Two rare sightings

September 3rd, 2009  ~  Ray Lee  ~  3 Comments 

Watch bridge long enough, and you’ll see everything.  In the last two days, I’ve seen two things that are very rare at the top levels of bridge.

First, yesterday morning, I saw a deal passed out.  With today’s light opening bids and myriad of 1-, 2- and 3-suited weak two-bids, the passout is an endangered species; I don’t actually remember the last time I saw one.

In the afternoon, an even rarer bird poked up its head.  Watch carefully, and maybe you’ll spot it it too.  After a morning spent watching 16 boards of not very good bridge between India and Russia (to be fair, my old friend and partner Subhash Gupta was playing in an unfamiliar partnership), we were offered a feast of superb cut and thrust in the second match, as we saw Meckwell take on one of the top Dutch pairs, Berkens and Bakkeren.  I was fortunate to be on a commentary team for this set that was also great fun: humourist David Bird and Dutch journalist Jan van Cleeff, both of whom I know well; Linda was also able to join us for the latter part of the match.

Enough scene-setting:  here’s the deal I want to talk about (rotated for convenience).

North
♠	AK10
♥	10872
♦	KQ62
♣	K6
South
♠	6
♥	AKJ542
♦	10875
♣	A2

For the purpose of this exercise, you are Jeff Meckstroth.  Despite RHO’s spade overcall, you have become declarer in 6♥ , and the opening lead is the ♠ 5.  The first part of the play is straightforward and routine:  win the ♠ A, draw trumps (RHO had the stiff queen), cash the ♠ K throwing a diamond from hand, ruff your last spade, and cash two top clubs ending in hand.  This brings you to here:

North
♠	—
♥	108
♦	KQ62
♣	—
South
♠	—
♥	J54
♦	1087
♣	—

At this point, having eliminated the black suits, you advance a small diamond towards dummy and await events.  If the ♦ K holds, which is likely whoever has the ace, you intend to return to hand with a trump and play up to the ♦ Q again, winning if the ♦ A is onside or there’s a doubleton jack somewhere.  If RHO has a doubleton ace he can’t duck, since he’s going to be endplayed on the next round, so if he has doubleton AJ or A9 we’re home as well — he’s going to have to win the ♦ A and return his other diamond, and all will be clear.  However, events take a surprising turn when LHO plays the ♦ 3, and RHO wins the ♦ A and returns the ♦ 4.

Well, let’s think about this, remembering that RHO is a world-class player.  If he started with doubleton A4 we are going down, and if he had AJ4 or AJ94, all he had to do was duck the trick to avoid the endplay and defeat the slam.  So we can eliminate those.  What remains is RHO having started with A94.  If he ducked the ♦ A from that holding we were going to see LHO’s ♦ J next round and make the hand, so he’s taken his only chance to beat us by giving us a guess, hoping we’ll go wrong and put in the ♦ 10.  Well, that’s not going to fool us:  we confidently insert the ♦ 8 — and are horrified to see West produce the ♦ 9!  Even more horrifying, it is RHO who takes the setting trick with his ♦ J.  This was the full deal (still rotated):

Dealer: Vul:		North
		♠	AK10
		♥	10872
		♦	KQ62
		♣	K8
West				East
♠	Q75			♠	J98432
♥	96			♥	Q
♦	93			♦	AJ4
♣	J98543			♣	Q107
		South
		♠	6
		♥	AKJ542
		♦	10875
		♣	A2

Did you spot the rara avis to which I referred at the start of this blog?  Yes, gentle reader, it’s a Grosvenor.  In the June 1973 The Bridge World, Frederick Turner wrote a humorous (and fictional) article describing a tactic employed by his eponymous protagonist Grosvenor: a defender would deliberately make an error, giving the declarer an opportunity to make a contract which he refuses, expecting rational defense.  The idea was to mess with declarer’s mind for later deals.  The term Grosvenor Gambit entered the bridge vernacular at that point and has been a standard term ever since.  You just don’t see them that often in expert play.

But here is a Grosvenor in its full glory, at a World Championship, no less.  All our Dutch defender had to to was duck the ♦ A, and Meckstroth had to go down.  Once he won the ace and played a diamond back, the slam could be made — but how was declarer ever going to work that out?

Another day, another grand

September 1st, 2009  ~  Ray Lee  ~  2 Comments 

♦

Of the 48 boards I watched today, undoubtedly this was the most interesting.  I’ll give it first as a single dummy problem, because that’s the way it shows in its best light (hands rotated for convenience).  It’s also the way we tried to analyze it, as responsible commentators, pretending we couldn’t see all four hands and trying to put ourselves in declarer’s shoes.

North
♠	4
♥	AQ105
♦	AKJ53
♣	J87
South
♠	AQ2
♥	94
♦	109
♣	AKQ1043

There’s no opposition bidding, and after partner opened 1♦ you end up in 7♣ (we won’t discuss whether that’s a good thing or not — you’re there, so live with it) .  LHO tracks the ♥3.  So how do you play the hand?

