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Unfortunately, due to the lack of sufficient entries from readers, this feature will not be continued.

Here is a summary of the panel’s answers and assigned score to the bids and opening leads, based on the panel’s answers, the majority answers scoring the most points, rightly or wrongly, along with my own comments where they may be of interest to the reader.

You are SOUTH in each case, and playing MATCH POINTS at your local club. Basic Acol, 12-14 1NT with transfers. 1C,1D,1H,1S all natural and 4+ cards.

This is a new feature that I would like to introduce to X-Clubs. Each week, I will select four BIDDING problems and four OPENING LEAD problems from actual deals at X-Clubs. I will pose these problems to a panel of club players and then assign points to the answers according to the panel’s views as well as results from the actual deals. All readers can enter into this competition, all they have to do is send their bids or opening leads for each of the eight problems, to me at villyn@xtra.co.nz before midnight each Sunday, this week the deadline is Sunday 21 May.

At the end of every four weeks, there will be a monthly prize of a Lotto Ticket (which could make the winner a millionaire!) awarded to the highest scorer. Good luck!

Just for interest, here are some deals which slipped through where there was a suit without cover in the 1NT opener. 3NT is then out of the question but does 4H become more attractive or not? I have made the 1NT opener East every time and not put in any vulnerability conditions, which may well be of importance in the bidding when NS might consider bidding over either 1NT or the 2NT response. I leave the reader to decide what might happen under different vulnerabilities.
Deal 1:

	8652 T5 A82 QJ84
4 KQJ96432 J6 T6		AKT3 A8 K754 752
	QJ97 7 QT93 AK93

When opener shows a club weakness, 4H must surely have many chances of making. In this deal, only the QC lead and a low diamond switch would defeat 4H if declarer falls for North’s clever switch. If declarer goes up with the DK in that scenario, an overtrick. But in reality at the table, NS will continue clubs for three rounds and 4H is then a claim. Note that when West asks with 2NT and decides on a final contract, NS don’t know very much about West’s shape or strength.

Deal 2

Now for our statistical analysis of the specific situation we encountered, with the eight card heart suit missing the ace. This is not all that uncommon and can happen with any suit, and you have to guess whether to bid 3NT or game in the suit. If opener does not turn up with the ace, you can almost certainly give up on No Trumps, but in real life you have no way of knowing that partner does have that crucial card. The same can apply to a suit like AQJ10xxx where the crucial card is the king. But why guess when you have the Evil 2NT at your disposal? Responder calling 2NT will allow you to find out whether opener has that missing card in your suit, and you can then make your decision based on it.

I asked Mike to give me a random deal of 20 hands where opener has a balanced hand and cover (minimum Qxx) in every suit, which means that opener has the ace of hearts. Then counted the number of times either 3NT or 4H could be made ‘double dummy’ according to Deep Finesse (DF). In practice of course things are a bit different at the table and defenders can often be depended on to defend badly, especially when declarer’s hand is hidden. I have found that in such cases, 3NT is harder to defend against than game in a suit. But let’s look at the cold hard ‘facts’ that DF presents us with on the small sample of 20 deals:

Just as a reminder, let me repeat the East-West hands as they were when the deal was played.
Board 18 Dealer East NS Vul

4 KQJ96432 J6 T6

QJ8 A8 K94 A8743

This deal presented a very good exercise in defence, but the main lessons to be learnt, I suspect, would have escaped most of the players involved in this deal at the time.

Board 7 from Friday 28/04/23
Dealer South All Vul

	K982 985 AK6 T75
QJ743 J632 8 J63		A AQ4 T9543 AKQ2
	T65 KT7 QJ72 984