[Hanoi5]

Red vs White, imps, you hold:

♠Q7x
♥KQJ8xx
♦KQxx
♣---

1♣-1♥-5♣-X
Pa-???

[billw55]

Looks like an automatic pass.

[jillybean]

Pass

[gnasher]

It depends on what partner's double shows. If it's for penalties I pass, of course.

If, as I prefer, it says that he has enough values to think that this is our hand, I bid 5♥, because I have far more offence than defense, and a good chance of making opposite a couple of useful cards.

[cherdano]

I trust partner...to pass when he has a penalty double with no offense. 5♥.

[Hanoi5]

 gnasher, on 2011-May-22, 13:14, said:

It depends on what partner's double shows. If it's for penalties I pass, of course.

If, as I prefer, it says that he has enough values to think that this is our hand, I bid 5♥, because I have far more offence than defense, and a good chance of making opposite a couple of useful cards.

Pre-empts are used because they work but if we can't penalize them, will we leave them to play undoubled? Would you double after 5♣-pa-pa? Partner can figure what's useful or not in a heart contract so I think the double, although optional, shouldn't be made with a hand where 5♥ looks better.

 cherdano, on 2011-May-22, 13:20, said:

I trust partner...to pass when he has a penalty double with no offense. 5♥.

So partner passes 5♣ and you'd double? How is this situation forcing?

Doubler held:

♠J9x
♥Txx
♦Axxx
♣ATx

What do you recommend?

[Phil]

Yet another reason to allow limited posting in the A/E section.

[gnasher]

 Hanoi5, on 2011-May-22, 14:58, said:

Pre-empts are used because they work but if we can't penalize them, will we leave them to play undoubled?

Playing card-showing/takeout/DSIP doubles, the idea is that one of these things happens:
- Partner bids 5♥, because he thinks it's making.
- Partner doubles to say that he thinks we might have made 4♥ (or some other game), but doesn't know whether to bid on or defend. I use that information to judge what to do.
- Partner passes to say that he has no reason to think we would have made game. I double to say that, notwithstanding partner's opinion, I think we might have made game. Then partner uses that information to judge what to do.
- Partner passes to say that he has no reason to think we would have made game. I pass because I agree.

So:
- When we have game on, we never defend their sacrifice undoubled, and we have maximised the exchange of information, so we have given ourselves the best chance of decising correctly whether to bid on or to defend.
- When we don't have game on, we miss any penalties that are available.

If you play penalty doubles, you pick up some penalties on partscore boards, but you have less accuracy on the game hands. I think that's worse.

Obviously this doesn't always work perfectly, because we may not judge correctly what our hands are worth.

Quote

Would you double after 5♣-pa-pa?

No.

Quote

Partner can figure what's useful or not in a heart contract so I think the double, although optional, shouldn't be made with a hand where 5♥ looks better.

Obviously he shouldn't double if he has a 5♥ bid.

Quote

So partner passes 5♣ and you'd double? How is this situation forcing?

Who said it was forcing?

Quote

Doubler held:

♠J9x
♥Txx
♦Axxx
♣ATx

What do you recommend?

I recommend defending 5♣ undoubled.As I said, it doesn't always work perfectly. However:
- 4♥ will not always make
- When we're making 4♥, 5♣ is probably only two down, so the loss from failing to double is only 5 IMPs if teammates saved or 3 IMPs if they didn't (-11 instead of -8)
- We might not have bid 4♥ under our own steam, so it may in practice have been a partscore board.

[Edited to correct the nonsense at the end]

This post has been edited by gnasher: 2011-May-22, 16:09

[benlessard]

Passing here doesnt make any sense. Double of 5C shouldnt be 100% penalty

Another way to see this is when it goes 1H-2C-???

you have plenty of ways to show different hands from pass,X all the way to at least 4S so your "ensemble" of hands can be divided in many categories and you expect some precision and result accordingly to your number of options.

1C-1H-5C

Here you will get a different universe of hands (less clubs, more spades probably slightly more pts in average) But you have far less option for your hands "ensemble"
will mean that you will need to pass hands to you would never pass if you had more options. It mean that you will raise to 5H hands that you would only raise to 4 or even make just make a limit raise. It also mean you will need to double with a lot of offbeat shapes. Hand that you would have bid 2S/2D. Pure penalty X when you dont have a lot of options is something you cannot afford unless your partner hand is well known or limited.

