mikeh, on 2021-January-26, 16:57, said:
Wuudturner criticizes opening 1C on 4432 hands.
I am personally a very strong advocate of the style, and should point out that it is very common indeed amongst top pairs, except of course for those who play a forcing club method.
The style makes bidding clubs more difficult, especially in competition, since responder can't usually afford to raise with 4 card support and has to be cautious about even 5 card support.
However, it has the opposite effect in terms of being able to bid diamonds. When 1D shows 3+, responder has to be careful, but when it shows 4+, then responder is able to compete far more freely.
Note that diamonds outrank clubs, so in the (admittedly infrequent) situations where both sides have a minor fit, diamonds is the more important, powerful suit.
One further advantage to 4432 1C openings will only arise as the partnership advances in its bidding knowledge. Transfer walsh (there are different versions) is a powerful approach, and it is useful to increase the frequency of 1C opening bids in order to make maximal use of it. For example, in one current partnership we open 1C on 3343 hands out of range for 1N
Wuudturner was making his arguments in the context of the third hand you gave.
I do understand the reasoning behind discounting the spade holding due to the spade bid, but I think you failed to give due weight to the 'explanation' of the 2C bid.
I suspect, to the point that (were I a betting man, which I am not) that I'd put good money on the notion that your LHO was worried that 2C was a takeout bid, and so he was competing in what might be a 9 card fit. If you took responder's 3H as invitational, then North rates to have almost all the missing hcp, plus of course responder might well have short spades and/or be able to use your spade suit, even after losing a finesse, to pitch a club loser.
I said '[I]f you took responder's 3H as invitational' because that seems to be how you did take it. Others have properly pointed out that it is standard practice, amongst advanced or better players, to use 3H here as purely competitive.
Say one held, as responder, something like xx KQxxxx QJx xx. No way do you want to sell to 2S yet game is almost surely out of reach. So you'd bid 3H.
How, then, do you show an invite? It is common to play that either a new suit is a gametry (it may be a game force but you just bid again if partner signs off) or when no gametry makes sense, double to show extra values but no clear direction.
Here, partner doubles, and you might well leave it in with your hand, although South will probably run to 3C (if North heard the question about 2C, and the answer, he cannot (imo) ethically run. He is not entitled, in my view, to knowing that his partner wasn't sure he showed clubs).
On the second hand, I agree with your 4S bid, even at unfavourable. You bought unluckily in that they were able to double, despite having a double fit, and neither heart honour was onside (declarer might end up having to make a good guess if one of them were). You can be morally certain that the opps have some game somewhere, and they don't always defend even when they should.
Put another way: you bid 3S and they bid game...are you happy passing?
Btw, a good rule of thumb is that if your opponents always make the winning call when you apply pressure, find someone else to play against. They're either the best players the world has ever seen or they are looking at the hands:)
In addition, defending 4H, which is presumably the alternative, would cost you 10 imps when your teammates butchered a simple hand to go down in a cold contract.
On the first hand, once again I have sympathy and once again you caught a very unlucky lie. Partner will rarely hold a void, and when he does it isn't always, though it often is, in your 'side suit'. Imagine a vanilla xx xx xx AKxxxxx hand (not that I am a fan of preempts with 7222 shape) and picture both 5C and the defence to 4M.
In 5C you are down 300 and they are cold for either game unless clubs are 1-1 and neither opp has short diamonds. Plus, and this is important, they have to double you.
You post a lot of examples where you think that your approach has led to a poor result. Sometimes I agree with you but I suspect part of the problem is that you dwell on reasonable decisions that don't work, and that can lead you astray.
If you made the same bids on hands 1 and 2 multiple times, you should expect to be a net winner, but if you allow the actual results to cause you to bid more conservatively in the future, you will be a net loser.
Lots of players make what, to a good player, would be terrible calls or plays, and get good results, and think that that means their bid or play was correct...leading to terrible bids and plays in the future. I fear you may be about to 'learn' the same but opposite lesson: you made two reasonable to good calls, and got terrible results.
Bridge is a very hard game to learn to play well precisely because it is a game not only of the probabilities of how the cards lie but also the psychology of the players.
When I learned the game, the prevailing expert approach was to 'avoid disasters'. Play and bid down the middle, avoid or minimize mistakes.
