Monthly Archives: January 2013

Rethinking the Rule of Nine

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I was done in by Mel Colchamiro’s Rule of Nine Continue reading →

Mel Colchamiro proposed a formula for determining whether to pass when one’s partner makes a takeout double of an opponent’s low-level bid. One simply adds together the number of trump one holds and the number of honors (ten through ace) in the trump suit. To that one adds the level at which the opponents have bid. If the total is nine or higher, one should, according to Colchamiro, pass. If the total is less than nine, one should make a bid.

I have achieved good results by using this rule. Last night, however, I applied it on the following hand with disastrous results.

I was sitting North. West opened 1♥, and East raised to 2. My partner prebalanced with a takeout double, and West passed. I applied the rule of nine:

  • Five trump;
  • plus one honor in trump;
  • plus the opponents had bid at the two level.

The total was only eight, and so I bid 2NT, which was doomed. I should have passed. We can easily defeat 2♥, and we cannot make any contract that is higher. The rule of nine was just wrong in this case.

They say that you cannot play results, but I have decided that the rule of nine needs a slight adjustment. My heart holding is surely more valuable than a Q-J-10 tripleton, for which Mel’s formula would have produced the same total. My hand virtually guaranteed two trump tricks, and if West ever ruffed anything, I would have control of trump. If I had had the Q-J-10 tripleton, I would have had one certain trump trick, but I would have had little chance of a second and no likelihood of ever gaining trump control.

So, from now on, instead of counting honors in trump, I plan to count likely trump tricks. By this reckoning, I would have bid with a Q-J-10 tripleton but passed with my actual holding of K-9-8-7-4.

Internet Girl Friends

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Duped or duper? Continue reading →

The buzz today is about Manti Te’o, the all-everything linebacker for Notre Dame, and his Internet girlfriend. Prior to this week everyone thought that she had tragically died of leukemia just before Notre Dame’s game with Michigan State. It now appears that she was a fig newton of someone’s imagination.

I suspect that it might be easy to develop such an intense one-sided relationship. Just today I received the following e-mail from Jennifer Heath:

Hey   ,

Remember how great I looked in highschool? I tried this saffron thing and WOW, you have to see this.

See for yourself – {link here}

By an amazing coincidence I received the following e-mail from Jennifer Cole only fourteen minutes later:

Hey   ,

Remember how great I looked in highschool? I tried this saffron thing and WOW, you have to see this.

See for yourself – {different link here}

The strange thing is that I do not remember either of these great-looking Jennifers from my high school (or “highschool”) days. In fact, I do not remember anyone named Jennifer in my class in high school. I am pretty sure of this, too. There were no female students (or teachers for that matter) at all when I went to Rockhurst High School in Kansas City. I seem to recall two ladies who worked in the office, but I do not remember them as looking that great, and I certainly doubt that they would be bragging about their appearance in their ninth decade no matter how much of this saffron thing that they had consumed.

You have to feel sorry for Manti Te’o, though. Either he is on the verge of being busted as a despicable con artist, or, and I think that this might be worse, he is about to embark on a career in the NFL with the stigma of having fallen in love with a make-believe woman and trumpeted that fact to the world.