[straube]

pilun, on 2022-January-08, 00:20, said:

Related question

If you demote singleton honours (stiff K => 1, stiff Q => 0) do you do the same with dry honours? So

AK- tight. Does that become 4 SPs?

AQ - tight. Is that 3 SPs and ignore the queen entirely in DCB?

I hadn't thought of that. Interesting idea though. Certainly HH is unexpected and blocks the suit, etc.

I use Parity Cue Bidding which I learned from Adam and Sieong. When pd was willing to deduct for stiff honors I felt my slam bidding improved.

I think Foobar and Adam deduct from 24 to see what could be missing. I've always just looked at how many QPs partner showed and then saw if he could have a combination of cards I needed for slam. So deducting QPs (or adding them conceivably) for certain honors never gave me any trouble.

[Gilithin]

straube, on 2022-January-08, 04:14, said:

I hadn't thought of that. Interesting idea though. Certainly HH is unexpected and blocks the suit, etc.

If you have QJT9xxxx in a suit, is it really bad news to find out that partner's doubleton is AK for slam purposes? Under what circumstances do you think this is going to be an advantage? Compare this with the question of whether partner's singleton suit has 0 or 1 loser when they have a singleton ace as opposed to a singleton king. Think about pros vs cons and you will surely come to the conclusion that downgrading doubleton honours makes little sense when it comes to slam scanning.

[straube]

Gilithin, on 2022-January-08, 07:30, said:

If you have QJT9xxxx in a suit, is it really bad news to find out that partner's doubleton is AK for slam purposes? Under what circumstances do you think this is going to be an advantage? Compare this with the question of whether partner's singleton suit has 0 or 1 loser when they have a singleton ace as opposed to a singleton king. Think about pros vs cons and you will surely come to the conclusion that downgrading doubleton honours makes little sense when it comes to slam scanning.

Easy there. I just said I hadn't thought about it but it was an interesting idea (to me) and doubleton honors are usually worth less than accompanied by length. Not for or against deducting for them.

[DinDIP]

Re discounting doubleton honours: an Australian international asked me about this (in the context of a pseudo-relay system). I tested a very small sample of deals and concluded that it was not a good idea for AK or AQ but might be worth considering for KQ. As Adam has noted, the value depends in part on whether the partnership uses DCB (when it takes two scans to distinguish between Ax and KQ) and PCB (when this is known in one scan).

[Cascade]

pilun, on 2021-December-30, 00:41, said:

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...

Of course ♠Q is 3½ times as likely as ♦Q, so you might just go with the odds if 6♣ is not a relay.

straube, on 2022-January-02, 00:22, said:

Isn't the SQ roughly 2.5 times as likely as the DQ since the SA and SK are known?

pilun, on 2022-January-02, 02:17, said:

Yes, 2½ times as likely to be ♠Q.

We are comparing the chances of ♠AKQxxxx ♦xx and ♠AKxxxxx ♦Qx. The opponents have five spades and seven diamonds. Partner has five unknown spades and two unknown diamonds.

The number of combinations of ♠AKQxxxx is nine (small spades) choose four which is (9*8*7*6)/(1*2*3*4).

The number of combinations of ♦xx is eight (small diamonds) choose two which is (8*7)/(1*2)=28.

The number of combinations of ♠AKxxxxx is nine (small spades) choose five which is (9*8*7*6*5)/(1*2*3*4*5). That is precisely the same number has for ♠AKQxxxx.

The number of combinations of ♦Qx is eight (small diamonds) choose one which is 8.

So there are 28 combinations of ♠AKQxxxx ♦xx for every 8 combinations of ♠AKxxxxx ♦Qx. The former is precisely 3.5 times more frequent than the second.