Bridge Another gem of a hand from recent Denver match

Here is just one more “average” computer dealt hand from Denver’s March tournament: None vulnerable, South dealer.

NORTH & Q3 h Void ( AKQJ10982 $ 1043 WEST EAST & A6 & KJ109752 h AQJ10762 h 93 ( 63 ( 7 $ A6 $ 987

SOUTH & 84 h K854 ( 54 $ KQJ52 At most bridge tournaments, including those in Denver, the hands to be played for most events are pre-generated by a computer. In theory, computer hands are supposed to be completely random, but many people have their doubts.

If you were to flip a coin 100 times, the last thing you should expect would be specifically heads, tails, heads, tails, heads, tails, and so forth for the entire 100 flips.

Similarly at duplicate bridge, suppose you were to make a list of about two dozen characteristics of hands that players tend to pay most attention to such as long suits (and accordingly, singletons and voids), how often a king (especially a singleton king) is offside, whether or not the suits are splitting two-two missing four to the queen, the queen behind the jack, high card count, etc.

With a couple dozen different factors to look, for the odds are very high that in any set of hands, that there will seem to be certain trends.

But even if there were non-random trends, it’s quite another matter as to whether you could figure out what it is quick enough during a session to take advantage of it, as opposed to taking notice after the game is over, looking at the hand record sheets made available at the end of a session.

Two recent columns were devoted to a bizarre hand from Denver’s March tournament where South held 13 red cards, but EastWest could make seven spades on a combined 12-card trump holding.

The hand above is one more little gem from the same session that was glutted with long suits. It did seem like the computer got stuck in a rut.

North has eight solid diamonds. Of course, with eight diamonds in the North hand, that’s only five diamonds to be distributed among the other three hands, which means there is likely to be at least a little more distribution, but the distributions for West, South and East could still be as flat as something like 3-5-2-3, 4-4-1-4 and 4-4-2-3.

But, no! West gets seven good hearts. East gets seven nice spades.

That was hand 11. On hand 14, West once again had seven pretty good hearts, and East had seven solid spades. On hand three, East had seven solid spades.

On hand 16, West gets six good spades and West gets six poor diamonds. On hand 17, South gets seven semi-solid spades. On hand 12, it’s six diamonds for West and seven clubs for East.

On hand 30, North gets seven clubs to the queen-jack, while West gets six good spades and East gets six great hearts. On hand 20, everyone gets a six-card suit. On hand 33, everyone except East has a six-bagger. On hand 35, everyone except North gets a six card suit. And so on.

Someone had a six card or longer suit on 20 out of 36 deals. Just five hands had no singletons or voids.

Whether random or not, it was a wild session of bridge.

Or maybe the bidding just made it that way.

With fair frequency at the end of a duplicate bridge session you hear players say, “What a bunch of crazy hands.”

Almost never do you hear anyone say, “What dull hands, not an interesting one all night.”

SUDOKU ANSWER JUMBLE ANSWER FIASCO BOTTLE EMBLEM FEMALE UNSURE HYPHEN She couldn’t find her husband in the casino. He went to play poker, but got — LOST IN THE SHUFFLE