It came again after how many deals?

Yesterday, I gave a deal in which I tabled nine trumps in the dummy. How often should you see a nine-card suit?

If my arithmetic is not too far out, it should happen approximately once every 2,800 deals.

This example occurred only one day after yesterday’s! It also features another extreme rarity — what?

My wife, Kitty, and I play against robots at a casual Bridge Base Online table. (There are no masterpoints or anything on the line.) The robots do some strange things, in particular, leading minor-suit singletons against no-trump contracts! They also assume your bids mean the same as they play. So, when I opened two diamonds, showing a weak major twosuiter, East must have had a shortcircuit. It thought that I was making a weak two-bid with a six-card suit. But the robot had nine diamonds! It doubled, feeling fairly confident that it could defeat two diamonds!

My wife understandably jumped to four hearts. We thought little was

amiss when four hearts was passed out.

Then the West robot led a diamond, conceding a ruff-and-sluff at trick one! When did you last — if ever — see that?

My wife ruffed in the dummy and discarded a spade from her hand. She played a trump to her ace, drew West’s remaining trump and claimed an overtrick, losing one trick in each black suit.

I was staggered when I saw that East had nine diamonds. Why not bid five diamonds? How bad could that be? As you can see, there are 12 top tricks, but even in a worst-case scenario, East cannot go down more than two.