Basically, you need a parking place for a heart loser, which can only be a diamond.  But how do you set up diamonds now?  The real problem with the heart lead is that it’s taken out the dummy entry.  Yes, you can set up diamonds, assuming they’re no worse than 4-2, but you can’t then draw trumps and get back to enjoy your diamond winner(s).  You can always finesse in diamonds, which is the same 50-50 or so that the heart finesse gives you.  You can, of course, cash the ♦A first, just in case the ♦Q is stiff offside.  Let’s follow that line through .  ♦A, ♠A, ♠ ruff, ♦A, and the queen drops.  That’s not actually good news.  Now with diamonds blocked, you still only have three diamond tricks, and if you cross back to the ♣A and ruff the last spade, you’re stuck in dummy with no way off, unless East obligingly had only one club too.  Hmm.  Of course, in that case, if West has the ♠K, youcan change tack after the ♦Q drops — run all the trumps, and catch West in a pointed suit squeeze.

So you seem to have 3 options:  heart finesse (50%), diamond finesse (50%), or ♦A dropping the stiff ♦Q offside, in which case we have a 50% chance West has the ♠K and you can squeeze him.  This 50% number is getting awfully repetitive.  Can you take any inference from the lead?

It wasn’t the auto trump lead, and on the auction you were known to have at least a 9-card club fit and to have all the top honours.  So probably even a stiff club wouldn’t deter West from leading one.  Dummy bid red suits, declarer bid clubs and cuebid spades.  And West led a heart quite quickly.  Perhaps he knows the ♥K is onside, and is trying to make you guess whether or not to finesse for it at Trick1, rather than fall back on that play when all else fails.  On that basis, the ♥K may well be onside.

Final piece of information:  LHO is Zia.

Okay, you’ve had time to think: what do you do?

Here’s the full deal:

Dealer: Vul:		North
		♠	4
		♥	AQ105
		♦	AKJ53
		♣	J87
West				East
♠	K1097			♠	J8653
♥	763			♥	KJ82
♦	87642			♦	Q
♣	2			♣	965
		South
		♠	AQ2
		♥	94
		♦	109
		♣	AKQ1043

Eric Saelinsminde, of Norway, after close to 10 minutes thought, put in the ♥Q, and went down at Trick 1.  At the other table, Jeff Meckstroth, arguably the world’s best declarer, rose with the ♥A, crossed on a trump, and took a losing diamond finesse.  In the Italy-China match, Alfredo Versace took the same line as Meckstroth, while Jack Zhao for China tried the heart finesse at Trick 1.  The winning line, as you can see, is that obscure cash of the ♦A followed by the squeeze.  Is it the right line? Maybe, by fraction of a percent.  Is it worth spending the mental energy to figure that out at the table?  Who knows.

Across the entire field in 3 events,  13 declarers faced a heart lead, and every one of them went down.  Meanwhile 12 declarers got either a trump (4) or a diamond (8) lead, and made the hand — with the ♥A still in dummy, cashing the ♦A brings the suit home for 5 tricks.  Next time someone tells you always to lead a trump against a grand, remember this deal.

To bid or not to bid

August 31st, 2009  ~  Ray Lee  ~  No Comments 

We’re in techno-limbo right now — all the feeds from Sao Paulo disappeared about an hour ago, so no chance to watch live action.  But it does give me a chance to look back on some of yesterday’s events.  No question, the most dramatic deal was this one:

Dealer: S Vul: EW		North
		♠	KQ10876543
		♥	10
		♦	32
		♣	2
West				East
♠	J			♠	A
♥	AJ74			♥	K862
♦	A984			♦	KJ
♣	9654			♣	AKQJ87
		South
		♠	92
		♥	Q953
		♦	Q10765
		♣	103

The North players must have been surprised to have a chance to open the bidding, but as far as I can tell, that’s what happened at pretty much every table.  So what is the right call on the North hand?

The ‘obvious’ call is 4♠, but is that enough?  After all, the vulnerability is favorable, and you do have nine of them…  On the other hand, West has passed, and there’s no guarantee EW can make a slam.  I have sympathy for the 4♠ bidders but it’s clear from the results that many of them thought they hadn’t done enough, and took another bid later.  I’m not a big fan of that kind of bidding.  The question to me is, how likely are you to buy it in 4♠?  If you open at the five-level, they aren’t going to bid over you except on a hand where a four-level opening wasn’t going to do much damage to them anyway.  However, there are many hands East could have where he’ll bid a suit over a four-level opening but will simply double if you open at the five-level.

Anyway, suppose North opens 4♠ as most did.  Now look at the East hand, and try to be objective.  What’s your choice?  Clearly, again from the results, a fair number of people doubled.  I’m sorry, but do you really want to play in hearts with this hand — most of the time?  Or defend 4♠ — which might even be making, from your point of view?  Surely the key to getting this auction right (as in most of these high-level situations at IMPs) is to be in the right strain — which is much more likely to be clubs than hearts.  So put me down as a 5♣ bidder.

South has nothing to contribute to the proceedings, so now let’s turn our attention to West — again, trying to be objective.  If partner has overcalled clubs, West has an easy raise to slam — four trumps, two aces and a spade control.  But what if East doubled?  What do you do now?  Maybe the LAWful action is to pass…  You have only one spade, so perhaps partner just has a strong balanced hand, in which case it’s probably right to take your plus (another reason East shouldn’t double).  One West found the call of 4NT, presumably transferring responsibility for picking a trump suit to partner.

