Saturday, March 04, 2006 5:40 AM

D.S.I.P. - History

PITBULLS:

I am finding articles on the net that shows Kokish was the first to suggest “D.S.I.P. doubles” . I took it a step further and made them more structured and added more concepts. The work that Tom , BJ , Stan & I did on them is original research. I must concede that Kokish thought of the idea before I did. I just did not know about it. Also this author suggested the name Do Something Intelligent Partner before Gordon Campbell did ( maybe Gordon read this article on the net ) . Action doubles are a narrow subset of D.S.I.P. doubles which I call 3^rd case D.S.I.P. doubles where the opponents own the hand and you want to ask permission to sacrifice after pre-empting.

Action Doubles

In the dim and distant days when I learned to play bridge, my mentors impressed deeply on my memory that once you had made a pre-emptive bid of any type, you kept quiet for the rest of the auction.

This seemed to be a fairly widely held view. After all, you had probably bid about two tricks more than your hand was worth when you made the pre-empt.

A couple of years ago, I noticed that auctions like this were becoming more commonplace.

NORTH	ME	SOUTH	MY PARTNER
2 Spades (weak)	3 Hearts	3 Spades	4 Hearts
4 Spades !	double	all pass

I would not have minded, but the opponents always seemed to get a good score from this apparently irrational bidding.

Lets look at an example from the other viewpoint. I held this hand at favourable vulnerability during the teams event at Brighton.

ªJ ©J4 ¨T76 §AQT8643.

I opened three clubs ( all right, I know that a red-blooded male would have opened five clubs ). Next hand doubles, partner bids four clubs and next hand bids four spades. What do you do now? Should we sell out? If so should we double? Perhaps we have a cheap sacrifice?

In reality, with this hand you want to bid five clubs but have a nagging worry that partner just bid 4 clubs to up the ante prior to doubling them. Some pairs play that 3NT by partner (instead of four clubs) encourages a sacrifice but it is not always certain which contract the opponents will reach.

The answer, playing ACTION DOUBLES, is to double. This means please bid on - unless you know better. Here, partner will normally bid five clubs but with a suitable hand will pass the double for penalties.

Basically, an action double says to partner "I don't want to pass; do something intelligent" (some hope with most partners!) They are fundamentally a blame-shifting device, allowing the doubler to place the blame squarely on partner for whatever goes wrong thereafter. Could there be a more appealing scenario?

Eric Kokish the brilliant Canadian player and writer, calls them "One for the Road Doubles" and provides this example.

As South at love all, You hold ªAQJ82 ©874 ¨AQ8 §J2

The bidding proceeds:

EAST	SOUTH	WEST	NORTH
1 Diamond	1 Spade	Double (t.o)	3 Spades (pre-emptive)
Pass	Pass	4 Hearts	Pass
Pass	??

Normally, it would be bad bridge to bid four spades now (having previously passed three) since it gives the opponents two bites of the cherry. Besides, sometimes West will have done the wrong thing in bidding four hearts. South has a difficult decision since the hand is potentially useful in both offence and defence. Total number of tricks (TNT) fans will note that South is likely to gain by some further action (but that is another article).

The answer once again is to make an ACTION DOUBLE, asking partner to choose.

Lets look at two possible full hand layouts:

(1)

	ª 10 7 6 3 © A 9 2 ¨ 5 § 10 9 7 4 3
ª K 9 5 © Q J 6 5 3 ¨ J 10 2 § A 8		ª 4 © K 10 ¨ K 9 8 7 6 4 § K Q 6 5
	ª A Q J 8 2 © 8 7 4 ¨ A Q 8 § J 2

(2)

	ª K 7 6 3 © 5 ¨ 10 7 2 § 10 9 7 4 3
ª 10 9 5 © A J 9 6 3 2 ¨ 5 3 § A 8		ª 4 © K Q 10 ¨ K J 9 6 4 § K Q 6 5
	ª A Q J 8 2 © 8 7 4 ¨ A Q 8 § J 2

With layout 1, North has an excellent hand for defence and a diamond lead will net +300. With this hand, North will pass the action double. In fact, four spades would have probably gone one down in layout one, emphasising the importance of not making the wrong "busy" decision .With hand 2, North has little interest in defending and will remove the action double to four spades. This is a very cheap sacrifice against the cold game.

There are numerous opportunities to use these sorts of double on competitive deals. Exactly how and when you use them must be defined by partnership agreement.