Brian Davies
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Since you have raised the topic of leading singletons. Here is a hand where I went wrong last night, What would you lead:
Your options are:
- Lead your singleton. Partner even bid it!
- Lead a trump. The auction is bizarre. Both opponents passed, but have now bid to game. They clearly don’t have the high cards for game, so they are presumably planning to make extra tricks through ruffing.
I don’t think that any lead beats 4♥ on that hand Stewart. Strange bidding from Q Plus got it to a contract that can’t be beaten.
The key on any opening lead decision is to listen to the auction and try and construct the hand shapes. There will be times not to lead a singleton as you state. Having said this, if you have the attitude of always leading a singleton you won’t be wrong very often. The Blackwood book would have been published many decades ago. A more recent text by Bird and Anthias Winning Suit Contract Leads uses double dummy simulations to analyse the success of various leads. It’s conclusions on singleton leads include:
- Side-suit singletons are excellent leads and should nearly always be chosen.
- Side-suit singletons are usually better leads than those from honour sequences such as K-Q-J or Q-J-10.
- When your trumps represent certain tricks anyway (for example K=Q-J) do not lead a singleton.
The second of these surprised me.
Well done Margaret.
Much will depend upon the auction of course, but the general advice leading against a small slam in a suit contract is to lead aggressively. Leading the diamond might do well if partner has the ace or queen and might look silly if partner doesn’t have either of these cards. But if you don’t establish the diamond trick now it might be too late.
Leading from KXX tends to be a poor lead against 4S, but is often a very good lead against 6S!
Hi Suzanne, this is a little complex! As you say, the basic (default) rule is that a low card says that you have an honour and a high card says that you don’t have an honour and this is true throughout the hand.
But there are some occasions where partner wants to know a different message and the most obvious of these is when you are giving partner a ruff. Partner hasn’t got any cards in the suit so it doesn’t matter to him/her whether you have an honour. Partner is going to switch after the ruff and wants to know which suit to switch to. In this particular situation, you should ignore the default message and instead, tell partner which suit you want to be returned.
If you are new to suit preference signalling, I would stick to this one situation. As you become more experienced and familiar with the concept, you might want to extend the principle to other situations.
There is also a copy of an article by Bernard Magee on this site:
http://youth.worldbridge.org/use-of-principle-restricted-choice-by-bernard-magee/
The original of this article is issue 90 of the magazine Bridge. There is also an article by someone called Julian Pottage in issue 196 of the magazine Bridge.
Here is an EASY Flat Bread recipe that I sometimes make using Yoghurt:
- 350g self-raising flour, plus extra for dusting. (A gluten-free self-raising flour would presumably work, but I haven’t tried it).
- 1 tea spoon baking powder
- 350g Matural Yoghurt
Bring all of the ingredients together in a bowl. Kneed for about a minute (doesn’t require any more as it is a flat bread).
Divide the dough into about 12 golf-ball sized balls. Flatten each and roll into disks- about 5 inch diameter. Place on a griddle pan at high heat for about two minutes each side.
Optional extra:
Brush the finished flat breads with a garlic butter (melted butter, 2 crushed cloves of garlic and some fine chopped herbs – parsley, tarragon, basil, dill, whatever you fancy!).
Leading a high card from a sequence is normal, but I assume that you don’t mean this.
There are many different lead styles. In Britain it is common to play 4th highest from an honour and 2nd highest from a poor suit. It sort of combines an element if count and attitude. There are other methods. Some do something similar but lead 3td and 5th highest. Some play pure attitude (a low card says that you like the suit, a high card says that you don’t like the suit). Some play pure count – they will lead the third highest whether they have an honour or not and lead the top of a doubleton.
I have never heard of the method described by your partner. Maybe that is because there is a gap in my knowledge, or maybe the method is unsound. It feels unsound to me, why would you waste a high card which might be sitting over a card in RHOs hand?
Thanks Julian. It was last night, but board 21 (add 16 to the board number to retain vulnerability / dealer!).
Well, you might think it spooky that Bernard constructed a deal to support his choice! Here is another spooky deal:
We are trying to find a lead that will defeat the contract most frequently (IMPs) or maximise our average score (Pairs). Both deals are possible and we are looking to find the lead that will work best when we consider all possible deals consistent with the auction.
I think that it is rather close and I don’t have a strong opinion, but I certainly reject the idea that a with club lead “you lose nothing and can gain a lot”. There are good arguments for several choices.
But when in doubt, I lead partner’s suit. It encourages partner to adopt the right behaviour!
Looking at the article, Jeremy was advocating taking advantage of the extra available call with the following structure after (1NT)-2♣-(Dbl):
- (1NT)-2♣-(Dbl)-Pass: No support for either major, length in clubs.
- (1NT)-2♣-(Dbl)-2♦: No support for either major, length in diamonds.
- (1NT)-2♣-(Dbl)-Rdbl: Equal length in the majors, please choose (similar to a 2♦ bid if there had not been a double).
Mr Carrick,
At the end of Bernard’s video on the solution to this Prize Quiz, Bernard said: “I’m sure that we might have some discussion of this one of the forum as well”. I’m sorry that you didn’t see the point of discussing an interesting hand on a Bridge Forum – it seems to me to be the very purpose of a forum. You and Charles both believe that leading the ♣7 was compelling, which a reasonable viewpoint.
The best way to improve is to understand why we would make a particular choice and I strongly think that there are compelling arguments for and against most of the options. For what it is worth, I entered the hand into “Lead Captain” and carried out various simulations. The exact results will depend on the parameters you specify but I can summarise the findings:
- There is no lead which stands out as significantly better (or worse!) than the others.
- The ♣7 seems to perform very slightly worse at IMPs (Teams) scoring. It performs very slightly better at Pairs scoring. But the differences were rather small.
- Leading partner’s hearts does well if you expect partner to hold a good suit for the over-call and less well if you expect partner to over-call on any five-card suit. (Unsurprising really!).
I am happy to discuss the actual parameters used, if anyone is interested.
I’ve being playing around with the cards trying to find a squeeze for the 13th trick. But unless I’m missing something, I don’t think there is one?
For those interested, the full deal was:
Unusually, I chose to be cautious. Thirteen tricks are easy of course, with spades breaking 2-2 and hearts breaking 3-3.
Hi Judith, it probably doesn’t matter much, the most important thing is that you and partner should be on the same wavelength and playing a method that you are comfortable with.
But since you asked, we should distinguish two different situations:
(1) When we are discarding: I prefer HELD, but the philosophy should be to discard in suits that you don’t want to be led. You will rarely have to expend a high cards with this approach. Of course on the odd occasion it will be expedient to play a high card, if you can afford it, to send a definite message. But this will be the exception if you trust partner to consider dummy and notice your discouraging cards.
I also play reverse attitude with one partner and this can work well and I have played count discards (discard a suit that you don’t wsnt led and give count). My least favourite style is suit preference (McKenney, Revolving, Italian, Dodds and the like). The problem with these methods is that you can never send a neutral message.
(2) When we are following suit to partner’s lead: most players play attitude (Standard or Reverse). I think that there are technical reasons why Reverse Attitude is slightly more effective in this situation, but any advantage is small and again it is best to play what you are comfortable with. Most will want to do the same thing when discarding as when following suit of course! (Although I know of a good player who does mix it up!).
Hope this helps!
