DavidC's Bridge Blog

System Notes

2009-12-13T13:23:00.003Z

Geocities closed down a couple of months ago and I've been too lazy to find a new place to put my system notes. For the time being, if you want a copy of any of the notes referred to in this blog, please email me at {firstpart}@yahoo.co.uk, where {firstpart} = dcrc2y.

What's so bad about transfer openings?

2009-11-01T16:33:00.005Z

The EBU has invited comments about system regulation on the L&E blog. Apparently the system that has prompted discussion this time is a transfer-based set-up along these lines:

1C = hearts
1D = spades
1H = balanced 9-15
1S = strong
1NT/2C/2D = natural [I assume]

And this isn't the first time that 1-level transfer openings have been under the spotlight - there have been complaints about moscito before.

Now, I've written about system regulation before so I'm not going to go all through that again. But there's something interesting going on here: these transfer openings aren't all that hard to defend against (not compared to multi, say, or assumed-fit pre-empts, which are Level 3 and Level 2 respectively), so why is it that people react so strongly? Having played both Polish Club (a lot) and moscito (a little) I've seen for myself that people find the latter considerably more intimidating.

I suspect a big part of the reason is that in these systems all of the 1-level bids are affected. If you're playing 1D as a transfer to hearts, the chances are you're going to want new meanings for 1H and 1S as well. Perhaps none of the bids are particularly taxing for the opponents when you look at them individually, but having four unusual 1-level openings is four times as much for the opponents to think about. Certainly the intimidation factor seems to be closely correlated with the amount of unfamiliar stuff in the system, irrespective of how "difficult" it really is.

Here "amount of unfamiliarity" could mean either the number of things that opponents need to think about before starting to play, or the frequency that they actually come up. I would say the former is a better reason for restricting conventions, but the latter is important too - a call that comes up once in a session can be an interesting challenge, but if these things are appearing every other hand (or more if you're unlucky) it starts to become a little draining.

Another point is that, although there are many unfamiliar systems around, these transfer systems are unfamiliar in a particularly obvious, in-your-face kind of way. The unfamiliarity of systems like Polish Club is dimmed by all the nebulous minor-suit openings you come across. Transfer openings really look like something completely different.

None of these are necessarily very "rational" reasons for disliking a system, but of course that's not the point. If opponents feel a system detracts from their enjoyment of the game, it's not because they've done a detailed technical analysis. If a system appears to be difficult, then that's a problem.

Besides, not everyone is a bidding theorist. When I look at a 1D opening showing hearts, I can see straight away that I can defend against it exactly like a 1H opening, so long as I've managed to agree what my double and cue-bid mean (and it doesn't really matter which agreement you pick). It's really quite remarkable that that's all there is to it. But you do have to be thinking about it in the right way. If you're not used to looking for analogies like this it won't necessarily be so easy to grasp. I've seen enough people making the "wrong" cue-bid in this situation to know that not everyone is comfortable with this stuff.

I'm not going to lose sleep over whether transfer openings should continue to be permitted. But the fact is that many opponents do have a problem with them, and my experiences of this are enough to make me feel it was probably a mistake to allow these bids in general tournament play. It would be great if everyone could learn to love these things; but if a large majority of players do not want them to be allowed, as suggested on the EBU blog, then that cannot be easily dismissed.

TaBR4: Three Answers to Every Question

2009-08-02T15:28:00.001Z

This post is about the regulations concerning disclosure of agreements - both alerting and answering questions.

Given the limitless variety of treatments and conventions that can be played, the rules about disclosure can never be totally precise. As a result, two very common questions are "Should this call be alerted?" and "How should this call be described?" When answering these questions, it is important to realise that the "best" answer may depend on who is asking. Our three different points of view are:

The player who is trying to describe his partner's call.
The opponents who are receiving this description.
The TD, who may have to decide whether the description is adequate.