But whatever West does, assuming he bids and doesn’t pass, North has to decide whether to save over some contract at the five- ( or even six-) level.  Let’s face it, if you are an aggressive preemptor, you could have KQJxxxx and out for that third-chair four-level opening at these colours.  So have you done enough?  Some of the best players in the world didn’t think so.  Sabine Auken, for example, bid 5♠ and then elected to defend 6♣ .  In fact, if you look at the whole deal, you’ll see that EW can make thirteen tricks in clubs or notrump, since South gets squeezed in the red suits — and you could end up pushing them into the grand.  After all, you have zero defense against anything

The results frequencies are fascinating, as you would expect.  In the Senior Bowl, 8 pairs played  6♣ , while 6 saved in 6♠ doubled.  There were two successful grand slams, one seven-level save, and three pairs who did not get past game (one got home in the 4-4 heart fit).  Finally, one pair bought the hand NS at the five-level.  In the Venice Cup, 9 pairs played the club slam, only two pairs saving over it.  There was one grand and one seven-level save.  Three pairs played five clubs, while one bought it for 4♠ doubled.  The Bermuda Bowl produced the widest range of results.  Again 8 pairs played  6♣ , while 6 saved in 6♠ doubled, with two successful grand slams and one seven-level save.  However, along with these were one five clubs, one five spades doubled, one four spades doubled, one five diamonds (unsuccessful — no doubt East is still regretting his double) and one (Italian) 6NT.

There will be those who disagree with me (and clearly, that includes a lot of the East players in these three events), but I think overcalling clubs on the East cards is much superior to doubling.  As Kit Woolsey likes to say, ‘So much easier if you describe your hand…’

Bridge, probability and information

August 26th, 2009  ~  Ray Lee  ~  No Comments 

Bob MacKinnon of Victoria, BC is probably best know as the author of the remarkable bridge novel Samurai Bridge, which we published a few years back.  However, in real life he knows more about the application of mathematics to bridge than anyone I know, and his new book, Bridge, Probability and Information, will be appearing in the Spring.  I have been working on editing it for the last couple of months, trying to make sure that the ideas are presented in such a way that, as the author himself says, it won’t immediately provoke the average reader into closing the book for ever.  It’s not easy, but there are a host of practical bridge results contained in it.  I was reminded of one of them by the deal Paul Thurston discusses in today’s National Post column.

North
♠	7 5 3
♥	9 7
♦	K Q J 9
♣	A 9 8 2
South
♠	A K 6
♥	K Q
♦	7 5 3
♣	K J 10 5 3

After an unrevealing auction (1NT-3NT), West leads the ♦4; dummy’s king holds, East contributing the ♦10.   Ace and a club now brings South to a familiar problem: to finesse in clubs or not?  It seems that West led from a five-card suit, and so the odds have surely shifted in favour of the finesse compared to the situation before any cards are played — but how much have they shifted?  What is the right play?

This is a great example of one of the first points Bob makes: odds in a suit should almost never be considered in isolation; you have to look at the most probable situation regarding the entire layout, as the split in one suit affects the odds of the split in another.  Here we have information.  First, we can surmise that West started with five diamonds to his partner’s one.  And what of all those missing hearts?  It seems likely that West has no more than 4 of them, else he would probably have led one (his diamonds aren’t that good after all).  That gives us an imbalance of Vacant Spaces in favour of West by a margin of at least 5 — is that enough to make us finesse in clubs?  If West has a stiff club, what is his hand, given that he led a diamond from 5?  3-4-5-1 with very weak hearts, I guess.  Isn’t it more likely that he was 3-3-5-2?

Bob discusses the Qxxx situation at length, along with the underlying probability concepts, and comes to the conclusion that the tipping point is a Vacant Space imbalance of 1.  If West has the same or fewer Vacant Spaces than East, you should play for the drop; 2 or more (as it is here), and you should go for the finesse.  If the imbalance is 1, look for other indicators, or toss a mental coin.  By the way, this isn’t the same situation as when you are missing QJxx and an honour drops — Restricted Choice among other things makes a difference there, and now you need an imbalance of 4+ Vacant Spaces in favour of West over East NOT to finesse.

So you see what I mean?  No complex math involved, just simple and highly practical bridge ideas that you can use at the table.  Kind of reminds me of Larry Cohen’s bestseller on the Law of Total Tricks — which Bob discusses in his book, by the way, as well as the recent Lawrence/Wirgren book (I fought the LAW of Total Tricks) that attempts to refine or discredit (whichever you prefer) the Law.  One of my favorite ideas in Bob’s book is basically ‘Don’t sweat the small stuff’ — if a decision is close, say 51-49, don’t worry too much about it, because mathematically speaking there’s very little gain or loss involved in the long run.  It’s the 57-43 ones you need to get right, since over time they’ll affect your score much more.  More on that one in a future blog.

To bridge or not to bridge

August 5th, 2009  ~  Ray Lee  ~  8 Comments 

Bridge novels are an interesting genre.  Most of them are murder mysteries of some shape or form, and in these the author has a fundamental decision to make: whether to include any actual bridge or not.  There are three camps:  none at all, lots, and the middle ground – one or two token deals.

