Author Archives: Mike

“Takeout doubles are meant to be taken out.”

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Thus spoke Edgar Kaplan, but it doesn’t always work. Continue reading →

We played many bizarre hands at the regional tournament in Rye Brook, NY, on MLK Weekend, but one really has stuck in my craw. Neither side was vulnerable. LHO opened 1♠, my partner doubled, and RHO passed. The cards that appeared in my left hand literally stupefied me.

♠ K Q J 10 9       ♥ A J   ♦ Q J 10 9 x       ♣ x

What kind of hand could my partner have? He probably had at most one spade, and if so he could have as few as eleven high-card points. Nevertheless, it was easy to picture him with a hand that would seem minimal to him but could produce twelve tricks opposite mine. I decided to bid 3♥, the strongest bid I could make. If he responded in clubs, I planned to correct to diamonds.

My partner quickly drew the 4♥ card from the bidding box and laid it on the table. At first I wondered why he was in such a hurry to get to game. Then I realized that if hearts were his best suit, he had no choice. I could not figure out any sensible way to proceed.

Here was his hand:

♠ A 9 x       ♥ Q x x x       ♦ A x x       ♣ K x x

I would not have doubled with his hand, but the fact that he did gave us a truly amazing opportunity. At the other table our opponents brought in eleven tricks with spades as trump. I think that our teammates could have implemented a better defense, but after our bidding fiasco I was not about to mention it.

Yes, LHO opened a five-card suit headed by the eight, and, yes, RHO was void in spades.

Mel Colchamiro has published a tool called the Rule of Nine. It is used to evaluate whether to leave in a takeout double by one’s partner. You can read about it here. I have never had a hand that scored an eleven on his scale before. If I had bothered to think of this instead of being dazzled by the slam that I envisioned, I would have passed the double, and, assuming we played as well as our counterparts at the other table, we would have scored +1400 instead of -200.

I was quite familiar with this rule, but my hand looked so potentially powerful to me that I did not even consider leaving the double in. This may be the most egregious blunder that I have ever made in bidding.

Incredibly, I got a chance to atone for my sins the very next day. This time LHO opened 2♦, my partner doubled, and RHO passed. My diamond suit was not quite as good as on the previous day – K Q 10 9 x – but it easily qualified for a pass using the Rule of Nine.

This time, however, my partner was the one who was void in the trump suit, and the opponents scrambled for eight tricks. We had another embarrassing number to report to our teammates.

These two hands were not the only hands in which weak two bids led to our demise in the tournament. In one case my partner bid 2♦, and we never found our spade fit. In another he opened a ten-point hand with six diamonds at the one level, and we ended up too high. There were other examples, too. It seemed that for three days whenever a weak two bid was made, we got the shaft.

Bridge is like that. Some days you are the pigeon. Some days you are the statue.

Two Encounters with the Hewsons

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Biggest coincidence ever? Continue reading →

I go to Italian classes at the local high school on Tuesday evenings. Two weeks ago the teacher mentioned that she saw a show that implied that Ben Franklin killed some people and buried them in his house. I had never heard of such a thing.

Before last night’s class I googled “Benjamin Franklin” cadavers and found this link. Evidently Ben was friends with a surgeon named William Hewitt. Franklin probably allowed Hewitt to conduct medical experiments on cadavers in the basement of his house in London. It is not clear where he got the cadavers, whether Ben knew about the rather grisly business, or why he buried the remains in the basement.

William Hewson died at the age of 34, but he accomplished enough in his truncated career to earn the Copley Medal, election to the Royal Society, and a Wikipedia page.

After the Italian class Sue and I always watch Finding Your Roots on PBS. It is just about the only show not on the Esquire Channel that we both can tolerate. Last night’s episode featured three people of Greek descent: Tina Fey, George Stephanopoulos, and David Sedaris. Near the end of the show they traced non-Greek ancestors of Fey and Sedaris. Tina Fey’s fourth or fifth great grandfather was John Hewson, one of America’s original textile manufacturers, who came to America through the intervention of none other than Benjamin Franklin.