Let's concentrate on the question of whether a call should be alerted. Nearly always (at least if we're talking about bids) this question arises when someone has made a bid which is essentially natural but has some additional information attached to it. We have to decide whether that information is enough to require an alert. Say someone asks you for advice on this. The sort of answer you give may well depend on who is asking. If a TD needs an answer, you have to look for exactly where the dividing line is between alertable and non-alertable. If you are lucky the situation may be covered explicitly in the regulations, but otherwise you have to try and work out what the requirements are by comparing to similar situations and coming up with the most sensible interpretation. Whereas to answer the question from a player's point of view, you can point to specific rules if there are any, but otherwise it is best to err on the side of caution.

So, what does that mean? Suppose it is unclear whether a particular bid is technically alertable. Then if you are the player who is doing the alerting, the best plan is always to alert it. That ensures that you always help the opponents when they need it. You could ask a TD for his opinion on whether an alert is required, but there isn't necessarily any guarantee that a different TD would agree. Unless you are able to find a definitive answer somewhere, the safest and most helpful policy is to alert every time. This is summarized in a well-known slogan,

When in doubt, alert.

Similarly, if your opponents have made a bid and you are unsure exactly what you can expect from it, the best way to find out is to ask. The ACBL has another slogan for this:

Ask, do not assume.

But for the TD, there are no such nice general principles. A TD cannot hedge his bets: he must rule one way or the other. That comes down to working out exactly what the regulations mean. The TD's question is undoubtedly the hardest of the three.

What's the point of all this? There are three things I want to say here. First of all, when someone does ask one of these questions, it's obviously important to know which point of view they are thinking of. From the various discussions I've participated in, it seems to me that it's all too easy to talk at cross purposes. You can be trying to decide how a TD should rule, and then someone comes along and says, "If you're not sure, just alert it. What's the problem?" Or, just as bad, a player who wants practical advice can end up being given a detailed technical analysis. This sort of thing can become very irritating. You really have to make sure you know which of the three answers is required.

Secondly, the phrase "when in doubt, alert" is certainly a useful piece of advice for players. But it is not, and never can be, the basis for a regulation. It is not something that can be applied by the TD. A TD has no alternative to looking closely at the definitions to see what the requirements really are. And I know that "when in doubt, alert" is written into the ACBL regulations, but it would mean nothing if it was not backed up by a proper definition and examples of what actually makes a call alertable.

Finally, I believe there are implications for what makes a good regulation. Players do not necessarily need to know all the details of the regulations in order to disclose their methods (and understand opponents') correctly. We may have different standards for the regulations that players do need to know, compared to those that will only ever be applied by TDs. More on this to come.

TaBR3: Who Makes the Rules? (part 2)

2009-07-26T14:26:00.003Z

In the previous post I argued that a TD should follow the regulations of his club (or tournament, or NBO), even if they contradict the Laws of bridge. That raises the question (as put by Nigel K in a comment to that post) - if a regulation is illegal, what can be done about it?

One possibility is to go through the usual process for changing a regulation. That means persuading the committee responsible for the regulation that they should change it. Very rarely, a committee might be overriden by a general meeting, or something like that.

But that doesn't sound very satisfactory. Surely if a regulation is illegal, it ought to be possible to require it to be put right.

Well, personally I don't think it's possible. Or, if it is possible, I think the cure would be worse than the disease. Let's consider the alternatives.

As mentioned in the previous post, there is a sort of chain of authority for making regulations, with the WBF at the top and TDs at the bottom. So, let's suppose that we have a club which has made an illegal regulation. Now, the WBF is the ultimate authority for deciding what is or is not legal, but there is no direct link between the WBF and an individual club, so the WBF can't do anything about it. So authority is passed down to the next link in the chain - the national organization. There is a link between a club and its NBO - clubs are members of the NBO - so, in principle at least, a NBO can require a club to bring its regulations into line with the Laws. In a similar way, everyone answers to the organization immediately above them in the chain: TDs work for their clubs (as per my previous post) and NBOs answer to the WBF.

