[thepossum]

Dear all

Yet another aspect of bridge and question for more advanced players. I pre-empted here (rightly or wrongly) and considered 5C but expected it to be doubled so thought better of it. 4S makes +3 and 5C goes down 5 tricks. However the one person who sacrificed was not doubled so had the best score of only -250 instead of -1100 doubled or -700+ game

I still think I did the right thing not sacirificng but am disappointed that W didn't double with that hand. Or was it the right call. Any comments. Wwas I right to pre-empt or would I be thrown out of a club

regards P

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[spotlight7]

thepossum, on 2018-October-30, 23:20, said:

Dear all

Yet another aspect of bridge and question for more advanced players. I pre-empted here (rightly or wrongly) and considered 5C but expected it to be doubled so thought better of it. 4S makes +3 and 5C goes down 5 tricks. However the one person who sacrificed was not doubled so had the best score of only -250 instead of -1100 doubled or -700+ game

I still think I did the right thing not sacirificng but am disappointed that W didn't double with that hand. Or was it the right call. Any comments. Wwas I right to pre-empt or would I be thrown out of a club

regards P

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Your 3C bid non vul. vs vul(white vs red) is fairly solid by modern standards.
l
You should not consider bidding again. "Partner makes all decisions after

you preempt." Bidding again is called "Hanging partner."


When equal vul. you might want a better hand to bid 3C.

If vul. a seventh club is normal and many would prefer a better hand.

[P_Marlowe]

The bidding looks reasonable, except the double by East.
He has a 6 carder, he should just bid it.

Given the vulnerability, it usually is not a good idea to go for
blood for E/W, they should go after their own contract.

[billyjef]

Bidding again might help them find their slam. Happens frequently against the bots.
Let sleeping dogs lie.

[HardVector]

The preempt is fine. Once you've made a preempt, you have described your hand, it's now your partner's hand to bid from there as they know more about the combined hands than you do. A preempts purpose is not to play the contract, but to make your opponents guess what to do. Your partners raise to 4c simply elevates that guess to the next level. There may be 2 reasons for this, 1. they can beat whatever contract they try to play in, 2. to make finding the correct contract more difficult. Here, the reason is the second one, they should be in slam. If you now bid 5c, you allow west to now show some real value by bidding 5s or X. Now east can reevaluate and decide that slam is a good idea. 3c-4c forced them to guess, they guessed game, it was wrong - you win. Try not to get caught up in results against bots.

[The_Badger]

The West that didn't double 5♣ should be thrown out of the club! At the five level it's a bit of the swings and roundabouts game. Occasionally you will double a five level contract and the opponents will make it, but more often than not it will go down. It's all down to the percentages in the long run.

As other commentators have rightly said, as soon as you pre-empt it's up to partner to make the last call.

Obviously I am not privy to the scores on this particular board, but 6♠ is a very reasonable contract, so your pre-empt of 3♣ has stopped the opponents reaching this optimum contract. Bidding again just lets them either double you or find the right level. Your hand is absolutely (pardon the expression) total crap, and when partner raises to 4♣ perhaps even crappier.

And as billyjef rightly says, "Let sleeping dogs lie".

[mikeh]

Op: you should look a little deeper into the hand. I suspect, based on this and other posts, that you tend to look at other results and infer that such results are fair representations of the hand.

5C doesn't go down 5, not against minimally competent opps.

Say a spade is led and RHO mistakenly plays another spade, ruffed. It hardly takes a genius on defence to eventually play the heart K and then low to the Ace, get a ruff, and then play diamonds. You lose a spade, a club, and 3 tricks in each red suit.

Indeed, LHO had 1100 available against 4C!

As for those agreeing with your preempts, my advice is that you make them a little stronger. Yes, the modern style is to lighter preempts, but I think you are risking some terrible results because, to be blunt, you are not yet very good. You are not going to become good if you keep insisting that GIB is a useful model for learning or if you go by the results in a weak field to assess how you should bid. There was a recent thread in which you bemoaned not reaching slam off the cashing AK of hearts, and when people pointed out to you that this was not a 'slam hand', you argued with them, claiming that it was a slam hand because most of the declarers made 12 or 13 tricks. Given that the opening leader held KQ of hearts and had no other lead that made sense, the fact that anyone made 12 tricks simply showed how bad the field was, and the fact that you argued that it was a slam hand showed how much you have to learn.

Please don't take this as an attack. The best player in the world was a beginner once. The best players generally have an attribute that you also clearly possess: a desire to learn and to get better.

Unfortunately, you seem to have chosen a path (playing with robots and assessing your game by comparisons to very weak players) that will not lead you to meaningful improvement.

While the calibre of advice here is lower than it used to be (we used to have some extraordinary players posting here.....where are you PhantomSac?), there are some pretty fair players trying to help you. Making what seem to be silly arguments (the hand off the AK of hearts being a slam hand is the most obvious) is not the way to take advantage of the help on offer.