In more recent years, the approach is completely different: try to make the opponents make mistakes. Apply pressure as often and as aggressively as possible. Don't assume the opps will always do the right thing. I think that this is because, at the expert level, play and bidding became so good, when the opps weren't in your face, that sitting back and letting the opponents have relatively uncontested constructive auctions was a sure way to lose the board or, at best, break even. Mix it up...let them guess.
As an example, on the hand you bid 5C, South might well have chosen to bid 5H...had he Qxx Axxxxx Jxx A he surely should, and now your partner leads his stiff diamond and you beat 5H.
Also, when you give examples of your partner's bidding or play (and I know you are not doing this to show them up or to blame them) your partner has often made a very bad play or bid. That isn't the case here, in any of the 3 examples.
However, if you want to improve, you need to find partners who either already know a bit more than you do or are very interested in getting better. Then try to find some good books on bidding or play....and both read them! Or find a mentor who will work with you and your partner.
If you can't find such a partner, try to find a mentor who will work with you, but read, read and read.
BBF is a useful resource, though its best days are now years in the past. There are few experts posting here. I suspect that I am the most experienced frequent poster, which was far from the case 5-10 years ago:( On the plus side, there are relatively fewer appallingly bad posters as well! But the reduction in activity means that you are not going to get a lot of sound advice here compared to the way it used to be. Justin Lall, Josh Donn, Richard Reisig, Frances Hinton and others (including rarely Fred G) were true experts who posted a lot of good stuff here.
Sorry for the long post, but I hope you find some useful information here.
Your post may have been long, but it was excellent.
I wanted to ditch the 1
♣ could be as short as two, on the basis that the only time it will ever be that short is with the 4432 weak NT hand, which is very infrequent. I would rather open 1
♦ with that shape, which makes little difference overall, because opening 1
♦ is almost always going to be 4+ cards, so just treat it as such when responding. My partner wasn't convinced and wanted to keepm it as it is.
Regarding the competitive auction, I understand that having direct raises as competitive and cue bids, new suit bids or double showing constructive raises is commonly played, and I like it. I will suggest it to this partner but she is the type of player who does not like going out of her comfort zone as far as bidding is concerned, and wants to stick with what she is familiar with. I happen to think I lose a fair few matchpoints on the competitive auction because of lack of agreement over whether a raise is constructive or competitive, or whether a pass is forcing or not, or whether one of us should be doubling our opponents to try and get +200 when they keep bidding over us, or how to treat those awkward hands with support which are too good for a pre-emptive raise, but not enough for a game invite.
Easier said than done finding good partners who I can learn and grow with. The decent players in a club tend to be paired off with other decent players, so they are mostly not interested in playing with me. I don't really know anyone who has a drive to be competitive and is willing to learn new things. Novice players who feel ready to have a go in the main duplicate have the same problem, they can only partner with their novice friends and get hammered, but don't know why. That is why before lockdown I took a novice under my wing to give her a game in one of our main duplicate evenings once a month, in the hope I might be able to pass on advice, and that my bidding is sound enough she can infer properly from it. I did manage to get a monthly game with one of the club's decent players last year, but the closure of the physical club has put a stop to that. I am limiting my online bridge, because I have a day job that involves sitting in front of a computer all day, so three hours of bridge in front of a computer on top of that regularly is a bit much.
The psychology game - yes I lose that one regularly. I easily get frustrated with bad sessions, especially runs of bad sessions, and that can incite me to make careless or reckless decisions at the table. It's something I need to work on.
I have always thought this forum was very good. I've tended to believe there are several superb players on here, internationals, maybe high up in the world rankings, hence I post many hands on here to get insight from experts who are going to be brutally honest if I messed up, but reassuringly also will tell me it wasn't may fault. I used to post hands on rec.games.bridge before I found this forum, there were some very good players on there, but then number of times I posted a hand on there and got hammered in the post mortem was a fair bit in excess of here.
"Lots of players make what, to a good player, would be terrible calls or plays, and get good results, and think that that means their bid or play was correct...leading to terrible bids and plays in the future."
That is what I am, or was, a little concerned about. I do occasionally get weird bids against me, sometimes leaves me thinking "what on Earth?!", but it has a nasty habit of working for them and duffing me up, and it is often the same people doing it. Will they learn they can do what they like against me because it will work more often than not? Either they know something I don't, they've been on a lucky streak, or I'm selectively focussing on the bad results and not logging the good results.
Help
+++++++++++++++++
IMO, you both bid well. Rub of the green.