Crazy Opps

Playing MP’s in a local game, you run into some opps that decide high level tough decisions will work in their favour. You pick up AKJ8764  K4  A  AKJ with no one Vul, playing MP’s. Your RHO deals and Passes, and you open 2C. Your LHO bids 3H (Pre-Emptive), partner bids 4D, natural positive, and RHO bids 5H. What now?

There are several options and problems on this hand. First, a Pass should be forcing, since you are in a completely Game Forcing auction and partner showed values, but you do not have Diamonds. 5S is quite an underbid, but might be the last place you can make if partner only has Diamonds. 6D might be right, but your K Hearts will be led through, and it is MP’s, not IMPS, giving up on Spades is quite a position to take. Perhaps the best effort to get the strength of your hand across, is to Pass, and then over whatever partner bids, trot out a Spade bid, on the theory that a Pass and Pull is the strongest action you can take. But will partner bid 7 of something expecting you to have all the first round controls later? Don’t you just hate when the pre-emptors pick the right time to play with your auction.

At the table, the person holding this hand bid 5S, and their partner raised that to 6S. I really think that their partner should have bid 6H, looking for 7, which this hand would accept, since the other hand was Q9532  ---  KQJ8752  6.

I was the person that bid 5H, and I guess that 6H would have been more effective, since that makes it really difficult to get to 7S. I think over 5H, they should have gotten there at our table. Although the pass and pull strategy over 6H might get you to 7S, it is tough for the 4D hand to want to bid 7 as a guess at this point, and what do you do if partner bids 6S, which they might do on this hand? Finally, 6H only goes for sticks and wheels (-1100) if they decide to stop and double it, so we would get to find out who was able to get to the grand.