[Hyperon]

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You open a weak 2 in hearts with the North hand. The opps get to 4♠ and partner leads ♥8. A low heart is played from dummy and your queen holds the trick. Declarer -erroneously- put ♥2, so you know that partner has a singleton. Since this is the last time you will be on lead, you decide to cash ♥A, with partner discarding something. You have two tricks so far and it seems that you should act quickly to collect two more tricks before declarer can
(a) pitch minor losers in hand on dummy's hearts
(b) pitch minor losers in dummy on a solid minor in hand.

Basically you have two options here:
(i) You continue hearts. This might set up a spade winner for partner when he has for example ♠Q97. As declarer is aware of this trump promotion, he is likely to throw a minor loser if that can save him. For this tactic to work it seems that you need partner to have either minor ace in combination with a 'trump promotable' spade holding. Another win is a lay-out like this, where declarer no longer would have two heart discards:

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(ii) You switch to a minor suit. This would work when partner has the minor king and declarer does not have tempo to get his losers pitched. A possible lay-out:

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Having considered all this, it follows that partner should give us a hint with his discard as how to proceed. Is anyone familiar with some 'expert standard' in this rather specific situation? Would you follow your regular suit asking method or switch to something like: high in a suit = lead hearts/low in a suit = lead that suit?

[manudude03]

I normally just play suit preference here. So here, it would be high card=lead hearts and low card= lead other suit.

[johnu]

Advanced carding???

Play an encouraging card in diamonds to get a diamond lead
Play an encouraging card in clubs to get a club lead
Play the clearest discouraging card in clubs or diamonds to get a heart continuation

[chasetb]

Yeah, this isn't even CLOSE to being Advanced, let alone Expert. You play Suit Preference.

What I do disagree with is what signal means what. An encouraging card obviously means lead the suit. A discouraging card only denies the suit, and strongly implies the other non-trump suit (in this case the other minor). A middle card is lead a Heart or a trump (seeing dummy's trump suit, clearly trump is NOT correct!)

The reason I say this is because if you play UDCA, there's no way to show an encouraging Diamonds, as the 2, 3, 4, and 5 are all accounted for. Also, while it's possible that the 3rd round of Hearts is best, I believe it's the least likely signal to be given of the three.

[sfi]

I agree with Johnu - this seems pretty basic. I don't have faith that either I or my partner can reliably read a middle card, and there seems to be no need for it here. The number of situations where I want to encourage for a specific suit but can't afford a card in that suit has to be pretty small.

[1eyedjack]

It may just be that a better example of the problem could be devised, but it is far from clear to me that it is right to cash the Heart Ace at trick 2.

Yes it is right, *if* a third heart is the best defence. The trouble with that is that if a third heart is *not* best defence then a lot of the time neither will be the second heart. Your Ace of Hearts is not going away anywhere, and in all likelihood declarer will be flushing out your Ace pronto, at which point you are in broadly the same position (without the option of a Heart upper cut of course), but by which time you will already have had an opportunity to attack one of the minors. Which one is a guess, of course, but if you guess wrong then you can guess again when in with the Ace.

[Hyperon]

johnu, on 2016-May-22, 23:12, said:

Advanced carding???

Play an encouraging card in diamonds to get a diamond lead
Play an encouraging card in clubs to get a club lead
Play the clearest discouraging card in clubs or diamonds to get a heart continuation

I know it sounds that easy. We play o/e discards normally and just switched to ud in this case because it looks more readable.

1eyedjack, on 2016-May-23, 03:24, said:

It may just be that a better example of the problem could be devised, but it is far from clear to me that it is right to cash the Heart Ace at trick 2.

At the table the last diagram actually occured, in which you have to cash ♥A or declarer's heart disappears on ♣Q. I don't consider it as clear, but it just happened.

[rhm]

1eyedjack, on 2016-May-23, 03:24, said:

The trouble with that is that if a third heart is *not* best defence then a lot of the time neither will be the second heart.

True, but my judgement tells me that killing one of those heart winners is the winning defense more often than not.
In defense you often have to judge probabilities relying on your judgement and your experience.
Constructing counter examples proves nothing. It is not possible to get the defense right in all circumstances.

Back to the question raised and the defense problem:

Partner is marked with a minor suit at least 5 cards in length.
He will very often have no choice but to discard from his length for Bridge logic reasons.

It is dangerous to discuss carding agreements based on such a specific example, because carding agreements must apply to many very different scenarios
An advanced signalling agreement would be the following:

Agree in cases where partner discards from a suit known to be five cards or longer as follows:

A small spot card: lead the lower ranking side suit (clubs here)
A high spot card: lead higher ranking side suit (diamonds here)

A middle card can have a number of meanings depending on circumstances:

1) No preference. The correct switch might depend for example what leader can contribute in the side suits.
2) You want a continuation of the current suit, in this case hearts.
3) you want a switch to trumps.

While this sounds complicated, leader almost always can figure out which option applies to the middle card, as long as he is aware of all the options.
In this case it will be 2) or the defense does not matter.

Rainer Herrmann

[Fluffy]

On my notes it says:

Encourage obvious shift: Play this suit, no promotion
Discourage obvious shift: Sure promotion
Encourage possible shift: Play this suit, no promotion
Discourage possible shift: Possible promotion.


A possible promotion on this situation would be ♠108x

I would take diamonds as the obvious shift here.

[Vampyr]

Fluffy, on 2016-May-25, 00:31, said:

On my notes it says:

Encourage obvious shift: Play this suit, no promotion
Discourage obvious shift: Sure promotion
Encourage possible shift: Play this suit, no promotion
Discourage possible shift: Possible promotion.

This is likely very good, but not everyone has read the book.