[awm]

Regardless of skill level, I think we all play a lot of boards against players who are intermediate (or maybe the low end of advanced). This comes up in various tournaments all the time, and maximizing your score against these folks is an important part of winning consistently. For this reason, I thought it'd be interesting to come up with a list of common mistakes made by players of this level that can be exploited to improve your results. Of course, this is also useful to intermediate players aspiring to advance!

I will start things off with a few examples I have noticed:

(1) If you lead a singleton from dummy in a suit contract, and RHO has the ace he will virtually always hop.
(2) If you lead away from dummy's ace in a contract, and RHO has the king, he will again virtually always hop.
(3) Similarly, if you lead towards dummy's queen (with no higher honor in dummy) LHO will hop.
(4) If you balance over the opponents two-level partial after they have bid and raised a suit, they will almost always take the push to three.
(5) If you have a suit missing the queen-ten (i.e. KJxxx opposite A9x) and the ten is played on the first round, play him for the queen. Intermediates will not play T from Tx so the only possibilities are QT-tight, QTx(x), and singleton T (which is least likely, and which you may not be able to solve anyway).

Again, these are all "mistakes" and part of improving is to avoid them. But I think they are common enough in a typical field that one can take advantage of them. Amusingly, against expert players you can sometimes catch them failing to take these actions when they are actually right especially if you make the play quickly so they have to try to keep even tempo (I think more often than you catch them doing most of these things by mistake).

[OleBerg]

Go fish.

(Ok, I'm spoiled.)

[Fluffy]

I use the strategy of letting them support parter at a low level. When I want to be able to play 4 in my major after RHO overcalls, instead of jumping to 4M directly, I cuebid at a low level so my LHO is able to raise his partner and get that urge out of his chest. Then both opponents feel happy because they have both bid their hand and I can comfortably bid 4M and play there.

On the other hand if the opponents use jacoby, it is very safe to jump to 5m with whatever hand, they will very seldom double you there. At the 3 level it is completelly safe to make lead directing bids even with 3 cards.

When dummy has KJx and you have doubleton always finese the jack since they will often hop with the ace anyway

Use the boomerang finese technique with KJ109 vs Axx or similars.

You can tap declarer even when dummy has a messy Qxxx in your suit, just underlead your ace or king, declarer will always ruff regardless.

[helene_t]

Fluffy, on 2011-April-06, 04:28, said:

At the 3 level it is completelly safe to make lead directing bids even with 3 cards.

As long as p doesn't raise you to the 5-level with his 4-card support

[JLOGIC]

helene_t, on 2011-April-06, 06:02, said:

As long as p doesn't raise you to the 5-level with his 4-card support

Unless you have the agreement that he can't/shouldn't because you frequently overcall 3 card suits there, in which case you should alert it, in which case they will be more likely to double you, in which case...

[Phil]

Agree with Adam's list. In addition:

- If they play o/e discards, they will NEVER falsecard.

- If they play udca, they will never give false count, even on the 11th trick. If they play standard, frequently they don't know enough to give count anyway, but if you see them giving count, they'll repeat the pattern.

- They will never bare a King, and seldom pitch a Q down to Qx, so you always go for the endplay instead of the drop. They will frequently pitch from Txxx or even Jxxx, even if their RHO has length in the suit.

- They don't randomize their spots, and always play lowest to highest. Last week in the club I watched a good player with AKJx in hand and Txxx (side suit in a trump contract) on the board proceed to finesse into Q9 after the opening leader turned up with nothing special in trump.

Unfortunately certain intermediate moves are less exploitable. They will frequently bid RKC off of two quick losers or even a void. So the normal inference isn't reliable.

[hrothgar]

There was an book publised a few years back called "Invitation to Annihilation" that dealt with the same topic

http://www.amazon.co...ASIN=0910791899

As I recall, it was pretty good

[Flameous]

Reading these it seems I'm not quite as bad a player I thought I am

[rduran1216]

Fluffy, on 2011-April-06, 04:28, said:

I use the strategy of letting them support parter at a low level. When I want to be able to play 4 in my major after RHO overcalls, instead of jumping to 4M directly, I cuebid at a low level so my LHO is able to raise his partner and get that urge out of his chest. Then both opponents feel happy because they have both bid their hand and I can comfortably bid 4M and play there.

On the other hand if the opponents use jacoby, it is very safe to jump to 5m with whatever hand, they will very seldom double you there. At the 3 level it is completelly safe to make lead directing bids even with 3 cards.

When dummy has KJx and you have doubleton always finese the jack since they will often hop with the ace anyway

Use the boomerang finese technique with KJ109 vs Axx or similars.

You can tap declarer even when dummy has a messy Qxxx in your suit, just underlead your ace or king, declarer will always ruff regardless.

I can't help but offer a tangent story on the jacoby point.

The first tournament I ever played in with Lowell Andrews, We were playing against Gene Simpson and a client. The client opened 1M and Gene bid Jacoby 2NT. I had xxx in hearts and nothing. I decided to psych a 3H call smelling that they were slamming. After the client bid 3S, Gene signed off in 4S, and I got put in 5H doubled w vs. r (which i probably deserved) down 1100. I apologized. 6S is ice cold, asking around, everyone is splintering, but nobody is making a jacoby bid with Gene's hand which was QJ10x KJx xxxxx A, and out of 50 tables, none of the N/S got to 6S.

Anyway the point about intervening over jacoby 2NT is 100% correct. Since most partnerships I'm in have the agreeement that a call is simply a lead direct, and not a request to play there, this kind of thing hasn't happened again thank goodness.


EDIT: hahaha I hadn't even read the follow ups, just hit reply after reading fluffy's post hahahaha.

[IdiotVig]

Phil, on 2011-April-06, 09:03, said:

If they play o/e discards, they will NEVER falsecard.

Except when there's no suitable discard, in which case, it will take an eternity to choose something. Expect the tempo in which the actual card is played to slow down considerably.