Firmly in the first group are some of the early ones, like C.C. Nicolet’s Death of a Bridge Expert and AnneAustin’s Murder at the Bridge Table. In Evelyn Berckman’s A Simple Case of Ill Will a bridge club owner is murdered, while B.H. Friedman’s Yarborough is a dark psychological novel, but not a mystery. Two famous mystery novelists wrote about bridge: S.S. van Dine, in The Benson Murder Case, offered a solution to the real-life never-solved murder of whist and bridge expert James Elwell; Agatha Christie’s Cards on the Table is a locked-room murder revolving around a rubber bridge game, and the bridge is integral to the solution – but no deal is ever shown.  Not one of these books contains a single bridge hand!  I remember when Jim Priebe was embarking on his first Art Fraser mystery, Takeout Double, we had several long discussions about whether to include hands, and eventually decided not to, in the hope that we could widen the book’s appeal beyond bridge addicts.

In the ‘small amount’ camp we have authors such as Susan Moody, who has written a series of successful novels (Death Takes a Hand etc.) featuring a bridge teacher.  Paul Bennett’s thrillers (Due Diligence etc.) star a kickass bridge-playing accountant (!) and usually include one or two deals, but the bridge is not really relevant to the main story.   Likewise Shirley Presberg (Death by Contract, etc.), whose self-published books again tend to feature only a deal or two.

Finally, in Ken Allan’s Deadly Endplay (2008, Green Spade Books), we have a bridge mystery with more bridge than mystery.  This one is full of deals, from some very simple ones (the local expert is explaining something to his novice partner) to some complex ones, including a modertely difficult double-dummy problem.  These are relevant to to the story largely because the author uses the bridge club to develop his characters (while admitting that their bridge personalities often are very different from their everyday ones).  He also builds the plot around a specific tactic (the ‘deadly endplay’ of the title) which is eventually used somewhat unconvincingly in the solution of the mystery.

It’s a curious mystery in that there’s no real detective or cop to follow – indeed, there are so many points of view offered that it makes it hard for the reader to engage with the characters.  There’s also no murder – just a suspicious death – and even at the end you’re not really sure there was in fact a murder.  The eventual ‘unmasking’ of the only suspect, and his confession, are the weakest part of the plot, and it’s not really a surprise to learn that the Crown eventually drop the prosecution for lack of evidence.

We do learn a lot about life in a small rural town, and even more about gardening and farming: from the name of the imprint, I suspect these are the author’s primary passions.  In the end, we sort of meander through the story, not sure whether we are reading a bridge book or a mystery.  The author may be not be too certain either, since despite the fairly highly level (and quantity) of the bridge content, he feels it necessary to explain things like how a duplicate game works.

The most interesting feature of the book, and definitely the one involving the best writing, is the pseudo ‘bridge column’ from the local paper, which appears every other chapter or so.  This is written by one of the characters under a nom de plume — I’m not sure why, since everyone knows who the writer is, but the idea is that it gives her a chance to adopt a different persona from her everyday one.  Emerging from her usual non-confrontational mien, she takes the opportunity to poke fun at some of the more pompous local experts.  Unlike most bridge columns, this one doesn’t feature brilliant plays so much as stratagems that worked and that showed up someone in a good or bad light.  At their best, they are wickedly funny, and alone make the book well worth picking up. I’d like to see more of Mr. Allan writing as ‘Jane Seabrook’.

I wonder whether it’s possible to put together a Jane Austen style novel purely out of bridge columns?  Just a thought J

Deep Thoughts on Washington

July 31st, 2009  ~  Ray Lee  ~  4 Comments 

Back in the days when COI (an organization dedicated to improving the ACBL) existed, Allan Falk used to write an assessment after each NABC.  He would, from a player’s point of view, comment on the good, the bad, and the ugly, and offer constructive criticism in the hope that future events would improve.  Sadly, the COI newsletter and Allan’s articles are no longer being produced.  So instead, here is my take on the Washington NABC, which is still in progress as I write.

The Good

1)  Washington is a great place for a convention of any kind.  Lots to do, good transportation –  and pretty much all the museums etc. are free!  What’s not to like?

2)  The Marriott is well located – there are lots of restaurants nearby, literally within 2 minutes walk, and plenty more if you are prepared to expand your radius to 10 minutes.  Other facilities, such as a drug store and the subway, are also close at hand.  There is food for every budget – from the organic Chinese tucked away in a basement next to McDonalds to the more pretentious Italian and French locales across the road.

3) While parking at the hotel was not cheap (this point should really be in the next section), the locals had organized a system where you could drop your car on someone’s street or driveway for the week.  Well done.

4)  The tours and entertainment were terrific, as they always seem to be when the NABC hits Washington.  For me the highlight was a performance by the Capitol Steps, a political satire comedy group, who had several hundred people rolling in the aisles on Saturday night. None of us who were there will ever think about Barack Obama or Sarah Palin the same way again.  I first saw these guys at a Nationals in 1993, and have been a big fan ever since – thanks again to the organizers for bringing them back.

