Give Respect, if Respect is Due

I have often recommended Larry Cohen’s free internet newsletter. If you have not looked at his newsletter in the past 6 months, it is worth revisiting. The newsletter has taken on a new feature which provides 4 sets of East-West hands for readers to bid and then he gives the likely or best bidding sequence, some rationale and comment and a score for your bid. The East and West hands are separately shown, so you can actually bid them with your partner without the double dummy advantage. Larry says this material is intermediate to advanced, but they are tough problem hands and are not going to be a pushover for anybody.

His lead article this month is a lamentation that no bridge convention has ever been named after him, while Marty Bergen has almost a dozen. After a worthwhile review of the basics of 4th seat opening bids, he puts a new twist on the Rule of 15. He says that we should augment the Rule of 15 by using CRIFS for deciding whether to bid or fold. CRIFS is an acronym for Cohen’s Rule In Fourth Seat. The rule is intended to be applied to 10, 11 and 12 point hands that actually meet the Rule of 15.

The rule is not about points, spades, distribution, but rather brings into play a human factor, the skill level of your opponents. After all, you do not have to play this hand; you can throw it in and move on. If you look left and right and see two highly competent, competitive players who will compete for the bid, and then play and defend like demons, do not touch your bidding box, do not pass Go and slip that marginal hand back into the tray. Alternatively, if you see players who you would like to make permanent opponents, pick your spot and go for it. If you open that 10 point hand hand, it is not considered good form to tell you opponents why you did so.

This is not the first time I have read about analyzing your opponents. A prominent professional team in discussing their opening lead discipline said that they prefer to use the more informative “Jack Denies” system, but that unfortunately it gives the same information to their opponents, so they only use it when they judge that their opponents don’t know what to do with the information!

As I thought about this sensible advice, I recollected that I had heard this same general advice before by a lesser known author. Sure enough, I found the same theme in a blog post I wrote in April of 2007 titled Rate Yourself as a Partner. This was a series of 12 tests of a good partner and you get a point for each “Yes” answer. The second item asks:

“Do you give expert players a little respect? The David and Goliath scenario hardly ever plays out at the bridge table. If you opponents are frequently known to play at the 55% level, you will do well against the field holding them to an average board. Find another time, place and opponent to demonstrate your cleverness.”

I think that blog post was one of my best and would be suitable to be reread before each game. Maybe suitable for framing! If you want to read that blog post, look in the archive in the right margin of the blog and locate the posts for April, 2007.

Now back to CRIFS. The underlying concept is valid, but I don’t need one more hard to remember acronym to tell me to duck when trouble is on the horizon. I doubt CRIFS will become a “biggie” in bridge vocabulary, and I think Larry Cohen was just having some fun at Marty Bergen’s expense.