DBT3: One Bid or Two? (part 2)

In the previous post, our One-Bid-Or-Two principle was a guide for what to open with a particular hand. But we can also write down a similar One-Bid-Or-Two principle which applies to entire bidding systems. It is, again, very simple:

You should arrange your opening bids in such a way that:

• one-bid hands are described as accurately as possible in one bid;
• two-bid hands are described as accurately as possibly after two bids.

To put it another way, it is perfectly acceptable to have a relatively poorly defined opening bid in your system, intending to clear things up with the rebid. But this only works if the hands which need clarification are genuine two-bid hands. Otherwise there will be trouble.

I hope that the One-Bid-Or-Two principle sounds reasonable. However, it is certainly not the only thing we need to worry about. For instance, it may be more important to use the available bids to pre-empt the opponents. This is often in direct conflict with the desire to describe our hands as well as possible. Since we only have a limited number of bids available, there will have to be compromises made. But One-Bid-Or-Two should always be one of your main considerations, and I will spend a lot of time discussing it because it so often seems to be neglected.

So far I haven't said anything about how the hands are going to be described, only that they should be described as well as possible. In the next post I'll start discussing the various ways you might try to describe your hands.