Lessons
Lessons
To be sure, it could be argued that any hand offers a lesson for the reader who doesn't find the point at issue too obvious from the beginning. Still, some hands seem to offer more of a lesson for the reader than others, notably those that offer an intriguing situation, but one that could hardly have been foreseen and reasoned out in actual play. I recall the time H.W. Kelsey described one of most recondite defensive maneuvers I've seen which could have beat the contract, but one that made me ask, even before going on to the next sentence, "But who could find that except the very top line of players?" And in the very next sentence, Kelsey said, "This defense was not found in play." I had a feeling of Q.E.D. I mean, he's writing about top players, and if they couldn't find that defense, it becomes more of a curiosity than a lesson to ponder.
Then there is another reason for this category, which is that sometimes I don't know where exactly to put a hand but feel it is too good to throw away. So I created this admittedly catch-all category for those hands.