Well, that's the principle. Is it going to work? In order to force a club's regulation to be changed (for example), three things will have to happen:

The NBO has to hear about it.
The NBO has to have the time to tell the club that they should change what they are doing.
The NBO has to be prepared to follow it through and take action if the club fails to put things right.

The first of these things doesn't happen very often: it requires someone to care enough about the situation to make a complaint. The second step is even less likely: NBOs are very busy, and most of them don't even get round to fixing their own rules, let alone worrying about what their clubs might be doing. Even in a reasonably pro-active NBO like our EBU, I'm sure they would prefer not to have to interfere.

Then we get to the last step. What can an NBO actually do to force a club to comply? Most likely, adhering to the Laws is a condition of membership. So they can threaten to withdraw affiliation (or "masterpoints", from the members' point of view). But now that's getting pretty serious. And the NBO doesn't want to lose a club. If too much pressure is put on them then they will just walk away. The NBO really doesn't want to take action over what is a relatively trivial matter. So it is very, very unlikely that this will happen.

One level further up, it's even less likely. If a NBO has an illegal regulation, then the WBF can in theory tell them to change; but in practice the WBF can't afford to lose an NBO - indeed there's no way they can take any meaningful action against them at all, over something as minor as this. You can't punish the players for actions taken by a committee.

And so the authority passes down to the next link in the chain.

You know what that means - it means that the people who get to decide whether the regulations are illegal are the same people who wrote the regulations.

Now, you know how easy it is to twist the wording of the Laws to make them say pretty much anything you want. Any regulating authority worth its salt will be able to come up with some justification for the rules it wants to make. And you may think that this supposed justification is poor to non-existent; but it makes no difference, because the regulating authority itself is the judge. Particularly for an NBO - if they say their regulations are legal, then they are legal, almost by defintion.

Now, personally I have more faith in my NBO than I do in the WBF, so this doesn't particularly bother me. But if you feel there is something that needs to be changed, clearly this situation is problematic.

The final possibility is to use whatever power you have to defy the regulating authority. I explained in my last post why I feel the TD should not do this. But similar arguments apply to other groups. Nigel mentioned appeals committees. Technically an AC doesn't have the authority to overrule a TD on a matter of Law; but even leaving that aside, I think it would be a bad idea. Basically I have three concerns; these all apply to TDs as well though I didn't really spell them out in my last post:

Not the right time and place. Regulations are usually decided in elected committees. This may not always produce the best results, but it's the best process we have. In particular, it takes time to properly evaluate a regulation, and it really demands hearing a variety of opinions. If a committee has been through this process, and has come up with a regulation, they really shouldn't be overruled by a different group who haven't had the time for proper consideration. And, though I'm not the world's greatest believer in democracy, I still don't think it's right to have an unelected committee thinking they can overrule an elected one, particularly if (when we're talking about NBO regulations) a committee was elected to carry out specifically this function.
Consistency. Players really deserve to know, before they start playing, what the regulations are. If you set aside a regulation then you are changing the rules.
Power struggles. It's not good to have two groups both thinking they have the right to make a particular decision. The poor players and TDs won't know who to believe. And it leads to bad feeling and ever more entrenched positions. It's much easier to change things for the better when there is only one committee involved, even if they are sometimes misguided.

TaBR2: Who Makes the Rules?

2009-07-19T09:03:00.006Z

When a ruling is needed, there are at least four different places the relevant rules might come from:

The WBF produces the Laws of bridge;
National bridge organizations have further sets of regulations;
Individual clubs (or tournament organizers) may have their own regulations;
Finally, the TD may have to decide some things for himself.

These form a nice hierarchy: decisions made by the WBF are binding on the NBOs; NBOs in turn have some control over their clubs and tournaments; and TDs should follow the rules they have been given.