I had never met or even heard of anyone named Hewson, which is in itself a little surprising since a different John Hewson was a prominent politician in Australia, and a third John Hewson signed the death warrant for King Charles I. I thought that the two Hewsons whom I encountered must be related. It took some digging, but I discovered here that William did indeed ask Ben Franklin to help John to emigrate to the colonies.

Unlike George Noory, I do believe in coincidences. I have been alive over 24,200 days. On only one of them did I encounter someone named Hewson, and it happened twice.

Judgment v. the LAW

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Interpreting partner’s bids in a competitive auction can be tricky. Continue reading →

My favorite bridge book is Larry Cohen’s To Bid or Not to Bid. This best-selling tome promulgated the LAW of Total Tricks, a very clever technique for determining how high to bid in competitive auctions. The LAW had been developed in the sixties by an obscure Frenchman named Jean-Rene Vernes, who wrote an article about it in Bridge World. Cohen refined its use and introduced it to many thousands of players. This technique fundamentally differs from the previous approach, which relied on experience and judgment, in that it is based on actual research.

There is one very large problem with basing one’s decisions on the LAW. It depends upon being able to determine how many cards are held in the respective trump suits by all four players. There is not much that one can do about one’s opponents. Fortunately, as one moves up the bridge ladder, the percentage of opponents who are willing to bid 4S with only seven trumps decreases markedly.

Dealing with partners who are committed to using “judgment” is a different matter. I have a few partners who insist on using the competitive techniques of the days before the LAW was discovered. Here is an example of a hand that demonstrates how difficult it can be for a mixture of techniques to survive.

I was sitting West, and this agglomeration was burning my fingers:

♠ A K J 3    ♥ A K 10 8 2    ♦ 8    ♣ A Q 10 4

North dealt and opened 1♦. My partner passed, and South ventured a heart. I doubled. North bid 2♦, which was followed by two more passes. As I do in every competitive auction, I tried to count trumps and points. I had more than half of the high-card points in the deck, but both opponents had bid. They must surely have almost all of the missing honors.

I put six diamonds in North’s hand and no more than two in South’s. That left four for my partner. I expected him to have no more than three spades or clubs. The only possible eight-card fit was in hearts. We would never find it, and we would be facing a 4-1 split. Notrump was out of the question. If I doubled again, I would expect partner to bid one of his three card suits. I did not want to play in a 4-3 fit even at the two level opposite a hand with no entries at all. So, I passed.

This was my partner’s hand:
♠ Q 6 5 4 2    ♥ 7 6 2    ♦ 9 6 3    ♣ 8 5 2

He did not bid 2♠ over the 2♦ rebid because he “did not want me to get too excited.” He was using forty years of bridge judgment, and his was a reasonable concern. I would in fact have raised him to 4♠. However, the opponents not only cannot beat this contract; they cannot stop us from taking eleven tricks.

Sitting in his chair I would have bid 2♠ with his hand without giving it a second thought. While it is true that the hand lacks the points for a traditional “free bid,” I would deem it mandatory to inform partner of a strong preference for one of his two suits. In fact, I would have bid even without the ♠Q!

To be totally fair, if I had passed with his hand, my partner would not have passed the second time with mine. He would have had no clear idea of where we would have ended up, but he would have felt the need to tell me that he had much more than his original double indicated.

So, if we had switched chairs, we would have been fine. What’s more, either of us would have done better with a like-minded partner. I don’t like the idea of having to channel the ghosts of Charles Goren and Edgar Kaplan to interpret my partner’s bids, but I guess that I will need to do it or run the risk of more zeroes in situations like these.

In reality, North’s bidding was cagey. Most people would have opened her hand (which included seven diamonds, not six) 3♦, but that would have made it easy for us to find 4♠ irrespective of which chair I sat in.

