Introduction
First, let me make the disclaimer: I am not a bridge expert.
This is a collection of hands I found interesting or entertaining.
Some of them are elementary, some of them are quite
complicated. There is only one artificial hand in this collection.
All of the rest are "real hands" in the sense that they were shuffled
(perhaps by a computer) and played in some event somewhere.
There are two themes which run through most of these examples.
They are:
- Squeezes for overtricks. At matchpoints, people often take
finesses which risk their contracts in order to make overtricks. Often,
squeezes are available at no risk.
- Defenders giving up information, either in the bidding or in
mannerisms. On many of these hands, unusual lines are taken
because an opponent has told declarer enough about his hand.
In one of the cases, the proper line was found simply
because a defender considered doubling.
I didn't choose these themes deliberately, they are just the
themes that interest me which crop up consistently.
You might guess, from my attitude about people who bid too much, that
I'm a curmudgeon just irritated with young folks who interfere a lot
in the auction. In fact, I am someone who interferes a lot in auctions,
and believes in aggressive preempts. My complaint is with people who
fail to conceive of the results of their action. They fail to ask themselves
"why am I overcalling?", "why am I raising?" And when their actions fail,
they often fails in subtle ways - the opponents buy the contract and take
all the right finesses, execute a tricky squeeze, or are warned away from
a NT contract because of the lack of stoppers.
When we pass, and it works out, we rarely think of the "pass" as being
the winning action. We look at the traveler at the end of the match
and think, "How did people make
4 ♠? It looked like it had
no play." It had play at other tables because the other tables got more
information.
And I haven't even started to cover the positive effect passing has
on your other auctions. Playing Roth-Stone with a friend on OKbridge,
we get quite a few good results simply by doubling the opponents in
partscores, after we have made an overcall.
Formatting
I have finished converting these articles to conform with Richard
Pavlicek's
Bridge Writing Style Guide.
I'm using a combination of XML/XSL/CSS to generate the (static) HTML files.
If you are interested in how it is done, you can
read my XML Test Pages, which have sample inputs adjacent to generated outputs.
XML lets you write articles without worrying about the formatting, which is done later. This allows the formatting to be more uniform.
There might be some glitches I missed during the change.
If you see any flaws, either in layout, grammar, or analysis, please feel free
to point them out.