5) The kids program was great – my son brought his 5- and 3-year-old kids, and they couldn’t wait to get back to the playroom while mom and dad had fun at the bridge table.

6) The Daily Bulletin has got better over the last few years, I suspect partly because Brent Manley is now regularly in charge.  My friend Mark Horton was also contributing entertaining pieces daily, so there was much more to it than the usual pages and pages about who came 6^th in section in each side game.  The presentation has improved too, with more photographs, and a neat graphic display of the pairings in the big KO events like the Spingold.

7)  More BBO broadcasts of both major KO events, from an earlier stage than usual.  The more the merrier, I say – the top players in the world come to the NABC tournaments, so let’s watch them in action.

The Bad

1)  Yes, we had all the events in one hotel (trust me, don’t go to any Nationals where that doesn’t happen), but boy were they scattered all over the place.  I spent an awful long time going back and forth through the lobby and up and down escalators.

2) The lighting in the main Ballroom, where most of the National events took place, was quite poor.  The combination of a very high ceiling and chandeliers wasn’t good.  I always know when I can’t take photos without a flash there’s a problem…

3) Internet charges at the hotel were $12.95 a day.  Now while it also gave you free long distance within the USA, that feature wasn’t any use to me, nor to some of my American friends who had their own long distance plans.  My son commented that the previous night on the road he’d paid $100 rather thas $150 for his room, and got a better room, with a free breakfast and Internet.  My room didn’t even have a fridge…  And there was nowhere nearby with a WiFi hookup either – even at the local Starbucks you had to have an AT&T subscription.  C’mon guys – in this day and age, everyone wants to stay connected, so negotiate it into the deal with the hotel.

4)  A Chinese trade delegation arrived after a couple of days, and became ensconced on the top two floors of one of the towers.  That resulted in people being ‘incentivized’ to move to another hotel, two elevators being reserved and out of action permanently, and sporadic security shutdowns of much of the lobby area and one of the key entrances during the day.  I suppose this is par for the course in Washington, but it sure was annoying.

The Ugly

1) The National events now bar cell phones and other electronic gadgetry, at least in theory.  I confess that several times I forgot and walked into the room with a turned-off cell phone in my briefcase, and no-one was the wiser – there’s no actual detection gear.  One Spingold team was penalized 12 IMPs for cell phone violation, which cost them the match – presumably it rang, because I don’t know how else it could have been discovered.  Recognizing that technology presents security issues, I think we’re a long way from solving them yet.  Right now I think we’re in the same state as the airports – attempts at increasing security make life very uncomfortable for everyone without really doing much to deter the bad guys.  I note, for example, that there is nothing to prevent a player wearing in his or her ear a device which is ostensibly a hearing aid.

2) Since Linda was playing in it, I watched some of the Wagar women’s teams event for the first time.  The obvious flaws were (a) a Nationally-rated event with only 14 entries – at least one decent women’s team played in the Spingold (good for them – that’s what the top women’s teams should be doing) (b) apparently random seeding points assigned to a number of top European pairs.  Couldn’t help but notice that a young Dutch pair with one European title to their names got 50 SP, while the French pair who own three world championships were awarded only 20 – and this wasn’t the only anomaly.  Linda has talked at length about this event in her blog, and there’s an interesting discussion going on there.

3) I got the sense from several incidents that I observed, and from listening to other stories, that the quality of table rulings is going down.  (It was noticeable that in all the Appeals cases published in the Bulletin in the first few days, the table ruling was overturned.)  The primary concern of the director seems to be calm ruffled feelings rather than to pay attention to the bridge issues.  I saw a well-known woman player make a false claim, then brazenly lie to the director about what had occurred.  He really wasn’t interested in doing anything but making her happy; indeed, he would barely listen to the opponents, let alone ask me (as a presumably disinterested observer) what I had seen.  I recognize that directors need to prevent hurt feelings from escalating into major confrontations, but there are bridge rulings to be made, and it’s not clear that that is being done very well any more.  A couple of years back, the director who was called to my table in a Swiss teams never actually returned with a ruling.  When I finally ran him to earth, his excuse was that the round was over and that my partner and I had left the table.  “We were EW at table F7,” I said. “Where did you think our home table was?”  Just a worry right now, but I’ll be paying more attention to it in future.

4)  There has been some effort to use technology better, but the ACBL is still a long way from where it should be.  Bridgemate score reporting was tested in Boston, but absent here (presumably if it works for world championships, it should work in the ACBL).  With Bridgemate, we could have barometer scoring in the final session of pairs events, for example.  Hand records are being posted on the Internet (yay!) but again, with Bridgemate, every result at every table could be there, as happens elsewhere.  Every time I see a director wade through the room with the results on a big sheet off his dot matrix printer, I wonder what the Europeans think of us.

5)  My final gripe: system issues and alerting.  Every time it gets changed, it seems to get sillier; no-one knows what to alert anyway.  Linda came across a new one: she and her partner got into a slam-going auction and she alerted her partner’s 4Cx bid at one stage.  The director was summoned later (for reasons unrelated to this story) and commented that Linda’s alert of 4Cx was delayed.  “But I did it as quickly as I could!” she protested.  “No,” said the director, “ you should have delayed the alert until after the auction”.  That one’s new to me too, and pretty stupid to boot.  Defenders need to have some idea of what is going on in these auctions.  I came across one where South opened 1Cx, which was alerted.  West bid 1Dx, and East was helpless – if 1Cx was forcing, then he needed to alert 1Dx, but he wasn’t allowed to ask until it was his turn to bid!

