Played in a 2 day Swiss Event recently.  This hand came up and my partner, "first to bid", opened 4 . Using Key Card Blackwood,  we ended up in 6 , making 7 (Partner used ruffing finance on the K )  (Not the way I would have played it,  I would have first tried to ruff out the K ). 

Any way,  here is the hand.  How would this have been bid in OCP? Both the opening bid and following bids.   Thanks. 


North                                 South

S   KJ10987532                   AQ64
H   A93                               876
D                                        A   
C   4                                   AQJ83

First thing to note, Jimmy, is that there is no way that this is a 4 opener in OCP. I would bid 4 without the A and (unless at adverse) without the 9th  too. It's a NAMYATS 4 opener IMO, 11 times out of 10.

You ask for the full OCP sequence. Sorry, I can't give you a definite sequence, because this hand raises questions which (AFAIK) are not covered in the notes.

So, having said that :-

4 - 4 (Beta)

and now this brings up an interesting question. Which beta scale are we on? A strict reading of the notes would suggest that we're on the weak scale, but I find it very difficult to construct a NAMYATS opener which doesn't contain at least two controls, so I would argue for using the normal beta scale in this situation.

4NT(3) - ??

And now I'd want some further thought as to whether we cue bid or use Epsilons. I suspect that this might be down to partnership agreement.

If we're using Epsilons, then I would argue for responder just blasting 6 over 4NT. You might look rather silly if opponents cash two or more  tricks, but the suit responder really needs to know about is  , and obviously the response to a 5 Epsilon is very likely to take us past 5 anyway, so why bother asking? So 4NT-6 and it's now just a question of whether opener has the nerve to punt the grand with the unshown void and extra 

Cue bidding makes things a little more certain,

4NT-5
5 -5
6

and I don't think we're going to get to 7 . It could all too easily be on a  finesse, and grand slams on a finesse are not good odds.

Well done for not giving up! What your opponent was doing I can't imagine, he could see  K sitting over him and (unless  were 4441) knew that his partner couldn't stop the 4th  trick.

Hand 1 (Complete Layout). I demand a redeal - the Queen is missing and North only has 12 cards

Hand 2 is lovely. You have to assess this hand accurately: You need to engineer an entry to the North hand in Diamonds. No other suit will do. You can afford to lose 2 Diamonds tricks in order to achieve that, as long as you give yourself the best chance of reaching Dummy's Hearts.

(a) If the Diamonds are 2-1, reaching Dummy is never a problem (neither is getting 12 tricks). (b) If East has all three, you're irrevocably stuffed, but (c) when West has all three outstanding Diamonds, you can assure yourself of the entry by cashing the Ace at trick 2 and leading the 7 at trick 3. If West follows small, you overtake in Dummy. If East wins, the 's are 2-1 and (a) above applies. If West wins trick 3 and East shows out, you simply win the return in hand, and lead the 5, once again overtaking if West plays low. If West goes up with the King, the 5 is now an entry with your carefully preserved 2. Cashing the other top at trick 2 is just in case Opps decide to give me a ruff 'n' sluff in Spades - doesn't really change anything)

Like I said, a peach of a hand. I just wish I could be confident that I would find the answer if presented just as a hand, without any suggestion that it was a problem! This is more of a problem at Match-pointed Pairs, of course. Do you give up the chance for 1 or 2 overtricks (by playing as above) or do you just lay down the Ace, hoping for a stiff King or any 2-1 split? At IMP scoring you would definitely play as above, assuming you analysed the problem correctly, but at MP Pairs I think you're effectively forced to get this one wrong by the scoring method.

There's a lot of these 'Concede a trick you don't have to in order to get more back in exchange' hands. One of Mollo's books has one where the Hog concedes a trump trick holding AKQJ1098 of trumps in order to endplay one of the opponents. There was also that hand from a simultaneous which I think I posted here a while back, you have to persuade one opponent to grab an opportunity to overruff in order to promote an entry card in dummy.

All good stuff, and a way to pass the time, but VERY long odds against you meeting the situation at the table, let alone recognising it if you do! As Oliver implies, it's much easier when you know it's a problem, because then you know that normal solutions won't work.

