What Players Need

The General Run of Players, That Is

This is written as a continuation of my response to the columnist's dissertation on the value of finding a 2% advantage. Some readers called it "silly" to zero in on such a small percentage, and after a brief fling at agreeing with the columnist, I decided my heart was really with the readers. And here are a few questions I would like to pose to that columnist. Forget professionals for the nonce, whom I've already acknowledged might well have both the motivation and the smarts to work out that small a percentage difference. I'm talking about, call it, 98% of players on OKBridge.
Now I'd like to ask, how often do you think they'll come across a hand with two viable lines of play differentiated by 2%? Beyond how often, what percentage of the time do you think these players would correctly work out and recognize that differential? I'm going to suggest that for the general run of players, even those who play fairly often, like 3, 4 or 5 times a week, it would take a year to get a hundred hands recognized as offering two viable lines differentiated by 2%. Of those hundred hands, you'll best me on two! The rest of the time either we both make or both go down. Now, I've got another question: what are the odds that in either of the two tournaments where I spot you a board, it'll make a helluva lot of difference? We play to win and there's nothing quite like first place, and it would be agonizing to have missed first place by that board. Second place in a large field ain't bad either, so I might extend this to the top ten spots. Anyone who finishes in the top ten when there are over a hundred pairs has done right well for the day and might well say Dang if they miss a little bit better spot by laziness about the odds. But it's difficult to believe anyone finishing 25th would feel a pang of remorse at not having finished 24th, or anyone finishing 60th wishes he'd been gung-ho enough about the odds to have finished 59th or 58th. What are the odds that those two boards we who don't want to work out such niggling percentage points spot you are going to make a significant difference in our standing? I would say somewhere between slim and none.
[I hafta take time out for a parenthetical comment here after looking over the hand, for on re-reading the columnist, I found that I agreed with the line of play, and that indeed, it demonstrated what I have often said in discussing a hand, namely that it's up to declarer to run his mind, his imagination, over all possible winning lines of play and that he should explore all safe possibilities that he can sequentially (i.e., if it doesn't work out, he can still try another). And when it's one or the other, your instinct on close differences is probably as good as cold mathematics. After all, as I've pointed out elsewhere, the odds only tell us what happens every 100 hands. But you play hands one at a time, and your opponents' choice of bids, of signals and of discards just might tell you more than the odds can. Which is basically to say that I disagree only on reducing it all to the mathematical odds. But I'm still in my original position of saying, well, so what if we miss a few small advantages in the odds. So what if our imgaination misses a few here and there that are by definition barely better than our line. There are just so many other relatively simple facets of the game -- like counting up to 13 -- that players need to learn a lot more than they need to to take on the chore of working out a 1.6% difference (the difference in the column offered) in two lines of play. Yuk!]
Which brings me to a few comments I wish to make on professinal columnists, the foremost being that they more or less willy-nilly take hands that allow them to display their superior knowledge of bridge. That's not meant as criticism. They have their professional standing to take care of and so they're hardly in the market for hands that can be analyzed in 3 or 4 sentences. That's fine. And I often marvel at how they can come up with a new hand every day where one important trick is decided on a sagacious decision by declarer (or perhaps lack of that sagacity). Do they recycle old hands? Do friends and readers send in these hands? Do they play or kibitz until they have a hand to write up? Nevertheless, for all their expertise, they strike me as being out of touch with players below their level -- very much out of touch. (I had to resist saying "completely out of touch"). Sometimes they'll make it near explicit when they say, "East couldn't have that card or he would have played it . . etc." And I'm sitting there thinking, "Oh brother, you think no one could make that error? You oughtta see what people actually do." And to put it bluntly, this strikes me as another instance of a columnist being out of touch with his readers. Their hands, I think, intriguing though they may be, offer little in the way of a lesson to be applied in the future.
Below is a hand I was mulling over when the the 2% column surfaced. One hand doesn't prove anything any more than does the columnist's hand, but after all, if one wants to make a point, he can only start with one hand and encourage the reader to explore others (as on this web site). The hand was butchered by five declarers, ranging in self-ranking from intermediate ++ to expert. Yes, expert. And I hold that this is the type of thing the general run of players on OKBridge need far, far more than they need to get tangled up over a 1.6% difference in two lines of play.

