What's new in SimiliBridge 5.10

A new technique for the card play

• The Dummy reversal technique

  I hope that SimiliBridge users have learned, when declaring a suit contract, to choose the long trump hand as the base hand, to count the losers of this hand and to look for ways (ruffing, discarding, etc.) to eliminate them. In this game plan, urgent ruffs are always made by the short trump hand (often Dummy), and each ruff immediately yields a trump trick. Ruffs from the long hand are used to get the lead back, go from one hand to the other, establish a suit by ruffing, etc. These are "service ruffs" which generally do not directly yield tricks.

  The Dummy reversal technique, as its name suggests, reverses the analysis of the game plan in a suit contract, by taking the short trump hand as the base hand, with the idea of ruffing from the long trump hand. But be careful, ruffs from the long hand are dangerous. Often, if there are too few of them, they don't yield anything at all. Sometimes, a single useless ruff from the long hand causes the contract to irremediably go down, while there is a winning game plan using the usual analyses. The dummy reversal technique is therefore aimed at experienced players who are capable of planning the entire sequence of tricks to be done, from the first to the last. For their dummy reversal to be successful, they will have to analyze the risk of overruffs according to their high trumps, check that they will have enough entries to the short hand to ruff its losers. And finally make sure that the short hand will be able to complete the elimination of the opposing trumps and reach the last necessary tricks. A dummy reversal does not allow for improvisation or approximation.

  The Dummy reversal option is therefore unchecked by default so as not to increase the level too quickly (even if, after all, this technique concerns very rare situations). But if you already master the ruffing play with the long trump hand as the base hand, you can check the option in the rule preferences on the Advanced Techniques page. Also see some examples with deals N°7 to 15 of the Last corrections file (accessible via the Examples menu).