This is all well and good when the rules are clear and uncontradictory. But inevitably, that isn't always the case. There are a number of things that can go wrong, and this post is about just one of those things.

It has been known for authorities to make regulations which are illegal according to the Laws of bridge. You might see a "club rule" that allows redealing of boards, or bans psyches. (Some psyches can be regulated according to the Laws, but not all.) Higher up the chain, there has been a bit of controversy recently because the ACBL has changed the wording of Law 12C1(e) in its publications, significantly altering the meaning from the WBF's version.

So the TD can be faced with a Law that says one thing, and a regulation which says something different and contradictory. What is he to do?

In my view, a TD's responsibility is to his club or tournament. If you have agreed to direct at a club, then you must uphold that club's regulations, irrespective of whether they are good, bad or downright illegal. Similarly, if there is conflict between a NBO and the WBF, a TD should always follow the regulations of his NBO.

Why should this be so? Partly because it's the only reasonable way to structure these things: a more specific regulation always overrides a general one. (Indeed, if you try to read the Laws of bridge without this principle in mind, you will get nowhere.) I would also point to the lack of a direct link between a TD and his NBO. A NBO can require that its clubs follow certain rules, but it has no say over who they ask to direct. So a TD does not have to answer to anybody apart from his club. That makes it pretty ridiculous to defy the club's regulations.

But perhaps the main point is that there are much better ways to address any conflict in the regulations. These things should be sorted out at the appropriate level, and at the appropriate time. If a TD refuses to apply a regulation which he thinks is illegal then he is effectively claiming that he has the right to adjudicate in a dispute between his club and his NBO (or NBO and WBF, or whatever). No, it is not his place to do that. If a bridge organization cares enough about something to make a regulation - particularly one that might be illegal - then they will not have done so lightly. It means they believe that is what is best for their players. Maybe they are wrong, but they have a right to expect that they will not be undermined by their TDs.

Now, this all seems pretty obvious to me. But I've seen too many people claiming that certain regulations are illegal and that this means those regulations can be ignored. Too often it is a way to try to get around a regulation that people don't like. I don't think this is a proper way to go about things. If you don't like a regulation, then you should try to get it changed. (Indeed the EBU recently did remove a regulation which I (and many others) thought was illegal. The main reason to remove it was that it was a bad regulation, but the question over its legality was a good weapon to use against it.)

Incidentally, what do we feel about authorities who make these illegal regulations (or regulations that are only legal with a very creative interpretation of the Laws)? Personally it doesn't really bother me that much. As I said above, organizations are just trying to do what is best for their players. If they think the Laws are so badly wrong that they have to make an illegal regulation, then they must feel pretty strongly that that is what is best for their players. I find it difficult to be too critical of that. And certainly in the case of Law 12 mentioned above I think the ACBL is totally right about what the Law should say, as the WBF's version is utterly perverse.

(To be continued.)

Thoughts about Bridge Regulations: Introduction

2009-07-18T21:00:00.003Z

This is the start of a series of posts about bridge laws and regulations. This series is about what makes a good regulation: what should be prioritized, and what should not be. It's also about the processes involved in writing, interpreting and applying these regulations. That is, I'm going to be talking about general philosophy, not about the specifics of what individual regulations mean.

Now, I always worry when talking about this stuff. Firstly, do people really care? I imagine that to most people, the idea of discussing this sort of philosophy would seem very boring, if not rather pretentious. And secondly, I've never had to take responsibility for producing regulations - so it's easy for me to talk, and a bit unfair on the people who actually have to do it. They get enough stick already.

But people really do care about the end product - they care about which systems are legal, and which calls have to be alerted. We see more than enough arguments about these things. And often those arguments can be boiled down to a question of philosophy. I think at some point we have to put aside the specifics and talk about what's going on underneath. And, sad as it may seem, I find this stuff interesting. So, here is a place to discuss that philosophy.