The Other Side of Politeness

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“Just be polite to policemen. They might even let you off.” Continue reading →

George Noory, who recently argued in favor of allowing the two American Ebola victims to die in Africa, counseled his listeners this morning to be polite to policemen because they might let you off when you have broken the law. There is little doubt that this technique might work, but there is another side to the coin.

The guys who protected and served with me in the MP Company in Sandia Base, NM, in the early seventies were a peculiar bunch. For the most part we were grateful that we had been assigned to an area with no rice bogs covered by invisible sniper fire, but most of us had no interest in police work, and we hated just about everything about it.

There was almost no crime on the base. The time spent on patrol almost always involved nothing more than driving around with an occasional stint as escort for the proprietors of the BX (Base Exchange – like a Target or Walmart) or the commissary (grocery store) to bring the day’s receipts to the bank. Occasionally the bosses would decide that we needed to do something about speeding in a specific area, and they would order us to set up radar. Otherwise most of us generally left the people alone.

There were a few exceptions. One of them was a guy in our platoon who asked us to call him “Duke” because he was a big John Wayne fan. I remember that my first day on patrol was with him. After he drove out to feed an apple to some horses that for some reason lived on the base, he told me that he was going to show me how to give tickets. He disclosed that he had a few favorite spots in which he would hide the cruiser. From these locations he could see whether people came to a complete stop at a stop sign, but they could not see the police car or truck very well.

The first time that he saw one of these miscreants he flipped on the siren and gave chase. When the offending vehicle had come to a stop, he deposited ours behind it and, before he opened the door, he said to me, “Watch and learn.”

He held his head tilted back a little as he walked and pulled his cap down over his forehead. His gait was a reasonable impression of John Wayne’s amble. “Good morning,” he opened. “Do you know what a stop sign is?” When he returned his ticket book was one ticket lighter.

We returned to our hiding place, and before too long another criminal appeared. After we chased this one down, the Duke told me that I should give him a ticket. I refused, which really annoyed him, but there was not too much that he could do about it. We were the same rank.

The Duke was not a hard-liner. Whether he gave the subject a ticket or not depended not so much on the egregiousness of the crime as the attitude exhibited by the driver. If he treated the Duke with the respect he deserved, he usually got off. If she treated the Duke with respect, she always got off.

One of the Duke’s favorite spots was outside of the Officer’s Club. At the club’s closing a fairly large number of cars would exit, and there was a stop sign there that the Duke liked to monitor on the midnight shift. One night a very drunk senior navy officer blew right through the stop sign and was pulled over by the Duke. Occupying the passenger seat in the subject vehicle was a young lady with a reputation for making her living by providing extracurricular services to military personnel. The odor of alcohol was overpowering.

Needless to say the officer was very polite to the Duke, and he was rewarded with a warning and a simple “Please be more careful, sir.” The Duke did not provide him with a police escort, but neither did he confiscate his keys.

Most of the drivers whom the Duke stopped got a ticket because they had the temerity to question the wisdom of his actions in insisting on enforcing the letter of the law in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere. So, in fact, in the Duke’s system there was a negative correlation between the severity of the offense and the likelihood of getting a ticket.

I don’t know if there are a lot of cops with the Duke’s attitude, but I do know that he was one of the very few in our company who intended to become policemen in civilian life.

My New Camera

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Great for stalkers. Continue reading →

I took my new Canon SX50 camera out for a spin in Cooperstown, NY. Here is a photo of a pond and the parking lot of the Alice Busch Theater, home of the Glimmerglass Festival, taken from the benches in front of the theater. The parking lot is on a hillside on the other side of Highway 80.
LotThe red oval (in the center of the photo just to the right of the telephone pole) indicates a picnicking area, which contained three tables, one of which at that moment was being used by three people. If you can’t see the oval, click on the photo to enlarge it. Here is what the camera showed me when I zoomed in on that table:
PicnicThis thing is awesome.