We also discovered that using 2Dx to show a single-suited major hand over 1NT (as an overcall) is a pre-alert.  Using 2Cx to show any suit (i.e. Cappelletti) is not. Nor is an opening 2NT showing a weak hand with both minors.  Go figure.  Then there was the pair who arrived with a little card covered in pre-alerts – and seemed to think this absolved them from actually alerting any of these things whern they occurred…

To sum up

In summary, this was an above-average Nationals, and as always, what made the difference was the work of the local volunteers.  The above comments are offered in the spirit of constructive criticism, in the hope that these events can be made even better for the players – that, after all, should be everyone’s objective.

Elementary, my dear Watson

July 20th, 2009  ~  Ray Lee  ~  No Comments 

Yes, okay, I know the great Holmes never actually uttered the phrase I’ve used as a title — but it seems as though he should have.

I have various (bridge-related) thoughts in the aftermath of Tom Watson’s heart-breaking loss in the British Open yesterday.

1)  Linda happened to watch the last couple of holes with me.  She is a dedicated non-golfer, but nevertheless got caught up in the drama, and we were still talking about it today.  It was so simple to follow the drama — you didn’t have to know anything about golf, let alone be a half-decent golfer, to understand the issues.  Sink the putt on 18, and make history; miss it, and become a footnote…  Can bridge ever be made that simple?  Can we cultivate the personalities, the way poker broadcasts do, and present edited highlights that focus on the big-money decisions, the way poker broadcasts do?  I’d love to see someone try that with the Cavendish, where there is for once some serious money on the bridge table.

2) Watson made headlines because, at 59, he’s well past the age that most people can dream of playing anything at that level.  Not so bridge.  First of all, Watson is younger than the average ACBL member, by some distance.  Second, take a look at the ages of some of the folks who will be playing the Bermuda Bowl in a few weeks — one Robert Hamman, for example.    Third, look at some of the names of the participants in the upcoming Senior Bowl, and watch some of the BBO coverage of that event from Brazil.  Trust me, these guys can still play.  So we should pushing bridge as a true ‘sport for a lifetime’, one which has been demonstrated, moreover, to help you retain mental alertness as the ageing process sets in.

3) We all cringed at that final, oh-so-tentative putt, and the (it seemed inevitable) collapse in the playoff.  The pressure of the moment, and even maybe physical fatigue, took their toll.  I was reminded of the lady who assailed me with messages a few weeks ago when I was doing BBO commentary on the final of the Women’s US Trials.  She told me in no uncertain terms that she was tired of hearing pressure and fatigue given as reasons for plain bad play.  After all, she said, they’re on a 6-man team, staying in a 5-star hotel — how could they possibly be tired?  I’ve never played a true world championship, but I’ve watched Linda do it several times, and others I know almost as well.  Trust me, there’s constant pressure.   Linda doesn’t sleep much, and eats very little, for the whole two weeks.  Inevitably, she gets sick, and that doesn’t help either.  I’ve watched two members of my family do ludicrous things their first time on VuGraph — pure stage fright.  There was a great quote from Watson in today’s paper: “A lot of guys who have never choked have never been in a position to do so.”  (He actually said that some years ago.)  That kind of pressure is part of any sport at top levels.  The great Yogi Berra said, ‘Baseball is 90% mental — the other half is physical.’  Seems to me that applies to bridge too, although numbers may not be the same.

So next month, when you’re watching the final of the Bermuda Bowl, spare a thought for the fact that the players will have been in action for more than 2 weeks, day in day out, making good plays, making bad plays, all leading up to that declarer play decision that everyone knows will decide a world championship.  Guess what?  However good they are, some of them are going to get it wrong.

State of the Match

June 8th, 2009  ~  Ray Lee  ~  1 Comment 

It was pointed out to me yesterday by a kibitzer, during the final stanza of the Meltzer-Nussbaum match at the USTT, that bridge is one of the very few sports where the players don’t know the score as they play.  The only other I could think of was boxing.   So most of the time, the players are guessing at where they stand, and that renders decisions based on an assumed score very dangerous.

Just because a result looks ‘normal’ at your table, doesn’t mean that something weird didn’t happen elsewhere.  Partners may have picked up a number on a partscore deal.  Or that tricky game that you thought you won IMPs by making may have been trivial for your opponents, who happened to get a different lead.  Your good boards may not be as good as you think, and your bad ones may not be as disastrous.  And some innocuous deal may have swung a whole bunch of IMPs one way or the other.

These thoughts began to percolate yesterday as the match drew to a close, because the final deal decided it.  Meltzer had started the set down a little over 20, and from John Schermer and Neil Chambers’ point of view, they had probably got that back.  Maybe a little more, maybe a little less.  So given that, I put you in Chambers’ seat when he picks up the following:

♠AJ109xxx ♥Q ♦AQ ♣ Jxxx

Everybody red, partner opens 1C, and you bid 1S.  Partner rebids 2C and you invent a forcing 2D call.  Partner bids 3S (nice), but over your 4C slam try, signs off in 4S.  So here’s the moment of decision.  Given the state of the match, are you going to push for slam or not?

