Mentoring Kathy

Today I meet Kathy in a bidding room in BBO.  I have used this a fair bit with different partners so I know how it works.  I thought that I might like to look at Kathy’s hand when she was struggling but I couldn’t.  Maybe that is good.

We were trying responses over 1NT.  I expected Kathy to understand the Stayman convention.  She has been playing for years (kitchen bridge) and I wrongly thought that it was something she would understand.  She knew the bid and the responses but she didn’t know when to use it or what to bid over it.  I was really surprised.

I guess more experienced teacher will know this already but I wasn’t prepared for it.  I try to explain how it worked and realized I was just confusing her more.  So then I thought I will just try 0-7 HCP.  First we would walk through what you bid with a hand like that and then I set it up to produce examples.

I started by asking her what were some things she could do with 0-7 high card points and she answered bit 2NT. Hmmm.  So I asked her what she would do with 0 points and she did come up with pass.  I was getting there.  We talked about transferring to a major… yes even if you had 5 small and some shape.  We talked about what to do with a six card minor.  I am not sure how most teachers teach this but it seemed easier for her to bid 3 of the minor to invite and go through Stayman to play the hand,  we did that.  I do think it works best that ways.

We practice some hands and after stressing the rule you need 5 in the major to transfer and you need 6 in the minor to bid the minor.  She herself worked out that you could pass if you bid Stayman and partner bid your diamonds.  You didn’t need to bid 3D.  Good going Kathy! 

After a while I thought she had mastered this so we went on to invitational hands.  She had a lot of problems with Stayman.  The auction that was particularly tricky was

1NT-2C

2H-?

with an invitational hand and 4 spades.  I actually am not sure what 1NT-2C-2H-2S means anyway since you could transfer to spades if you had 5 of them.  The whole area of continuations with invitational hands after Stayman was hard to grasp.  But Kathy was great and she did get there.  I still think she needs some practice though.  Transfers were easier and she got the idea with some discussion of transferring and then bidding 2NT (or 3NT) to give partner a choice of contracts.

She was very good at hand evaluation.  She understood intuitvely that a good hand is not just determined by points.

I sent her a brief summary of the rules about bidding after 1NT and a very small number of exercises.  I also sent her to some helpful downloads on the mastering bridge teachers page. 

I suggested looking in the BIL resource pages for even more and of course working through examples in her copy of 25 Bridge Conventions you should know.  (I love that book).

I feel like I have a lot to learn about mentoring but that we can learn together.