jblowery wrote: Mon Jul 13, 2020 5:44 pm
I'm in 1st seat. Upcard is

and dealer passes. On to me. I'm holding the following:
Call next (weak hearts call), reverse next (much stronger hand in clubs), or pass (knowing that you have reverse next blocked)?
Score is even. Say 5-5 or whatever.
Jblowery you have been doing an excellent job of finding that exact head scratching edge spot lately!!
One thing I would clarify is that this spot comes down to two strategies: calling clubs or passing. Calling Next (hearts) should not be considered as one should never be making super thin Next calls when they block Reverse Next. One should save their thin Next calls for when they don't block Reverse Next, I.E. when they don't have a good defensive hand.
And I would also like to point out if we change this hand slightly to this:
We shouldn't call anything unless our opponent was at 9 since we should never call marginal when we have all suits blocked.
Ok back to the OP's hand:
So then the question is, should we go against Hoyle with R+1+ an off ace + no voids due to the fact that we don't block all suits, I.E. due to the fact that we don't block diamonds. Even against hoyle this marginal call does score a point a decent amount of time. Maybe it does score a point often enough to be worth worrying about the fact that we don't block one suit? It's ok to be super paranoid about the 2 seat being loaded in Next IF our hand scores at least a point often enough. But does it? IDK. My default here has been to call clubs in this spot, but frankly I wonder a lot about this spot. I think I can definitely be wrong and I think passing here is certainly defensible. Keep in mind tho that this hand is highly score sensitive. Like you should always call clubs here up 9-7. Never give the 2 seat a chance at a miracle loner when the worst case scenario is your team will have 65% equity when you're the dealer at 9-9. I would never pass this hand with a nice lead either for the same reasons. Up 3 I'm certainly calling. It's when my team is up 2 pts or less that I wonder about. Like I said, I have been always calling but it could easily be wrong.
However, if we tweak your hand to this:
Then I'm calling clubs at any score and feeling good about it. It's still a marginal call of course, but having that void in hearts means 2 things:
1) Our TC is more likely to take a trick
&
2) With no hearts in our hand vs 1 in the previous scenario S2 is marginally more likely to have that hearts call that we would dread should we pass.