Dark Bridge 002: Competitive Fit Finding

Welcome to the second Dark Bridge column.  I've dealt another random hand, and this one is surprisingly interesting.  It's our first competitive hand.

 

The Hand In Question

Dlr: S Vul: Nil AQJ5 A86 A8732 8 K42 K532 J9 K1054 1098 Q7 104 AQJ976 763 J1094 KQ65 32

South	West	North	East
Pass	Pass	1	2
Pass (!)	3	All Pass

Dark Bridge 001: Introduction and a Simple Strong 2 Club Opening

Welcome to the first of our Dark Bridge series of posts. To create each of these posts, I will deal out a bridge hand and then analyze it. Some hands will probably be analyzed to death, and maybe even visited on multiple occasions; some hands will probably only generate a few brief notes--particularly low scoring hands.

It's probably worth saying that I'm not really a Bridge expert. I've never even played at a club, and I don't have a single matchpoint. This blog is really aimed at beginners, and perhaps those as fascinated by bidding systems as I. The idea is really to pore through my library of Bridge bidding books, the set of conventions we typically use, and various other materials to try and learn some more about why we bid the way we do, and perhaps achieve a better understanding of what's out there.

For the purposes of this blog, we'll call our convention system 'Dark Card,' since it's derived from Standard Yellow Card (SYC).  I'll frequently link the Bridge Guys website, as they have the nicest overview of conventions and such on the web.  They have a workbook on SYC as well.  Dark Card is just a modified version of SYC with a few intermediate conventions thrown in, but the approach is fundamentally the same.

Finally, if you don't like what you see, post a comment.  This is meant to be a learning exercise for me most of all, so your feedback and questions will help this be useful to all.  Particularly interesting comments will likely prompt a revisit.

Finally, I'll be taking as much advantage of the web as possible in that there is no limit to column size.  Some of these blog items will likely run a bit long as I'm a somewhat verbose writer.  While I'm also practicing writing here (are you starting to feel a bit experimented upon?), I'm not going to edit these to within an inch of their life like one would traditional prose.  I'll also use the first person, which I would probably not do in another forum.

Before I started this, I resolved to take whatever hand I dealt myself.  When you pick up cards in a game, you get whatever happens to fall, and cherry-picking perfect hands with clear answers to talk about always leaves me feeling a bit lacking.  That said, this is probably not what I would have begun with given a choice...

The Hand In Question

Dlr: S Vul: Nil 643 A2 9432 Q963 AKJ1098 53 AJ AK7 Q75 Q1086 Q65 J52 2 KJ974 K1087 1084

South	West	North	East
Pass	2	Pass	2
Pass	2	Pass	4
All Pass

Thanks to ContractBridge.net Hand Creator for help with the HTML above.

Welcome

I'm thinking about actually starting a publicly accessible blog here. Topics would likely include Bridge, Software Development, and other random thoughts. So is anyone else out there using blogger?