[thepossum]

mikeh, on 2018-October-31, 15:20, said:

While the calibre of advice here is lower than it used to be (we used to have some extraordinary players posting here.....where are you PhantomSac?), there are some pretty fair players trying to help you. Making what seem to be silly arguments (the hand off the AK of hearts being a slam hand is the most obvious) is not the way to take advantage of the help on offer.

Well the point of the other thread was not about slam and others were the ones who unnecessarily made a thing of it to have a go at me. Also dredging up irrelevancies from another thread to have a go on this thread isn't very constuctve either I'm trying to raise issues that may help beginners and novices, not for people to have a personal go at me. Hoow many of the people on this forum have personality problems and love to nit pick, pick irrelevancies, love to attack people and pick minor irrlevant issues that dont go to the point of the post. Several people had a go at me here when all I was asking was about a prempt. OK.

Please all go and look in the mirror before attacking people

[mikeh]

thepossum, on 2018-October-31, 19:42, said:

Well the point of the other thread was not about slam and others were the ones who unnecessarily made a thing of it to have a go at me. Also dredging up irrelevancies from another thread to have a go on this thread isn't very constuctve either I'm trying to raise issues that may help beginners and novices, not for people to have a personal go at me. Hoow many of the people on this forum have personality problems and love to nit pick, pick irrelevancies, love to attack people and pick minor irrlevant issues that dont go to the point of the post. Several people had a go at me here when all I was asking was about a prempt. OK.

Please all go and look in the mirror before attacking people

Ok. I give up. You post here, incessantly, claiming to want advice. You get advice. You respond by taking criticism of your bridge thinking as reflective of the critic having personality problems or of attacking you. Those ‘several people’ were sincerely trying to help you. What kind of person responds the way you did?

There are two kinds of frequent posters claiming they want to learn. There are those who are sincere, and they try to learn from those who point out the flaws in their thinking. Those people stand a decent chance of becoming better. Then there are those whose professed humility is false. They want people to praise them, and to tell them how good they are.

Those people never get better, because that’s not what they’re seeking. Consider this: even looking at all four hands you still thought that 5C should be down only 5. You can’t even see an obvious defence (obvious to any semi-competent player seeing only their hand and dummy) with all 52 cards on view, yet you assert that this is irrelevant. You have zero chance of improving if that’s your attitude.

Good luck playing robots.

[akwoo]

All of you criticizing thepossum have absolutely no idea how bad the average player is.

I guarantee you that if I showed this hand at my club, more than half the players would not be able to look at all 4 hands and figure out how badly 5C will go down.

It's true that most novices who eventually become experts can look at all 4 hands and figure out the result of a contract, but there's no reason to restrict advice giving to novices who have the potential to become experts.

[mikeh]

akwoo, on 2018-October-31, 21:14, said:

All of you criticizing thepossum have absolutely no idea how bad the average player is.

I guarantee you that if I showed this hand at my club, more than half the players would not be able to look at all 4 hands and figure out how badly 5C will go down.

It's true that most novices who eventually become experts can look at all 4 hands and figure out the result of a contract, but there's no reason to restrict advice giving to novices who have the potential to become experts.

A valid point. However, the issue for me is about attitude. One need not be deferential and it is fine to raise concerns about the advice one is given, but one ought not to make personal remarks about those far better players who raise bridge issues. He’s like those players who used to come up to a good friend of mine (and a truly good player) and ask his opinion, and then argue with him about his advice, insisting that their view was correct. Why ask, if you have no interest in learning?

[nullve]

thepossum, on 2018-October-30, 23:20, said:

Wwas I right to pre-empt or would I be thrown out of a club

I mentioned Partnership Bidding at Bridge by Robson & Segal in the Slam defence thread. This very influential book explains why it's probably right to open 3♣ in 1st seat NV and 3rd seat NV, but not in other positions.

[Stephen Tu]

Quote

Well the point of the other thread was not about slam and others were the ones who unnecessarily made a thing of it to have a go at me

The point of the other thread was flaws in the 2/1 system. Your first post was just general complaining, no one can really guess what specifically you were talking about, so we asked for specific examples. As an example you posted a hand where you posited that Soloway Jump shifts (which are by no means integral to 2/1, anyway) prevented you from reaching slam on a particular hand. Pointing out that slam is a terrible contract to be in, with an obvious lead that beats the slam, plus still a Q guess even if that lead is avoided, is merely pointing out flaws in the logic of your thinking in a particular case. It is not "having a go" at you.

If you interpret people point out flaws in your logic as them "having a go at me", then you really shouldn't bother posting in the forums at all. You are too thin-skinned to learn. At your level you aren't able to logically think through all the conclusions for hands. This is common for novices. Hell it's common for a lot of levels, bridge is a complex game, even experts make tons of errors, they just get more subtle than the ones beginners make. We can help you. But if you interpret anybody who thinks you have come to a logically fallacious conclusion in a particular case as a personal attack, then go away. You aren't interested in learning in that case if you can't ever accept that you may have made a mistake. If you think the poster's conclusion is wrong, then you can question it, & post your logic dissecting their argument and asking them to further clarify. But if you just dismiss everything as personal attack on your intelligence and ignore it, you learn nothing and just piss off people.