A Q 8 3 2
J 10 9 8 7 6 4
------
7
------ 9 7
K Q 3 2 A
A Q J 8 5 4 K 10 7 3 2
Q 10 6 K J 9 8 5
K J 10 6 5 4
5
9 6 Contract: 6 spades
A 4 3 2 Opening lead: A of diamonds, 6 of clubs

The hand is almost too simple to discuss. It can be explicated in three sentences. Whatever the opening lead (aside from a heart, of course), lose a heart at trick two. Upon regaining the lead, go to dummy and ruff out West's hearts in three more leads from dummy, being very careful with entries back (those with a club opening lead have an extra entry, but those with a diamond lead do not). When done, return to dummy and claim. 'Nuff said? Do the declarers who went down need a lesson in counting? Or taking a look at dummy reversals? Or guarding entries carefully? Or remembering that you don't always want to draw all enemy trump before stopping to consider what you need. All of the above were reasons why declarers kicked away this rather simple hand.
Counting looms large here. One first must get a handle on how many hearts there are in dummy. Then the question is, How many entries to dummy do you need on a 3-2 heart split? On a 4-1? You don't know there's a 4-1 split, but when you have enough entries to handle that, such a line has to look more attractive. You don't need an entry to dummy to lead the first round of hearts though some did just that, wasting a valuable entry. Now, how many entries are you going to need after losing that heart to the A? And the answer must be four: one to ruff out each of those three cards and one to return and cash those long hearts. How many entries do you have? And of course the answer is five! except on an opening diamond lead, which wipes out an entry before hearts are ready to be ruffed, but then it's four and not one can be wasted. Every one of dummy's spades can be an entry, starting with the A Q to draw trump at the same time as you use an entry to ruff a heart. Now, if you need four and have either four or five, one wouldn't think the hand would give so many people trouble, but the majority of my declarers went down two! Yes, three out of five!
The first declarer I looked at got a club lead, taken by the ace, of course, followed by two rounds of trump -- Yikes! -- before a heart was led. Now declarer cannot make the hand, of course because he has only three entries to dummy and hearts are splitting 4-1. Sometimes I marvel at how delicately so many hands are balanced, waiting to trip careless declarers. Had hearts been 4-1, or trump 1-1 (assuming declarer would have desisted with trump leads after one round), declarer's sloppy play wouldn't have shown up on the score sheet. His score match that of declarers who played with more care. But hearts weren't 3-2 nor trump 1-1 and declarer paid the price. This one went down two: In addition to the A of hearts, the defense picked up a heart at trick 10, as declarer sluffed the 9 of diamonds, rather than ruffing with his last two trump in the closed hand, and then a club at trick 13.
Here's another count that some declarers might have been drawn to: Count out the closed hand! And what do we find? Well we're always losing the A of hearts. So that means we have 5 spot cards we've gotta ruff in dummy. And by a lucky coincidence, we have five trump in dummy! Now we have to lose the lead once. So one would think that the first order of business for those thinking of establishing the closed hand would also be to lose a heart right away. If a trump comes back, you can't ruff five times in dummy and will have to go to Plan B, but at least you found out early. And if a trump doesn't come shooting back, you would seem to have a crossruff. With only two diamonds, the chance of being overruffed is remote, so you'll want to ruff them with low spades and the second round of clubs, leaving high trump for the last two rounds of clubs.
And ruffing hearts? It looks chancy. You've gotta ruff no fewer than three hearts with a low trump. And the only way you can ruff three hearts is if either West has four (remember, the first round is theirs and you're ruffing the 2nd, 3rd and 4th rounds!) or if he has no trump. Not a good prospect, not very attractive at all, but it just happens it will work -- provided East doesn't lead a trump when in with the A of hearts. And at least that inferior line beats not counting at all, not asking how many leads will wipe out the defense's hearts and would declarer have that many and one more to cash the long hearts.
One declarer queered his contract at trick one! He made the bizarre play of ruffing the opening diamond lead with the Q of spades! When I noted it, the significance didn't reach me for a day. It just looked like a fancy-schmancy showing off of how many top trump he had. After all, declarer has every trump down to the 10, and there are only two out. He can afford the Q there, right? Wrong? When I pulled out the hand again the next evening, I said to myself, "Why he can't make it now!" He has four trump in dummy and thus four entries. But he can't use three entries by way of ruffing and be in dummy with all trump out, and if he cashes the K of spades first, he can be in dummy with all trump out, but he can't get four more leads from dummy if he chews up a trump with the K of spades. Please note that if trump split 1-1 or hearts 3-2, declarer could overcome that rank foolishness. But neither suit was splitting so benignly and declarer got his rightful comeuppance for such rank foolishness.