Im probably playing penalty/semi pen X way more than most players but here it obvious you cannot afford to have penalty X.

Ps Just to make sure when partner make a non-penalty X and you have a void you dont pass.

[gwnn]

When I read the topic title this sprung to mind for some reason

http://www.anyclip.c...comes-to-visit/

"The way we handle ourselves in this situation, so important"

[whereagles]

I dunno what dbl is or should be, but my hand is defensive enough for me to pass regardless, so I'll just do that. Take the money.

[pooltuna]

Your choices look to be pass, 5♦, 5♥. With the high potential for wasted ♣ values I am inclined to take any plus I can get out of the hand by passing.

[OleBerg]

 Phil, on 2011-May-22, 15:16, said:

Yet another reason to allow limited posting in the A/E section.

Yet another reason to allow only limited posting in the semantics section.

[nige1]

 Hanoi5, on 2011-May-22, 08:01, said:

Red vs White, imps, you hold: ♠ Q7x ♥ KQJ8xx ♦ KQxx ♣ ---
1♣-1♥-5♣-X
Pa-???

IMO 5♦ = 10, 5♥ = 9., _P = 8
IMO 5♦ is descriptiive if 2N would have been unusual.

[the hog]

I would bid 5H over the double, and I would NOT have doubled with the posted hand.

[billw55]

 Phil, on 2011-May-22, 15:16, said:

Yet another reason to allow limited posting in the A/E section.

It sounds like you are being snide to somebody, but I'm not sure who. Maybe more than one person.

[CSGibson]

 gnasher, on 2011-May-22, 16:00, said:

Playing card-showing/takeout/DSIP doubles, the idea is that one of these things happens:
- Partner bids 5♥, because he thinks it's making.
- Partner doubles to say that he thinks we might have made 4♥ (or some other game), but doesn't know whether to bid on or defend. I use that information to judge what to do.
- Partner passes to say that he has no reason to think we would have made game. I double to say that, notwithstanding partner's opinion, I think we might have made game. Then partner uses that information to judge what to do.
- Partner passes to say that he has no reason to think we would have made game. I pass because I agree.

So:
- When we have game on, we never defend their sacrifice undoubled, and we have maximised the exchange of information, so we have given ourselves the best chance of decising correctly whether to bid on or to defend.
- When we don't have game on, we miss any penalties that are available.

If you play penalty doubles, you pick up some penalties on partscore boards, but you have less accuracy on the game hands. I think that's worse.

Obviously this doesn't always work perfectly, because we may not judge correctly what our hands are worth.

Thank you Andy, I find this to be an incredibly useful post discussing an area I haven't given much thought to.

[han]

Andy gave a very nice explanation of how he likes to play the double. I play it similarly although we have discussed it less precisely. I am not convinced it is best though. Even if you play a double as described by Andy, opener will be pulling very rarely. But perhaps then it is better just to play it as penalty/they are going down at this level? I am not saying it is better, I simply do not know.

I don't think Andy meant to write this:

 gnasher, on 2011-May-22, 16:00, said:

- When we have game on, we never defend their sacrifice undoubled.

Of course 5C can easily be passed out in his style when game is very good. In fact, change the two hands in this thread only slightly and 4H is nearly cold.

[gnasher]

 han, on 2011-May-24, 00:10, said:

I don't think Andy meant to write this:

I did mean to write it, but it was only supposed to be an explanation of how I think it should work in theory.

The thresholds for action by either hand should be such that if both players have a maximum pass we are just short of game values. For example, if we need 10 Banana Points for game, we might play that advancer doubles with 4+ and overcaller doubles with 7+. If we pass out 5♣, we have a maximum of 9, so we didn't have game on, and if they go down we don't care (as much) about the penalty.

Needless to say, the two hands provided by the OP don't provide much support for this theory. The best thing to do with such evidence is to ignore it.

[helene_t]

5♦, it would be useful to play wide-ranging U2NT here so that partner knows I have six hearts. Unfortunately I don't play that (unless partner insists) so for all p knows I could be 5-5. Even so, I prefer 5♦.

Against randoms at the club I would pass, though, as LHO usually doesn't have a 5♣ bid.