November 2011 - 54

Bidding Matters

Karen Walker
www.kwbridge.com

The 12 Habits of Highly
Effective Bidders
10. They allow their opponents to
make mistakes.
My opponents in a regional Swiss
team event were two 20-something
players from my local club. While we
were shuffling, the young man and
woman pre-Alerted us to their homemade bidding system, which featured
ultra-light opening bids, zero-point responses and anything-goes preempts.
Their system didn't perform well.
In the first six boards, they suffered
a penalty from a garbage preempt,
overbid to a hopeless slam and then
missed a game because neither could
be sure the other actually had constructive values.
Just as we were starting to bid the
last hand, my partner, the always colorful Harold Feldheim, put down his
cards and announced that he had an
important question for our opponents.
"You seem like nice kids, and I can
tell that both of you have a lot of
natural talent," Harold said warmly. "I
just have to know: Why do you want
to tunnel your game by playing this
crazy system?"
Our opponents were taken aback
54 Bridge Bulletin November 2011

but amused. "You have a team of experts, and we're cannon fodder," the
young man grinned. "We figure this is
the only way we can beat you."
Harold shook his head. "We'll talk
later," he promised.
Our team may not have had as big
an edge as our opponents believed.
Their system failures had cost more
than 30 IMPs, and we won the match
by only 20.
Many players believe that desperate measures are called for when
they're underdogs. A common strategy is to preempt aggressively, push
to thin games and slams, and hope
for miracles. Some pairs, such as the
young couple from my club, alter their
entire systems just to create unusual,
"swingy" results.
Winning a bridge event usually
involves some element of luck, but
much of it is the luck of the draw
- whom you play on which boards,
and how well they play at your table.
Matchpoint tops and big IMP pickups are most often the result of your
opponents' errors rather than your
brilliancies.
Experienced pairs will, of course,
make far fewer mistakes than newcomers, but they still happen. World
championships have been decided by
outright blunders. In the final of the
2011 Vanderbilt Teams, two pairs of
national champions bid a grand slam
missing the ace of trumps. If you kibitz the free vugraph shows or expert
team matches on Bridge Base Online
(www.bridgebaseonline.com), you'll
see plenty of bidding misunderstandings and judgment errors.

No matter what the skill level of
your opponents, they are not perfect.
You'll get the best results if you can
give them opportunities to make mistakes, then take full advantage when
they do. On some deals, that requires
patience and self-control, recognizing
when it's right to settle for an average
result, resisting the temptation to act
on a hunch and allowing for the possibility that the opponents might not
be in the perfect contract.
On others, you may want to take
risks to force your opponents to
make difficult guesses. Choose these
battles wisely. If you "shoot" at every
opportunity, your luck will have to be
extraordinary to come out on the plus
side. You'll need two miracles to make
up for every disaster.
It's also important to give your opponents room to fail. There's a fine
line between an aggressive bid that
gives them a problem and a foolhardy
one that leaves them no choice at all.
And once you've created the dilemma,
you have to stop pushing and hope
that they guessed wrong.
In upcoming issues, we'll look at
ideas for how to induce, recognize
and take advantage of your opponents' errors. We'll also discuss some
of the ways you can avoid making
mistakes before they do.
r
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of November 2011