I should point out that this series is going to be a bit different to my series on bidding theory: that had a nice sense of direction to it, with each post building on the ones before. This new series is just a collection of thoughts, in no particular order. (And you shouldn't expect two posts a week, either!)

What's Up

2009-07-18T19:55:00.002Z

I have to apologise again for not blogging recently. Particularly seeing as I was quite optimistic last time that I might get back into it.

Anyway, what's happened is that I've moved back to Cambridge and started work as a software engineer. I've been here for a month now. After all this time, starting a proper job has been a bit of a shock to the system - I was so tired after work for the first two weeks - but I'm very glad to be here. And the weeks have gone by very quickly.

And I've played no bridge at all since I arrived! Apart from one game on BBO where I was barely concentrating. Which is clearly something I will need to rectify ...

There are two posts to come this weekend. I'm not going to be blogging very frequently, but it's nice to be able to write here when there is something to say.

Don't Hesitate!

2009-04-13T19:24:00.000Z

This post is about the laws on Unauthorised Information, and in particular the definition of a logical alternative (Law 16B1(b)).

Here in England, we used to have a "70% rule" for logical alternatives - that is, if a particular action would be chosen by more than 70% of a player's peers, then we would say that there were no logical alternatives to that action.

The "70% rule" no longer applies: it has been superseded by the definition provided by the new (2007) Laws. That is,

A logical alternative action is one that, among the class of players in question and using the methods of the partnership, would be given serious consideration by a significant proportion of such players, of whom it is judged some might select it.

Since this is now part of the Laws the EBU is obliged to go along with it, though there is still room for interpretation - particularly in terms of quantifying what is meant by "a significant proportion" and "some". The EBU suggests "a significant proportion" is something in excess of 20%. I'd have to say that to me the term "significant proportion" sounds more like 30-40%. But that's not the main point here. Whatever the details are, it is clear that this definition is going to result in there being many more LAs than there were under the 70% rule (since "some" is a lot less than 30%). To put it another way, the Laws are now much more restrictive in terms of which actions you can take when in possession of UI.

What are we to make of this? If we look at it from a TD's point of view, we just have a different test to apply. That's not so hard. But how about from a player's point of view?

It seems to me that we will have to start looking at UI situations in a different way. And particularly if we are talking about UI from hesitations.

It is often said that inadvertently transmitting UI is not an infraction: the infraction is if you make use of information from partner. It is advisable not to hesitate as this may put partner in a difficult position, but if you find that you have to think then you should not worry too much, because if partner has a clear-cut action then he will still be able to make it.

Now, in theory this position has not changed under the new Laws: it is not an infraction to transmit UI. However, I believe that this is no longer the right way to think about it. In my opinion, the effect of the new definition of a LA is that there is now a penalty for hesitating. Not the automatic penalty advocated by Bobby Wolff, but a randomly-applied penalty that depends on the other hands at the table.

The thing is, the definition of a LA is now so weak that there are all sorts of rubbish actions that have become LAs. It's no longer good enough for you to have a clear-cut action, it has to be very very clear-cut: it has to be obvious to all those idiots that the TD believes are your peers (though of course you are really a much better player than they are). Think about all the silly bids made each day: it doesn't take much for there to be "some" people selecting an action.

So, if you hesitate in a tempo-sensitive situation, there is a fair chance that the TD will have to impose some daft action on your partner. It's no good blaming the TD for this, since he has to follow the Laws. And you certainly can't blame partner. No, it's your fault for hesitating.

Like I said, I view this as a change. With the 70% rule it was best to avoid hesitating, but even if the TD did have to adjust the score you could be assured the result would be fair: you would not be given a silly result. This is no longer true. There is a penalty for hesitating, and depending on the hand that penalty may well seem very arbitrary to you - it is quite possible that you would genuinely never have had that result with or without UI. So, you must not put yourself in the position where that penalty can be applied.

