How to respond with this killer club suit? - with Graeme Tuffnell 

The trick to improve bridge memory is to prevent having to use it, Memorize the most frequent hand patterns (ie 4432, 5332 et cetera). If you know them, when needing to know opponents hand pattern most of the times you need to be able to count to 4/5 instead of 13. For example, having seen 1 opp has 4 heart, 4 diamonds and 3 clubs, you KNOW he has two spades and you can work out the other opps distribution. The same goes for counting out a trump or side suit. Say you miss 5 cards and have a 53 fit yourself. Having memorized hand patterns you know their distribution will be 5-0, 4-1 or 3-2. Once you have seen one opp holding 0,1 or 2 in that suit you know what's left. No need to count to 13... Study "Countdown to winning Bridge" by Tim Bourke and Marc Smith for this, it's a great book to advance your skills.

On this board, 1nt 2h(s) 3c(d&s) 4h(exclusion) 5c(2 kc) pass. While 6c looks tempting, I see it failing with spade onside more often than making with it offside, so (while I'm sure many people made 6c this time) I'd be OK booking in 5c with the avaliable over.

That was my first thought.🤔

No clue why E led 2H unless he had a club void, or why KH wasn't played at trick 1. In retrospect, N has relatively bad hand for us, as 8 HCP in his hand are worthless.

The h lead (while objectively poor) is with expectation that s is very distributional and could have a singleton heart that vanishes later. Its the kind of play that players make when they first get to the level of starting to build candidate hands for everyone, but don't really know what to do with that information.

Dissent help here. It would make partner think ace of hearts better than ace of diamonds!

Heart lead is only one that lets 6C make, but in real life it would make almost every time. When D is led towards dummy and W takes the A, knowing that he musn't try AH is really difficult. 6H save loses 1 trick in every suit, so -700 loses unless NS make 6C.

It's not about which is more likely to make. If 6s is 90% and 6c is a claim on the lead, I want to be in 6s every time at match points and 6c every time at imps. Fro. Conversation they are clearly at match points, so you must consider spades The % for spades vs clubs will not be small. I expect the room to split fairly evenly between clubs and spades, could easily be 30+%

@@puffinbasher I know you don't say this hand is 90% in spades. But to even mention it seems fully irrelevant. A9XX opposing QJXX is nowhere near 90% for zero losers, it ONLY is no loser if they are 3-2 AND with the K onside AND you correctly choose between dropping the K or pinning the T second round, 16% chance of success. Apart from this your choice to be in 6S in Match points is a clear misunderstanding of Match point percentage decisions. The point of match points is you need to assess what the field is doing. If for example in a field no-one will bid a small slam you need 100% to bid a grand and break even against bidding a small slam yourself. If you bid a small in this field you only need 50% to break even as half of the time you score 0% and the other half 100%. This situation is fully comparable. Given the target audience for this channel, you can safely assume not a lot of pairs will bid 6 holding 11HCP against a 1NT opener. So you need a bit more then 50% on the long run (50+ 2x the percentage of pairs you will win against anyways as you'll outscore them in game "they miss game, they screw up the play, have an accident after bidding controls, are in the wrong game, let the opponents steal the hand..." Read Kit Woolsey's Matchpoints it is a very good book on this topic). And for picking the highest scoring slam over the best odds slam you need close to 100%, which holding a 4-4 fit almost never is the case, and it won't be anywhere near missing an Ace AND trump King. And then finally without sound information your partner is very long in your 4card (on this hand he can't be, he opened 1NT), when you hold an 8-4 you play your 8 card, that is simply very sound advice.