With a double fit, and controls in both red suits, it’s very tempting.  But partner knows about the double fit, and hasn’t cooperated.  If he has the hand you want him to have, with prime cards in the black suits and not much wasted in the reds, wouldn’t he have done more than bid 4S?  On the other hand, maybe you need this to win the match.  On the third hand, maybe you’re going to blow the match by bidding a bad slam.  If only you knew the score.

Well, suppose I tell you that you are actually 5 IMPs down at this point, with just this board to play.  Do you want to bid a slam now?

Okay, enough suspense.  Neil Chambers gave it a lot of thought and emerged with a bid of 6C over 4S.  That ended the auction.  This was the whole deal:

Dealer: Vul:		North
		♠	xx
		♥	xxx
		♦	K10xxxx
		♣	10 9
West				East
♠	Kxx			♠	AJ109xx
♥	Kx			♥	Q
♦	J9			♦	AQ
♣	AQxxxx			♣	Jxxx
		South
		♠	Qx
		♥	AJ98xxx
		♦	xxx
		♣	K

As you can see, the bridge gods were feeling bountiful.  The trumps behaved, spades broke 2-2, and the DK was even onside if that were needed.  A contract that fits Bob Hamman’s famous definition of a ‘good’ slam: one that makes.

So Chambers’ swashbuckling leap to a roughly 25% slam paid off big-time, and won the Meltzer team the match.  But I wonder what he would have said to his partners if the CK had been offside, and it turned out his team had been 5 IMPs up, rather than down, going into that final board.

A couple of tough decisions

June 7th, 2009  ~  Ray Lee  ~  1 Comment 

Linda’s on her way to the Canada Team Trials, which start tomorrow (watch her blog for reports) so she’s delegated me to cover the US Open Team Trials which began today.   Since I was a VuGraph commentator for the first two sets, it wasn’t hard to find something to write about.

Unlike matchpoints, where every board counts the same, IMPs is a game where you can trundle along playing nothing deals for a while, then suddenly hit a decision that you just know is going to swing a bushel of IMPs, one way or the other.  I’ll give you a couple of those from today’s action.

The first one, I’ll tell like a story, as Larry Cohen puts it.

Dealer: W Vul: NS		North
		♠	Axx
		♥	A
		♦	Kxxx
		♣	AKQxx
West				East
♠	KQJxxx			♠	xxx
♥	Q10xx			♥	KJxxxx
♦	x			♦	x
♣	xx			♣	xxx
		South
		♠	x
		♥	xx
		♦	AQxxxx
		♣	Jxx

We were just commenting on the fact that grand slams are available on the NS cards, when West got the diamonds in first: a Multi 2D.  White against red, I don’t mind the side heart suit.  North bid 2H, a strong takeout of hearts (he sure had that), and East (to me, unaccountably) passed.  I mean, if your partner opened 2S or better yet, 2H, at these colors, wouldn’t you up the preempt on the East hand? Anyway, he passed, and South jumped to 4D.  North cuebid 4H, giving East a chance to come to life with a double.  South obviously thought he had done enough with his first bid, so passed rather than bidding 4S (my choice), and North ended the auction with a leap to 6D.  Or did he?

West still had to bid, and he came to life with a call of 6H.  I personally hate check and raise bidding — I would have bid 5H or 6H over partner’s double in the first place,and let them make the last guess.  But there he was, and for a while it looked like he was going to win even more IMPs than he would have done by passing (yes, they did bid the grand in the other room).  North made a forcing pass over 6H, and South still had nothing to add, so he doubled, ending the auction.  Or did he?

No, North was not yet done.  Having made a forcing pass, he now pulled partner’s double (which was in tempo BTW) to 7D, securing a push on the board.  West thought long and hard about bidding 7H, but subsided, possibly realizing that 7NT would be available even if the heart grand was a good save. I have no explanation for North’s bidding.

So an eventful push, in the end.  I got some laughs from the kibitzers by suggesting that North’s pass and pull to 7D showed a stronger hand than the direct 7D bid would have.

But that was just the curtain-raiser.  Here’s the really fun one.  This time, it’s a defensive problem:

S  9 2   H  9  D  7 5  C A K Q J 10 8 5 4

Everyone is vulnerable, and you’re not totally surprised to hear RHO open with 1C, strong and artificial.  You raise clubs to game, and LHO goes into the tank.  He emerges with a bid of 6H!  Partner contributes the first pass, and RHO retreats to 6S.  Everyone passes this, you lead the CA, and this is the dummy:

S —  H A K Q 10 7 6 5 3   D  J 8 6   C 7 3

Partner plays the C6 (standard count) and declarer the C9.  Your play (BTW, only 17 IMPs depend on your next card).

