I'm a bit of a bridge noob, but I'm kind of puzzled about this. Say I have a hand that is ridiculously strong in one suit, say at least 10 cards with all 4 honors (I'll use spades for the example suit). how should I bid? This is so many cards that almost nobody will be leading spades but me, so if another suit is trump, I'm flush out of luck.
Obviously I would want to end up playing a spade contract with a good potential for a slam, but if I open too high, say 5 spades, won't my opponents catch on pretty quickly and bid in their own suits or No-trump, just so my spades will be next to useless? They will likely have favorable distributions for their own suits since nearly all the spades are gone, which only worsens the fact. Then again, if I bid to low, my partner may not rebid, and while taking 12 tricks at a contract of 3S is obviously good, knowing you will have that many overtricks from the start seems kind of a waste.
Even if I held 12 or 13 spades, if I bid 7S, won't my opponents just bid 7NT and I'll never get to lead? How should hands with this heavy a distribution be bid to make the most of them?
(I've already said I'm not a very experienced bridge player, so if I'm making any glaring oversights don't hesitate in the slightest to bring them up.)
NOTE: I know these hands are extremely rare, but in all reality, every single possible hand is rare enough that studying bridge hands is actually quite useless because you'll never see the same hand again in your life...but we do it anyway because that's how we learn. Couldn't you tell anyone asking about a specific hand not to worry about it because it'll never show up again? :D