More Beauty : Privilege of transfers

East's takeout double may not be a thing of beauty but he does not really have the textbook hand for a 2D overcall either.

At first glance, Bocchi's 3S bid seems a bit too keen. Partner passed over 1S doubled, there doesn't seem to be much upside in competing.

However, such hands show the hidden costs of the fashion of transfers.
Playing transfers over the takeout double, South has to pass with hands that would normally constitute a 1NT bid. In fact, the Italians pass with upto 9-10 HCP in similar situations. Their style is for the opener, even when minimum, to compete aggressively with shape to compensate.

Having already shown invitational-plus hand by bidding 2S, West can complete the message of balanced-game-force by doubling 3S. It is not a penalty double, just a better statement of the nature of his hand than the 4H call chosen. East, with three unexpected trumps (opposite a balanced game-force) and a singleton has an easy pass.

That is how a sophisticated partnership could have made N/S pay for the privelege of transfers. Yet I suspect their post-mortem would focus solely on the beauty of the takeout double of 1S and not the action that really caused the swing.

Previous post : I lied about the auction in the other room. North played 3NT on the same lead. When North crossed to a club, West had to play his lowest club. My guess is that East took that to be a (non) Smith signal and decided partner did not have the spade queen. He switched to a heart, which seems like an error anyways and that is what really caused the swing.

Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder

To some, developing methods and devising special treatments gives pleasure. Put the overcaller on lead, declare from the positional holding, right-side contracts. It all sounds very nice in theory. Do the work, the gospel holds, and the rewards will come.

Say we hold Kx in a suit and are contemplating the best way of protecting it.
The case against it runs :
For it to be right
1) Partner needs to have a weak holding in the suit, say xx or Qxx
2) The ace of the suit has to be disadvantageously placed.
3) Even with the Ace offside, they have to lead the suit
4) Even if they lead it, the anti-positionality has to be relevant to the swing on the board.

Analyzing through Spingold '09 R/16 Set3 Jacobs vs Schermer, two hands strike my eye.

Hand 1


With an elegant auction, North-South right-side the contract. Spades was the danger suit and the ace was offside. The defence led a spade. Declarer crossed to a club to finesse the diamond. East won and continued a spade for down one.

I find this beautiful.

Bridge is so random, its beautiful.

It gets better.
In the other room, they bid 1D - 1NT; 3NT. West's natural lead was a heart. Declarer won, crossed to a club and finessed the diamond. The defence was dead.

Isnt bridge so pretty ?

Tomorrow : The second hand and an admission that I lied about something in this post.

What Johnny Cash can teach us about bridge

One of the new crazes in my life is repetitive watchings of this video recorded live at San Quentin prison by Johnny Cash. This is not some performer looking for a cheap publicity stunt in a prison, this is a performance by a true artist showing how powerful and moving an art form can be. The song.


I had the brainstorm then of working the song into a blog post. If Chris Depasquale, when challenged by a bet, could work in a sexual angle into a chess column , then working this song into a bridge context shouldn't be that hard.

I thought of how empathetic Cash seems to be with the prisoners; he appears to believe every word he is singing; he has transferred himself heart and soul into an inmate's being. I thought of extending that somehow to the empathy our partners and teammates at bridge sometimes deserve but which, in our own ego-games, we deny them.

Nah, a bit of a connection but too much of a stretch.

The other way of fitting the song was how Cash appears to be in Heat One. I doubt if he ever performed this song with the same intensity and belief in any other setting, for the rest of his life. At such a moment, when he pushed the boundaries of performance and of expression, he symbolizes the beauty of man.

The bridge connection hmmm...

Damn it, I think I'll go back to watching the video again.

First Among Equals

Bridge conversations amongst experts are rarely ever balanced. Balanced in the sense of two people interacting, sharing ideas, constructively criticizing each other's opinions and being open to revising one's own ideas.

These conversations instead consist of the players stating their own point of view, reinforcing their own prejudices, paying attention to the other person's argument with the aim primarily of butting in at the right moment with something like "There is something to that but what if..."

Why is it ? Why can't we hold a civilized discussion instead ? Why can't we learn from others ?

The standard response to this would be that such players have too much ego or that they are insecure or that they are incapable of changing.

I believe that bridge is not a game of logic. The winning philosophy is not one that can be argued using pure logic. Logic is overrated.

The player receives information through the prism of his playing experience, his analysis of his experience, his perception of his experience, he literature he peruses, the opinions of others he respected in the past, the habits of his peers. He distills all these inputs into his own crystallized form of the game, his own little logical setup.

This setup consists of his so-called bidding philosophy, principles and habits.
Any succesful player needs this crystallization, else the self-doubt eats up on one's energy reserves in a competitive domain. There is so much ambiguity in the game and so much subtlety.. Unless one has something solid to fall back on for the big chunk of it, it is very easy to get lost in the maze. This feeling of certainty, of knowing the way to play the game, is a confidence enhancer. It is not the real truth, and on a subconscious plane we understand that it is not the truth but it is a crutch we need to get by. A precious crutch.