Well, I don't want to flog this hand to death, particularly since I don't want to discuss declarer malfeasance so much as what bridgeplayers need, the general run of those on OKBridge. The self-rankings, incidentally, were very much in sync with what I have found on other hands. I don't often look up self-rankings but did so here because I wanted to show that these are not novices. These are representative rankings. Indeed, I would say that Advanced and Expert are the two most common self-rankings I come across on butchered hands. Never novice and infrequently Intermediate.
What lessons do these declarers appear to be in need of? Well, one apparently needs a psychiatrist more than an odds guru, but aside from that, I have one oft-repeated exhortation and 5 categories the declarers might profit from. The exhortation is "Don't cash out established winners without a good reason." (The expert got a diamond lead, came to the A of clubs and ruffed a club! With 6-5 trump, that was a trick he always had coming, and now he can't make it.) Here are the categories:
1. Counting -- particularly the number of entries needed to establish hearts on anything other than 5-0, and the number of tricks available on a cross-ruff with and without a spade lead when you lose to the ace of hearts -- and how many hearts you'd have to ruff low (i.e., count to see the unsuitability).
2. The common suitability of a Dummy Reversal.
3. Entries.
4. Trump as entries to be cashed separately. (A category not yet made, but one I was fixing to institute when this came up.)
5. What does a Winner Look Like?

I suppose all the malfeasance could be collected under a dual rubric: Failure to note the potential of that heart suit (until too late) along with a wastage of entries.
Here's one last thought that occurred just when I was about to put this discussion to bed, and ironically, in context, it's perhaps my strongest argument. What are the odds on this hand? A 5-0 heart split would probably doom the contract. That's 4%. (I don't want to go through a 5-0 split.) So on a club lead, then a heart with everyone following, your 96% game has become 100%. No lead could harm you now on any distribution. On a diamond lead, there is (theoretically) the possibility of a heart with East and a club lead to West's void. But when I look up an 8-0 split, it's less than 1%, and that's before dividing in half for that to be opposite the A of hearts.
So. . . is that point pretty clear? We're talking about a 96% game being missed by players identifying themselves from Internediate to Advanced to Expert. And you wanna point out the advisability of going for a 1.6% advantage? It just makes no sense to me. It just makes no sense.
Okay, that wasn't quite the last one. Here's one more: how about fun? How much fun is it to work out the odds by juggling three percentages, sometimes multiplyiing, sometimes adding, to come up with figures 68 or 70? I really can't believe that the general run of players would find that appealing. Again, I say, by all means, let's encourage the broadest imaginative grasp of where winners are lurking. And so what if we do occasionally grasp a 68% chance when there was a 70% chance on another line. That's not going to make habitual winners of anyone except, okay, maybe a few professionals who get a kick out of it and play enough hands to make it matter, and have a far higher stake in winning than most of us who think it's a big deal to finish in the top ten.
I quote: Can you count to 13? Then you can play a very good game of bridge. Sure you might miss a few intricate percentage plays, but the bulk of the hands require only logic and counting to 13. And just who said that? Why, the very columnist I've been referring to above! The one who thought presenting a 1.6% difference in odds offered a lesson to his readers! I don't know. Looks as though he's seen the light.

Here are some illustrations of odds in play.