Alerts and Questions
Common Mistakes

In one of her patented e-mails, Annabelle explains a Director's ruling she made recently.
She related this incident:

"At a recent game, a player [the Questioner] came to me, showed me his hand and explained his problem.  I went to the table and had the players reconstruct their bidding, which had gone P by questioner's partner, 1♣ by RH opponent, P by questioner, 1♥ by LH opponent, P by partner, 1NT by RHO, P by player, 2NT by LHO.   At partner's turn to bid, partner asked if the 2NT bid meant that opener didn't have 4 ♠s.  He was told that it did.  This was followed by 3 Passes. The questioner, being on lead, felt a little uncomfortable because he might want to lead a ♠.

Poor Hearts.  Mom always liked Spades best.

Yesterday, Rich and Marj Talbott rolled out a new wrinkle to even the playing field a little.  Playing 2/1, and holding 5 Hearts and a game forcing hand, Marj bid 2C over Rich's 1D opening, which Rich alerted.  Neither I nor Jim Somma had ever seen this bid, and were at a loss what to do.  I'd like Marj or Rich to comment on it.

But it got me to thinking.  Why do the bridge gods so favor Spades over Hearts, and to a lesser extent Diamonds over Clubs?  Is this "fair" to Hearts and Clubs?  They're just as good looking, and work just as hard, but no matter what they do, they're always second class to Spades and Diamonds.

NT gets an even better deal, but at least NT has to work harder.   And of course Diamonds and Clubs, being minors, don't score as well as the adults.

[Editor's note: This article is reproduced from the Mid-Atlantic Bridge Conference web-site www.mabcbridge.org. It appears not to be copyrighted and is presented largely verbatim, except as desirable for presentation here.]

For the Intermediate Player

[Editor's Note: This article appears on the Mid-Atlantic Bridge Association web-site, www.mabcbridge.org, and appears not to be copyrighted. As presented on that site, the suit symbols are not displayed correctly, so I re-formatted it for presentation here.]

Continuing to think about Puppet Stayman responses in a Big Club system.

Let's keep going and see what develops.
 

Puppet Stayman is a variant of the Stayman Convention that is used by many pairs over 2NT and by some pairs over 1NT.