A so-called bridge conversation is never about one's philosophy. That is too precious to expose to the outside world. However, if we do respect the other person, then the conversation becomes one of the inputs into the prism of our identity and may indeed one day lead to a change in our thoughts.

Reminds me of a deleted scene from Pulp Fiction
Mia : Do you listen or do you wait to talk ?
Vince : I have to say I wait to talk but I am trying very hard to learn to listen

The truth is out there.....

In my last post I posed this problem


Partner's bid appears to be irrational.
Since normal thought is not going to help, lets try the alternate style of crossing out alternatives.

Option 1: Partner has a weak hand with long clubs. Say QJ to eight clubs and out. That would be a comfortable natural, non-forcing 2C bid. Passing an eight card suit and giving up on an opportunity to bid cheaply does not seem to fit in with our bid-early-bid-quick style.

Points, Schmoints. In competitive auctions, shape rules.

So let us strike out a weak hand with long clubs

Option 2 : Partner has bit of a spade fit and some club values and is exploring for game. Again, making ambiguous wishy-washy bids is not our style. Although we have never explicitly discussed it, we go out of our way to avoid bids that partner may not understand. Partner is our friend, do not torture him.
Martin Reid mentioned the prototypical Qx,xxx,xxx,AKxxx hand for this theory but for us, this would be a 4S bid (bidding 1S and 2S shows a good hand) or 3S on a conservative day.

While there are still some lingering doubts in my mind about long-weak-clubs theory, we can certainly strike out this delicate game-try theory.

Option 3 : Is there an option three ?
Nothing else seems to be possibly going on. Or could it ?

If you have a genuine interest in getting to the heart of this problem, I would recommend stopping here and try thinking about a third option.

I recall reading something in a book or a magazine about what were believed to be bidding principles over 50 years ago. These were common sense beliefs in the expert community, some of which continue to be relevant today and some do not.
For example, partner passes as dealer, RHO opens 1H, we pass, LHO bids 4H, partner comes back in with 4S. Today, in our developed(?) style of bidding, we do not have a clue what partner has. Back then, this sequence clearly showed a weak two-suiter. Say 6 spades and a 5 card minor.

Another such principle was "Passing over 1NT and then coming back into the auction shows a solid suit". There isn't much point to bidding seven solid diamonds over a strong NT. Why not try a pass for now, hoping to go plus against 1NT or 3NT, but if the opponents seem to be heading into a suit contract, then we can always re-enter with 3D. Or so the thought of the time went.....

If we seriously consider this option, the rest of the hand falls perfectly into place. The opponents were in a vulnerable 1NT, a penalty double was not available, the points add up, there rates to be a spade misfit.
So the only thing which makes sense is approximately seven solid clubs and out.

Ergo, a confident 3NT and a prompt redouble.

Or perhaps a classic case of hindsight bias ?

At the cross roads

The play sometimes progresses to a point where two options remain equally enticing. The evidence to date does not decide the case conclusively. Yet the professional player must take responsibility for his choice. Terence Reese has famously argued "There is always a clue."

For example, an opponent has overcalled 2 Clubs and we need to figure out whether they hold

or

The decision is not entirely logical yet it is not completely random either.

What usually happens after the post-mortem, however, is that the person in the hot seat, their partner and anyone else who knows the full hand concludes that "he should have got that one right."

For now, we are no longer grappling with the issue of assigning appropriate weights to all the subtle inferences. Subconsciously, either in an apologetic attempt at treating bridge as a purely logical pursuit or in an indulgent ego stroke for the capacity of our powers of deduction, we tend to favour the succesful choice. The weights that we struggled to appropriately apply to various factors at the table now appear to be clearer.

There is a term for this phenomenon, hindsight bias, that I came across in this brilliant book. Some links for the author and detail of his work can be found here, here and here.


Meanwhile, back on the subject, try solving a defensive problem

Trick one goes spade queen ducked all round. Trick two is a spade to the king ducked again leaving us on play. Is there a clue or will we eventually succumb to the hindsight bias ?

The Elements of a Bridge Match

Before the match starts
When two teams sit down to play each other in a match, there are three key battles :

a) Our Concept versus Their Concept
b) Our Delivery versus Their Delivery
c) Our Luck versus Their Luck

Concept : Bidding system. Bidding style. Bidding philosophy. Play technique. Play understanding. Play psychology. Concept is a theoretical entity.

Delivery : Being able to demonstrate the concept at the table. Mental toughness. Honesty. Integrity. Delivery is a practical entity.

Luck : Finesses. Percentages. The type of hands that come up. Luck is a random entity.

In a vacuum, the team with the better concept should win.
In practice, the team with the better delivery wins.
The closer the two teams are in the concept/delivery spectrum, the higher the role of luck.

After the match is over
Combination of factors above creates a result. The result is a function of the fundamental truth (concept), the peculiarities of the day (delivery) and the randomness of luck.

How valid is the result
The less the element of luck, the more valid the result.

A team that plays badly (low delivery) has no genuine cause for grievance even if their concept is far superior than the other team.