV = not vulnerable.

Robert was sitting South with a miserable zero points. As dealer I opened a pre-emptive 4H, following the old “rule of 2 and 3”. This suggests that when considering a pre-emptive call to make life difficult for the opponents, a good guideline for determining the level of your pre-empt is to assume that you can afford to go down two down doubled if vulnerable (-500) and three down doubled (-500) if not. This five-loser hand more than qualifies; some might open 1H as a result.

As it was East overcalled with 4S and Robert pitched in with 5H, “raising to the level of the fit” (11 trumps = bid up to the 5 level). Now East, Espen Erichsen, an experienced professional who had won another event at the EBU festival just the previous day, jumped to 6S. With at best half a defensive trick I passed as North and now Robert bid on to 7H. He later added “I know one is not meant to do this”, What he meant was that normally, if you are going to make a sacrifice bid, you are best served doing so at the first opportunity, giving the opposition as little room as possible to decide what to do.

Here however, with his miserable hand, a void in trumps and no reason to expect more than one trick (at most) from his partner, he was taking advantage of the favourable vulnerability to put more pressure on the opponents. As 6S, a vulnerable major suit slam, rated to score 1430 or 1460, he knew that we could afford to go at least six down doubled (-1400) and still make a profit. The risk of course was that EW would bid on to 7S which if it made would have been worth 2210, comfortably beating all those who bid up to the 6 level and stayed there.

Knowing the odds just as well, all Espen could do was grimace and guess which of the two courses – doubling or bidding on the 7S would produce the best score. Eventually he bid 7S, acknowledging once he had done so that thanks to Robert’s bold bid it was a guess. Robert led the 10C and when the dummy went down, it looked at first as if Espen had made the right call. On normal distributions there seemed to be 13 top tricks by means of six spades, five clubs and two red suit Aces.

Declarer certainly thought so and put his cards down to claim all 13 tricks, but Robert was having none of it, pointing out that the clubs were not breaking and even if declarer drew trumps and took two discards on his winning club tricks there would still be a diamond loser at the end. (I am sure that the risk of bad breaks was one reason why he took the risk of bidding on to 7H). So 7S was one down for an excellent score for us, helping us to an eventual fourth place finish (out of 68 pairs).

A review of what had happened at the other tables showed that nine other EW pairs had been pushed into bidding 7S, all but one also going down (best not to enquire how it was made). Eight others were allowed to play in 7H doubled and the remainder included several stopping tamely in 5S. 7S-1 earned an 89% score on the board while 7Hx down three tricks was still worth an above average 56%. Allowing EW to play in 6S would have scored just 13%.

One other technical point (for the very keen) may be worth making. Once the declarer discovers that the clubs are not breaking, he should play off all his cards in spades and hearts. If his left hand opponent turns out to have both the five clubs and the KQ of diamonds, he will be squeezed and the grand slam will still make. It is not at all likely but when a contract looks doomed, it is still worth trying for an improbable outcome, just in case this is your day.

Bridge tales recount hands that I have come across or played myself recently and which I think contain an important instructional point or two. If you spot an error in the analysis, which sometimes happens, despite my best efforts, please let me know…..Some hands are difficult, others of more interest to early stage learners.