Undoubtedly the definitive work on competitive bidding is Robson and Segal's (the mavens' machers) seminal Partnership Bidding at Bridge. One subject it deals with extensively is this week's starring call, the takeout double. This is the advice that the authors give on its use:

"If your hand is offensive and you want to bid, but there is no obvious bid to make — double."

Good advice, but it may have been taken a little closely to heart on the following two deals.

Let's go through this hand from my point of view. I held this collection in a teams-of-eight match with both sides vulnerable:

Partner opened 1 in first seat, RHO made a takeout double and I bid 1 (and I don't want to hear a peep out of any of you redoublers out there). LHO bid 2 and pard competed to 3. At this point the original doubler dug in and brought 3 from out of the bag. Now clearly I want to potch this but I have to confess, ladies and gentlemen, that avarice got the better of me. How can this not be forcing, I thought. RHO has doubled and bid a new suit at the three level opposite a freely bid 2! So I passed in tempo and so did the rest of the table. Oy!

I could probably have made some sort of claim that a non-forcing 3 should be alerted. But I didn't want to noodge like some kvetch. I wanted to sleep that night so I let it go. Dummy hit:

So clearly North was a meshuggener and the contract drifted an unsurprising 3 off. I was rather surprised, as you can imagine, when I reconstructed North's hand! Thankfully the price for missing out on +800 wasn't too severe as we scored up another three positives on the board for 12 IMPs anyway.

Let's quickly schlep over to the other deal.

This is from the Guildford Swiss Teams last weekend:

At our table, with Luke and I sitting East/West, we had the auction to ourselves:

A perfectly normal auction, I think you'll agree (don't ask). Double-dummy this shouldn't make but it's hard to defend and I scored up my +600. What delights would there be at the other table?

In third seat, North decided to show some chutzpah [Enough!! —Ed] and open the bidding with 1. East, as you've probably guessed, doubled and South responded 1. West made another double (for takeout) and North tried to look confident as he passed this, hoping to avoid any further damage. East, whose takeout double now contained all of K J 8 in the unbid suits, couldn't possibly have hoped for a better development to the auction — 1X is going 2 or 3 off, which is plenty. He decided to, er, "complete the description of his hand" by bidding 1NT. And then, thankfully, he declined his partner's invite because nobody really knew what was going on anyway. This was the full bidding, in case you missed a bit:

2NT made an overtrick but that was 10 IMPs to the goodies.

You may think these doubles were ridiculous but they're clearly adhering to Robson/Segal's advice quoted at the start of this article: "If...there is no obvious bid to make — double". It's just that not everybody has the same opinion as to what constitutes an obvious bid!