Well, you can’t tell from the spots, as declarer could easily be concealing the C2.   The question is, given the auction, how many clubs and/or hearts is declarer likely to have?  Could he have no hearts and two clubs?  One of each?   If he has one heart, a heart shift will beat the hand.  Could partner even have the DA?  Okay, time to make a play… I’ll tell you that one East played a second club, and one played a heart, and only one of them was right.

Okay here’s the answer:  if you played a club, you were with Neil Chambers, and you lost 17 IMPs.  Only a red card will beat the slam, and  Michael Prahin found the heart switch.  This was declarer’s hand:

S A K Q J 8 7 6 4   H 2    D  K Q 3   C  9

So the heart switch takes out dummy’s entry before trumps have been drawn, and there’s no place to put the diamond losers.

Stay tuned — more tomorrow.

The Devil’s Tickets

June 5th, 2009  ~  Ray Lee  ~  2 Comments 

An important book about bridge is being published this week, by Crown:  ‘The Devil’s Tickets’, A Night of Bridge, a Fatal Hand, and a New American Age by Gary M. Pomerantz.  And it won’t help you win a single master point — sorry!

The author is a journalist, who seems to specialize in racy accounts of sports events and historically ‘significant’ episodes (his previous books include one about a plane crash in Georgia, and its effect on the survivors, and one about the night Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points in a game).  It’s not clear why he decided to write about the history of bridge, since on the evidence of this book he isn’t a player himself, but he did.  He focuses on two stories from the 1930s: the Culbertsons, and the Bennett murder case.

The Culbertson story has been told before, and well, by John Clay amongst others, so this book adds little if anything to the literature on that score.  Pomerantz uses it as the backdrop on to which he pins his main themes: the rise in popularity of bridge in America (he mentions that other countries play, but doesn’t comment on the significance of the game in the UK, for example) as a symptom of the growing emancipation of women, and the fascinating issues surrounding the Bennett case.  The two stories are told in parallel, and we follow the rise and eventual decline of the fortunes of Ely and Jo, while in alternate chapters we follow the Bennetts as they come together, marry, and eventually meet tragedy.

The book is at its strongest when it is concentrating on the Bennetts.  I’ve personally never read a detailed account of the murder, let alone the trial.  Woollcott’s ‘While Rome Burns’ did include an account of the case, but has long been out of print.  In these pages, we learn about the political and legal characters in Kansas City in the 1930s, and it is perhaps no surprise that Myrtle Bennett’s trial makes the OJ extravaganza look like a sideshow.  And a bridge sidelight: the Encyclopedia includes a discussion of the fatal four spades hand which supposedly led to Jack Bennett’s death.   In fact, none of the three surviving principals could remember the deal, so Ely got Sidney Lenz to ‘recreate’ it for The Bridge World, and analyze it in an article that appeared there.  So the two narratives finally crossed, as Ely milked the sensational murder case for publicity for his magazine.

I found the least convincing strand to be the one where the author draws his sociological conclusions.  For him, the success of bridge was all about women being given an arena where they can compete with men on equal terms.  (Curious that in modern times, women argue that they can’t!)  And the Bennett murder is all about Myrtle being able to express that equality when her husband treats her in much the same way that most American women at that time accepted.  So for Pomerantz, Myrtle’s shooting of her husband Jack was in some ways the first blow for feminism, and her bridge career had everything to do with preparing her for it.  Unfortunately, the author doesn’t really have the credentials to be making this kind of statement, and whenever he did so, I found myself saying ‘Really?’ — there’s no supporting evidence, simply the repeated statement that ‘this is so’.  It’s an interesting point of view, but not one, in my opinion, offered here with any great credibility.  It’s almost as though he needs a grand design to justify writing the book. Actually he doesn’t.  As others have found before him, the history of bridge is a fascinating yarn without the need to find it a significant role in the history of the world.

The book is written in a breezy narrative style, as you would expect, and really holds up well through the middle sections.  However,’Tickets’ tails off in the last few chapters.  Here, we move to the present day, and follow the author as he researches some of the principals through their later years (some required no research — for example, future President Harry S. Truman was a major player in KC at the time).  The end results are interesting, but the story drags somewhat here, and too much time is spent on the process rather than the results.  We do meet the Culbertsons’ children, both emotionally scarred (how could they not be, given their parents and idiosyncratic upbringing?) and adamantly opposed ever to playing bridge themselves.  Myrtle Bennett, after a career in hotel management in New York, eventually retired to Florida, where she died relatively recently — she never changed her name, but it seemed no-one ever connected her with the famous murder case.  No-one from the local bridge club remembered, her, either.

I got the chance to see an advance reading copy, so the book may have been edited further before final publication.  Certainly, the version I saw could have used some tightening in places, as well the removal of a totally futile Appendix which attempted to summarize the rules of bridge in about 3 pages.  I’ve no idea why anyone at Crown even thought that was necessary, let alone useful.  You don’t have to know anything about the game to want to read this book, or to get pretty well everything out of it that can be got. The extensive bibliography and references were also curious — they seemed to be there to add an air of pseudo-scholarship to what is really a lengthy piece of pretty good journalism.

Overall, I’d rate this book a B.  If you want to know about Culbertson, read Clay’s book, as well as Ely’s own bizarre autobiography.  But it’s a superb and fascinating account of the Bennett murder and trial.