By Dan Israeli (ACBL_17)
Welcome to this week's ACBL Club Bulletin.
Every week I will bring a few interesting hands played in our very own ACBL games, and try to show you how the hand should be bid and played. Of course, Bridge is not an exact science, so I will try to bring more than one angle.
I hope you will find this interesting and useful.
If you come across an interesting hand you'd like to share and have analyzed, or if you have an interesting story to tell or a question to ask, feel free to email me.
My email address is ehhehh@gmail.com.
A few preliminary notes:
1. I try to keep the bidding simple. The Basic SAYC system is used, but mostly it is common sense bridge, added with a few simple gadgets.
2. Some boards will require a more scientific approach, but nothing really major. I believe good bridge can be played without 200 pages of agreements.
The rule of 11 is a very important defensive tool. Take partner's spot card lead and subtract it from 11, and the result you get is the number of cards higher than the lead in the other 3 hands. You can see two of them, dummy's and your own, and this way you can figure out how many cards higher than the lead declarer holds.
The concept of safety plays is very important. Sometimes we should give up potential overtricks in order to secure the contract against a bad layout.
An elimination play is when we clear a suit and then throw in a defender, and he does not have a safe exit card, because he no longer holds cards in the suit we eliminated.
That's it for today.
I hope you had a good time.
See you next week!
Dan Israeli