Regional

So the 2010 Edgar Kaplan Winter Regional is done, severely impacted by the weather. I originally planned to play three days, and finished up playing just one, a bracketed round-robin event yesterday. We won the top bracket, winning 6 out of 7 matches, and collecting oodles of gold points, so it was a good day.

But it was a tough day's bridge. I only remember one slam in the 49 boards, and that was the other way from where Elwood and I were sitting. (Our opponents made no attempt in the bidding, so that was a swing in our favor.) There were a few game swings, but we spent most of the day grinding out smallish victories with part-score swings. That's a perfectly good way to win, of course, but it means you know the match is close all the time and you don't dare let your concentration slip for even one board.

One interesting decision came on this hand. I picked up
JTxx
AKTxxx
-
KTx
as dealer, vulnerable against not. Opening 1H is obvious enough, but the auction rapidly escalated.
N E S W
1H 1S 3H 3S
4H 4S P P
?
If you are a point-count junkie, you probably are confused at this point. Elwood's 3H raise is pre-emptive, meaning that he has some hearts and some distribution, but not too much in the way of high cards. You have already opened the bidding and raised to game on your 11 points, knowing that the opponents probably have more points total than our side. So what is there to think about? Of course, points are meaningless for a hand like this. I knew Elwood had at most one spade, and very few high cards in the majors. There was no way to tell until I saw the dummy, but if he produced one or two good cards in clubs, this hand could easily generate eleven tricks and a vulnerable game. Conversely, what have we got in defence? No more than one heart trick. Probably a spade trick. Can we get a couple of tricks in the minors and so beat 4S? Probably, but it's not a sure thing. I think that if you look at this hand the right way, the scale tips very heavily in favor of bidding 5H.



At the other table, the opposing N-S elected to defend 4S, and collected 100. When hearts showed up as 2-1, I was quickly claiming 11 tricks and 11 IMPs.

Here's another high-level auction where I perhaps chose to live dangerously. In second seat, nobody vulnerable, I picked up
x
AT8x
Axxxx
J9x
and saw the auction start
N E S W
P
P 4S Dbl P
?
On the one hand, if Elwood has enough to double, my two bullets guarantee a reasonable plus score, and risking the sure plus by bidding has to be a questionable decision. On the other hand, if he doesn't have the aces, Elwood must have some meaty middle cards, and if he has a really good hand we might well have 11 or 12 tricks. This is the first board of the final match, and the opponents are one of our strongest competitors. I decided to go for it, and was lucky to survive.



4NT indicated that I had two places to play. If I was going to bid, I didn't want to pick one of the red suits unilaterally. The problem with responding to a takeout double of 4S is that you can't assume that the doubler has four hearts. He is bidding under pressure, and you have to allow for that. We settled into our best fit, but the contract is far from cold. I won the spade lead and took a losing trump finesse. Now I could ruff the next spade and draw trumps, but they had to be 2-2. When that passed off successfully, I could eliminate clubs and run the QH, guaranteeing only one heart loser. (As I look at it now, I'm thinking that it would have been smarter to play AD and a diamond, rejecting the finesse. But at the table I “felt” that the KD was onside. So much for table presence!)

So the game came home. Our opponents at the other table took 300, so that was a 3 IMP swing to us. A heavy blow, considering that we won the match by 2 IMPs.

What a mess!

This blizzard is playing havoc with the city in general and the regional in particular. Elwood played yesterday, and described conditions outside as awful. He was in a bracketed round-robin, and his final-round opponents dropped out, meaning that he got to go home early. He said he was grateful, since otherwise he might not have made it home. Today, I was originally scheduled to play, but that's not happening, and tomorrow is questionable at best. Agent 99 is still trapped in Cincinnati, and won't get back here until Wednesday sometime, so whether I play on a team with Goldie tomorrow depends on whether we can find a fourth. As an alternative, I suppose we could play in a senior pairs or something, depending on how her other partner(s) are doing. It's all a shambles, really.

It's very unfortunate for the GNYBA and New York bridge in general. This is the biggest snowstorm to hit the city in a number of years, but even so I expect everything to be back to more-or-less normal within a day or two. The City is really pretty good about plowing the roads, restoring power where it drops out, and stuff like that. Which means that if the storm had arrived just two or three days earlier, there would likely have been little impact on the regional. As it is, Dr. Evil couldn't have arranged the timing to do more damage. I'm sure that attendance will be way down for Sunday and Monday, and it will probably be low for the other days too. Very disappointing.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas everybody. We aren't having a white christmas, but we have a blizzard to look forward to (Sunday night / Monday morning), so everybody take care travelling to the regional.

Edgar Kaplan Winter Regional

This week, there are only two topics on my mind. First up, Christmas is nearly here, and I'm trying to plan how I'm going to finish my gift shopping (basically done), finish my food shopping (nearly all to happen Thursday/Friday), and produce my usual Christmas dinner masterpiece on Saturday. No worries, as the Aussies say.

