Introduction

Every week, the oddest things happen at the bridge table. This collection is devoted to exploring a specific sort of oddity - the six-card fit. Specifically, it will discuss the cases when the six-card fit is the best place to play, double-dummy.

For example, in this grand slam:

North/South have a lot of playing strength, but the only grand slam which makes is in clubs. On a club lead, North wins, cashes the ♦ A-K, ruffs a diamond with the ♣ Q, re-enters North's hand in spades to draw trumps and claim.

Most of the examples that follow are significantly more complicated than this, of course.

As with my collection of Double Asymmetries, this collection used a combination of two programs to find interesting examples:

• Deal, my own flexible dealer.
• GIB, a double dummy solver written by Matt Ginsberg.
• More recently (as of May, 2008,) I've added Bo Haglund's double dummy solver to Deal, so I no longer need the GIB double dummy solver.

Actually, I didn't use GIB directly; instead, I used Ginsberg's library of about 720,000 deals, including double dummy results. Ginsberg generated those results using GIB, however.

Six-card fits are the double-dummy par result about once out of every 210 deals - they are not that rare.

As with the previous collection, I did a considerable amount of sifting by hand, finding the more interesting examples, altering holdings to make the examples cleaner.

Thanks to Richard Pavlicek for pointing out some oversights on my part. Richard has a deal on his site where the only making game is in an awful 5-card suit.

As usual, I encourage feedback, particularly if you find errors in analysis, but even if I've left in typos or bad grammar. I'm a bad copy editor :-)