TALES OF AKARANA

Board 10 Dealer E Both vulnerable:

                                        AK753

                                        Q8653

                                        8

                                        97

 86                                                                     Q42

 AJ72                                                                 4

 K764                                                                 AT953

 652                                                                    QT83

                                        JT9

                                        KT9

                                        QJ2

                                        AKJ4

The post this week emphasises the importance of right siding contracts if possible and suggests the key to doing so for this hand is to either to have been playing a strong no trump and using transfers, or be playing transfer responses after a 1 opening.

There is at least a third possibility for those that play a wider 1NT range other than 12 - 14 HCP to right side the contract for this particular hand and that is to play 4 or 5 card major non promissory relay stayman (refer Wikipedia) that is used to primarily determine the shape of the 1NT opening hand but also allows ability to transfer to right side contract for some hands. While we use a variation of 5M NPR Stayman with a wider HCP than most it could also be used for a Precision 13 to 15 HCP 1NT opening for this board.

For this hand our bidding would be:

North          East         South       West

-                  Pass        1NT¹       Pass

2^2.            Pass.        2³        Pass

2⁴             Pass.        2⁵          Pass

2NT⁶            Pass         3⁷         Pass

3⁸            Pass.         3⁹        Pass

4^10.         Pass           Pass      Pass

1.        12 - 19 HCP 7 to 8 losers (L) May have 5 Major

2.         <= 8 L 5M NPR Stayman

3.         No 4 or 5 Major

4.         <= 7 L shape asking relay (SAR)

5.         No 5 card minor

6.         SAR 

7.         4333 12 total losers

8.         Loser asking Relay

9.         8 L. Therefore from Law of Total Losers 3 - 4 cards higher than J. 14 combined Losers.

10.      Using Rule of 18 (18 - 14 = 4) indicates a 4 level contract is possible. Choose to play in  rather than  to right side contract.

Advantage of this approach is that West has less information about North’s hand shape for their opening lead so possibly will be less likely to lead A. Disadvantage is that both hands are open books after the opening lead which may have allowed a killing defence to have been found with different EW distribution.

Interestingly for these particular hands the 3 HCP from NS Js are immaterial to NS making 4 and only encourage the potentially wrong line of finessing for the Q so 4 could potentially have been made with 21 HCP.

Started by SEAN LYNCH on 07 Dec 2018 at 09:52PM