All Roads by Foxymoron

The proverb "All roads lead to Rome" derives from medieval Latin. It first appeared in writing in 1175 by Alain de Lille, a French theologian and poet, whose Liber Parabolarum renders it as 'mille viae ducunt homines per saecula Romam' (a thousand roads lead men forever to Rome).

I thought of the saying yesterday when discussing the auction to 4H on the following hand from the Autumn SIMs. I am pretty sure that all will have played the hand in 4H, but the auctions might well have been different. Playing "Benjy Acol", South can open 2C (or 2D if that shows 8 playing tricks in a suit). The rebid of 4H shows nine or ten tricks, and North will pass.


A slightly different diagram as the booklet and BBO record is "not yet available", but Sally Brock's excellent comments are. If South opens 1H, as I did, North will respond 1S, and South is too strong for 3H, non-forcing, so is pretty much forced to bid 4H. All roads ... Even an attempt to show extras by bidding 3C over 1S will just get preference to hearts when South will bid 4H. All roads ....

All roads do not lead to ten tricks, however ... If West leads a passive trump, declarer can make an easy 11 tricks by leading a spade up after drawing trumps. Andy Conway found the best diamond lead against me. I won in dummy, East playing the king, and drew trumps and led a spade up straight away. Andy had to guess whether I had one or two spades. Some of the time I have two spades, the defence can take three tricks anyway, so I think it is right to win. But Andy and his partner Leonid Balakhchev had a fine win with 69% so it would be churlish to criticise his decision on this board.

Can East help his partner in this decision? Only with some defensive agreements. East has a choice of which heart to play on the first round, and would need an agreement that his heart carding is "linked" to the key suit. He has to diagnose that this is spades, first of all, and then he has to have an agreement that low high in hearts shows an odd number of major suit cards. Armed with this information, West can win the first spade for a good score. However, declarer can avoid this "exchange of information" by only drawing one round of trumps and then playing a spade. Now West has only seen the eight of hearts and doesn't know whether East has a higher or lower one. He will probably assume that the other heart is lower and still duck the first spade, playing his partner for a doubleton. Bridge is a game of "imperfect information" and defence is harder than offence.