The other thing is the Edgar Kaplan Winter Regional in New York, which is next week from the 26th to the 30th. I don't really need any gold points myself, but Agent 99 needs quite a few to get to Life Master. And in addition, there's a client (or potential client) at the Manhattan who needs about 15 gold - I'll call her Goldie. So I've agreed to play with Agent 99 in a Golden Opportunity Pairs, and Goldie is playing with another Life Master in the same event. Then the next day, the four of us team up in a round-robin. That should provide a fast route to a few gold, because the whole team has a total of only about 2000 master points, and we must be in with a good chance to win whatever bracket we finish up in.

No pressure, except Goldie's husband (they both play at the Manhattan, sometimes even together) has promised to stalk me and haunt me if she doesn't get enough gold, on the grounds that he isn't going to be able to sleep until she gets them, so why not share the pain.

I'm also going to play a bracketed Round Robin with Elwood, but that should be a relaxing wind-down compared to the earlier efforts. Tell me again - this is fun, right?

2010 Gold Cup

OK, finally I see the news. "My" team, the Nick Stevens team, has survived the quarter-finals and will be heading to the finals weekend showdown. Go team!

Concealed Splinters And 4-card Raises

Splinter bids are bids that (by agreement) show partner a trump fit, a raise to game, and shortness in a side suit. This is terrifically useful information for assessing how well the two hands fit together, and splinters should be used at almost every opportunity.

There are a couple of tweaks that can be made, though. One observation is that usually, a splinter could be either a singleton or a void. Singletons are much more common, of course, but if you do happen to get a void, it would be nice to be able to distinguish it. Another thought is that the “traditional” splinter uses three responses to distinguish shortages in three suits. This is easy to use, but a tad inefficient. If you use one response to indicate that there is a shortage somewhere, a relay can be used to identify exactly where, if partner wants to know. And if he doesn't ask, you can bid game without revealing where the shortage is.

Another leaf on the tree of Niggle is the matter of jump-shift responses to major-suit openings, and using them for different flavors of raise. I don't like Bergen Raises, but the 4-card raises in Shep's 2/1 make sense to me. In addition, it's fair to say that if you don't need or want to use jump-shift responses as natural and strong, you need to find a good use for them, and that's not quite as easy as it sounds. Clearly distinguishing an assortment of 4-card raises seems like a very useful idea.

Putting all this together, you find that everything fits quite neatly. We include 2NT in the pantheon of jump-raises, and we include 3NT in the range of double-jump raises. Now, the cheapest jump raise is a concealed splinter. So 1H-2S and 1S-2NT are raises to game that include 4 trumps and a singleton somewhere. If Opener wants to find out where (ie usually), he bids the next step as a relay, and Responder bids the suit of the shortage, or bids the trump suit for the one suit he can't mention below 3. That is:
1H-2S; 2NT (relay) - 3C/3D/3H with a singleton C/D/S respectively. 1S-2NT; 3C (relay) - 3D/3H/3S with a singleton D/H/C respectively. This all leaves plenty of room for Opener to start q-bidding if slam is starting to look attractive. Note that if Responder q-bids the splinter suit subsequently, he is indicating the singleton ace.

We have only used one response so far, the cheapest jump-shift. There are 4 other single-jump responses, and these are used in reverse order of strength to indicate a 4+card raise (this idea being lifted from Shep's 2/1).
1H-2S 1S-2N Splinter (above)
1H-2N 1S-3C game-forcing raise without shortage (equivalent to Jacoby 2NT)
1H-3C 1S-3D 4-card limit raise
1H-3D 1S-3H 4-card mixed raise (weak but includes a defensive trick, an A or K outside trumps)
1H-3H 1S-3S pre-emptive, no defensive trick

Next we move up to the double-jump raises. The cheapest one is a concealed void splinter, showing a raise to game with 4 trumps and a void somewhere. As with the singleton splinters a level lower, a relay is used to locate the actual void. So,
1H-3S; 3N (relay) -4C/4D/4H shows a void C/D/S respectively.
1S-3N; 4C (relay) -4D/4H/4S shows a void D/H/C respectively.

At this point, we can look back and see that we have an array of raises with 4-card support, and can distinguish singleton and void splinters, which is a lot more than most people have in their bag of tricks. [infomercial voice]But wait, there's more.[/infomercial]

We actually have a few bids spare now. The double-jump raises, that most people use for splinters, are available for some different meaning. There is a type of splinter used by Opener called an Auto-splinter. For example, the sequence 1C – 1S; 4C! would indicate 4-card support for spades and a raise to game that includes 6 solid clubs (and a shortage somewhere else, therefore). This is off the main track of splinters, as the most important part of the message isn't actually the shortage but rather the honking great source of tricks. But it's still a good idea, and I think it makes sense to make that type of raise available to Responder also. So, for example, the sequence 1S – 4C! would show a hand like KJxx/xx/x/AKQT9x. It's true that you could start to bid this hand by bidding clubs, or by showing a diamond splinter. But I don't think either of those routes is really going to convey the combination of a very good suit with 4-card trump support.

Now we're talking. All I have to do is sell Agent 99 and Elwood on the idea.