I vaguely remember someone putting up a trick hand in one of those pre-dealt simultaneous events many years ago, the whole point of the hand was if you got to the fairly obvious grand slam, you were likely to get a lead in a suit where dummy held exactly AKQJ and you were void, but the point of the hand was that you had to count your entries at trick 1 - you had to ruff the opening lead (or you could discard a high card from your own hand) in order to pull off the trump coup. Throw a small card from your hand on dummy's winner, and you were sunk, you couldn't pick up the trumps without losing a trick.

I can't remember who it was who set the hand, but Oliver for one will remember the sort of event I'm talking about. Was it the Epson Pairs? I know there was some big name company (at least, big name in those days!) that was sponsoring it.

OK, I recreated the scripts (e-mailed on request). To be included, South must have any 4441 or 5440 shape with short spades and 0-8 HCP. North must have a 1 opener (2NT opener excluded) and it's assumed that North will rebid any 4+ side suit in preference to rebidding a 6+  suit.

Given those criteria, South will hit a 4-3 or better with North holding only 5 card  on 52,965 deals out of 100,000,000.  North will rebid 2 with a 6+ card suit and no 4+ side suit on 19,252 deals out of 100,000,000.

Yes, it surprised me when Georgi got me to run these scripts for the first time, but there you go! 

Now, before Oliver points it out, this takes no account of what contracts may or may not be makable, nor does it take any account of opponents rescuing you. The only question answered is if opponents stay silent, are you better off responding 1NT or not. By a factor of about 2.5 to 1, it would appear than the answer is "Yes".

As I said upthread, the question is significantly more complicated when the opener is 1 , and the scripts will need a bit more thought.

<snip>

As you say, you pays your money and takes your choice. I know what my money is on, though... In my experience, sod's law says that if I am ever tempted to bid 1NT on this sort of hand (but a little stronger, as I said), Partner invariably rebids their Major and so we just play 1 level higher than we might have. Most of the time we're still making 8 or maybe even 9 tricks (because I will normally only do it on about a 9 or 10-count), but sometimes we only making 7 tricks. Occasionally we even find a better fit somewhere else, but my luck is not that good that it happens very often

As you're aware, I have faith in the statistics classes that you skipped to learn Greek and Latin.    I admit that I was of your opinion until Georgi tried to convince me otherwise sufficiently often that I ran the numbers in order (so I thought!) to disprove what he said, but it was me who was in for the surprise. If I can't find the scripts, then I will re-create them. It may take me a little while because I have PC problems at the moment, I think a motherboard fault as the whole shebang is locking solid every 60-90 minutes or so, requiring a big red button recovery. I've eliminated the graphics card and drivers as a source of the problems (happens with both NVidia and Radeon based cards on two distros with very different parentage) so I've got a new barebones setup on the way, but I have to cannibalise the current PC and obviously do a full reinstall, that burns up a few days worth of my spare time these days.

Not in any way wishing to comment on what you say about playing this specific hand, this sort of bidding problem is something about which Georgi and I had extended discussions.

I've been brought up on the idea of dropping the bidding at the 1-level on North's hand, as happened here, but Georgi tried to persuade me that the odds in fact favour a 1NT response on North's hand. I ran a bunch of simulations to try to cover the various possibilities, and without having a double-dummy solver available, it did appear to me that Georgi was right (although not overwhelmingly so), and the 1NTF on  1=4=4=4 shape (0=4=4=5 is even better of course!) does seem to pay off, even if only slightly, in the long run.

I will try to find the simulations I ran (it needed a whole bunch of them to cover the various permutations), and if I can, will take another look at them and post the results if I still think they support 1NTF with North's hand.

Brian, the hand diagram (in which East is on the left-hand side of the hand diagram), clearly shows East on your left. To make it clearer, I've now put West in (on your right) in green. I've even put the outline of the table in, just for you .

For those who have a hard time figuring out points of the compass, I've slightly amended the original hand diagram. As I've said before, North is at the bottom of this diagram, which has been rotated by 180 degrees because the hand is viewed from North's standpoint.

OK, now I see what you've done. I read it as you wanted to rotate North to the bottom of the diagram. It just didn't occur to me that the table was over the hands rather than under them, so I had the axis of rotation in the wrong place. Put it down to too many statistics courses as a student...