This Saturday's not-regular-Saturday bridge column illustrates the pitfalls of attempting to describe a hand on incomplete information.
North deals, and the opening bid with a balanced hand and 16 high-card points is standard. I'd like to think that raising to Two Spades with seventeen points is standard; that the simulation highlights the bid as some kind of a suggestion. The North bot shows Clubs, with a notrump opening I figure there are game values in Spades, but the bot has other ideas. That Four No Trump does not have a highlight on it indicating calling for aces, and the bot interprets my additional responses as a way to bid a grand slam in Clubs.
The opening lead is East's ♦7. We treat the North hand as the closed hand for counting losers. In Spades, none, but note how useful the South hand would be as a dummy with Spades as trumps; in Hearts, there's one; in Diamonds none; in Clubs there might be two or three losers, even as trump. Unfortunately the simulation is not an artificial intelligence that might see the value of stopping with game at Four Spades, especially with all those potential Club losers once the Ace is cashed.
And so it goes: win the opening lead with the Ace on the board; the ♣4 winkles out the Queen and now it's possible to run all the Clubs. Perhaps it would have been wiser for me to draw trumps, establishing the ♣7 and ♣8 before going to work on the other suits, but I opted to use the high Diamonds in hand to discard some of the low Spades on the board, then cash the ♥ Ace, and then on the second round of Spades, east was out and ruffed with the ♣ Nine. Now East can lead a low Heart to the Queen and West can return a Spade for another club ruff; as the North hand is a closed hand, there's a club ruff available there of the ♥ King, and the three remaining tricks are mine, but down three on a grand slam attempt isn't how any of this is supposed to work.
18.1.20
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