[miamijd]

Possum, if you want to improve your game, play in the toughest game you can find at your local club. I improved my game most as a young 20-something in the mid-80s playing evening club games in Columbus, Ohio against a lot of national champion and national champion-caliber players. Got my brains beat out at first, but I improved very quickly.

Cheers,
Mike

[akwoo]

mikeh, on 2018-October-31, 22:30, said:

A valid point. However, the issue for me is about attitude. One need not be deferential and it is fine to raise concerns about the advice one is given, but one ought not to make personal remarks about those far better players who raise bridge issues. He’s like those players who used to come up to a good friend of mine (and a truly good player) and ask his opinion, and then argue with him about his advice, insisting that their view was correct. Why ask, if you have no interest in learning?

For the average club player, you're not actually teaching them; you're just telling them they're wrong. Because they're not capable of understanding your explanations, they don't think you've actually given any.

[RD350LC]

mikeh, on 2018-October-31, 15:20, said:

As for those agreeing with your preempts, my advice is that you make them a little stronger. Yes, the modern style is to lighter preempts, but I think you are risking some terrible results because, to be blunt, you are not yet very good. You are not going to become good if you keep insisting that GIB is a useful model for learning or if you go by the results in a weak field to assess how you should bid. There was a recent thread in which you bemoaned not reaching slam off the cashing AK of hearts, and when people pointed out to you that this was not a 'slam hand', you argued with them, claiming that it was a slam hand because most of the declarers made 12 or 13 tricks. Given that the opening leader held KQ of hearts and had no other lead that made sense, the fact that anyone made 12 tricks simply showed how bad the field was, and the fact that you argued that it was a slam hand showed how much you have to learn.

Please don't take this as an attack. The best player in the world was a beginner once. The best players generally have an attribute that you also clearly possess: a desire to learn and to get better.

I agree with what is being said here. There was a time when I played in a 0-20 game, and be lucky to get average. I now play in the open games, and hold my own.
I tend to be aggressive in my pre-empts, especially when white vs red. That being said, once I make a pre-empt, I leave all decisions up to my partner. I also do not tolerate a partner who repeats a pre-empt. There are two major problems with that:
1. The opponents have two chances to hit you.
2. Your initial pre-empt may have just pushed the opponents up high enough so that partner could hit them for a telephone number (800), and in repeating the pre-empt, you deny partner that chance.
Yes, the bots are not very good. However, I greatly respect the person who programs them in that they are as good as they are.

[rmnka447]

First of all, skill at preempting and sacrificing is something that is acquired with experience. Everyone who has mastered those skills has some point suffered some ignominious sets. I've certainly had my share of telephone numbers (4 digit sets) over the years.

One point previously stated cannot be emphasized enough "Once you have preempted, it's up to your partner to do any further preempting."

The objective of preempting is to obstruct or make it difficult for the opponents to find there optimum spot. If you can go down less than they score in the par (not necessarily optimum) contract, then you're likely to get a good result. If they get to a reasonable spot, but not their optimal spot, you've also scored a victory in the sense that you haven't given away as much as you could have. The trick is to make life as difficult as possible for them while avoiding too large a set.

Your preempt worked on this hand although it was very aggressive. Looking at your hand alone, you rate to have no winners outside of the ♣ suit and likely have 2 losers in ♣ opposite a small doubleton in partner's hand (which is all you should assume absent any other information). Partner made a dangerous raise to 4 ♣, but the opponents vulnerable elected to go on not wanting to risk missing a game versus an uncertain set.

Consider that if you had passed, the opponents might well find 6 ♠. Either East will open a strong 2 ♣ and go on over West's strong ♠ raise, or, after opening 1 ♠ will explore for slam after West makes a 3 ♠ limit raise.

[helene_t]

Hi Possum,

When you preempt, you describe your hand once and for all, and leave all decisions to partner. He knows what you have, more or less. You have no idea what he has. He may be intending 4♣ to make, hoping to push them to an unmakable game. He may be bluffing. He may be happy to defend 4♠, either because he knows that some other game is better, or because they have missed a slam.

So you don't have to think about whether 5♣ is right or wrong. You just don't consider bidding again after you have preempted (unless partner makes a forcing response). If the decision not to bid 5♣ turns out to be wrong, it is either bad luck or it is partner's mistake.

Here, partner's 4♣ bid (and subsequent pass) worked as intended. Opps missed a slam.

That another South did better due to the robots' mistake is not something to worry about. I suppose you play against robots (and subsequently post the hands here) because you want to learn some lessons that will be useful against real opps. Bidding 5♣ here in the hope that opps will forget to double it is not real bridge. It is just stealing sweets from children.