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Bridge hand with 13 cards
  
 

Lead Captain 4.0

 
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Opening Leads
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Opening Leads

Your Hand

East opens 1NT (15-17). Since your methods won't let you show diamonds below the 3 level, you pass. The bidding proceeds 1NT-2♣-2♦-2NT-P. West has a 4 card major with invitational values; East doesn't have a 4 card major and didn't accept.

What's your lead?

Lead Captain is the perfect program to answer that question.

Here's all you need to do:

  • Fill in the leader's hand
  • Define the three unknown hands.
  • Specify the contract, click the button

What could be easier. Here's an example with the above hand:

Define South:
As you type in each suit, the cards will automatically be sorted by rank. Leader

Define West:
Dummy Pattern 1    Dummy Pattern 2

Since Stayman was used, we expect dummy to hold a 4 card major. Thus TWO patterns are defined for the dummy's hand. Buttons on the bottom let you add/delete additional patterns as well as display those patterns with the Prior/Next buttons. The first pattern sets the heart length to exactly 4 and the spade length to 0-4, while the second pattern sets the spade length to 4 and the heart length to 0-4. You may wish to set different parameters - the choice is yours. As long as a hand mets one of your patterns, it will be included.

There's also a feature to exclude a pattern(s).

 

Define East:

Declarer

Declarer didn't accept the invite so his hand has been limited to 16 HCP. Partner didn't bid so there's noting to define for that hand.

 

With Lead Captain you can be as sophisticated as you want in defining the hands. "TP" means "total points" - the sum of HCP plus one length point for each card over 4 in a suit. You can also specify the total number of aces and kings as well as suit quality and controls in each suit.

Specify the Contract and Click: "Best Leads"


In a little more than one minute these results were available for a very large sample set of 5,000 hands. "Fourth from longest and strongest" was not nearly the best lead on this example hand.

Download your FREE copy of Lead Captain 4.0