If you hesitate and it happens to make no difference, then you are lucky. If you hesitate and find that the TD has to adjust to some silly result, that's your penalty for hesitating. So don't hesitate. Or at least, if you hesitate, then be prepared to accept your penalty.

Update

2009-04-13T11:52:00.002Z

OK, so I haven't done any blogging for ages. In fact, I haven't been playing much bridge at all recently. Back in the summer I was finishing off writing up my PhD. After that I moved back to Hampshire - unfortunately away from most of my bridge partners. I expect I'll be moving again once I've found employment ... but who knows how long that will take. (In fact I had my first interview last week; actually I'm waiting to hear back from them in the next few days, but let's just say I made a few mistakes that I can learn from there.)

Meanwhile, I've been playing a bit of bridge with my Dad and his group of friends - in fact we won a little swiss teams event last month - but it's not quite the same as when I was in the U25 squad.

You might think, if I'm unemployed and not playing much bridge, I'd have plenty of time for blogging. Why hasn't it turned out like that? Well, I think many people have found with this sort of thing, it's difficult to keep up the initial enthusiasm. And particularly for me, since this is a bridge theory blog and not a bridge hands blog (because this is what I find most interesting), I don't get a limitless supply of material just from playing the game. I started this blog to get certain things off my chest - particularly my thoughts on bidding theory. And now I've said what I wanted to say there.

But every so often I find things that make me want to write a blog post, so I'm not going to stop completely. Unfortunately a lot of these things are about bridge politics, which can be interesting but is not particularly uplifting. And I'm worried that if I talk about bridge politics too much you'll get the impression that I think bridge administration is in a mess, which is not the case at all. Never mind. There will doubtless be a lot of bridge politics on this blog, but I hope I can find other things to talk about as well. I have a few things lined up, let's see how it goes ...

L&E Minutes for June 2008

2008-06-20T14:32:00.001Z

Apologies for the excessive amount of EBU stuff on my blog, but we live in interesting times ...

6.2.1. New permitted agrements at Level 4.

So we have some new "toys" at Level 4. They are all pretty harmless, being things that it makes sense to allow given what is already permitted. For example, in the rule for "Either-Or Club" both the strong option and the weak option now correspond properly to what is allowed at lower levels.

6.2.2. 2C Fert.

This is the evil convention from Brighton where 2C shows 0-5 points with either 4+ spades or 4+ hearts or 4+ diamonds. The L&E decided that they didn't like the way this could be opened on a two-suiter with longer clubs. So they've banned this.

I'm not sure this makes a whole lot of difference. This change doesn't really affect the defenders' options. And there are other hands with longish clubs that could still be included by modifying the definition slightly - for example it seems a pair could still play 2C as "any hand except for a two-suiter with clubs as the longest suit".

The problem is these ferts should never have been allowed in the first place - not when Level 4 is to be used for nearly all EBU events. The pre-2006 rules defined the permitted methods in terms of one-suiters, two-suiters and three-suiters. This might have looked a little clumsy but it did at least mean you ended up with bids that actually had a definition. With the 2006 rules, if you want to get around the requirement not to include the suit bid in the "specification", you can do this simply by not specifying anything much at all! These things should not be allowed: the EBU should be requiring a minimum amount of "specification" like the pre-2006 rules did. This would still be considerably more permissive than, say, the WBF "Brown Sticker" regulations.

6.2.3. Alerting of doubles.

Good news here: the L&E discussed three decent options, and decided to go with this one:

Alert strange doubles only at any level. Any double that is takeout, penalties or somewhere between the two is not alerted.

In my opinion this is not only the best of the three options discussed, but indeed an excellent solution to the problem. Finally, after about three years of discussing this, the L&E has found something which will actually work. I'd really prefer there to be an exception for doubles of natural opening bids (a double of a suit opening is expected to be for take-out) but that is a relatively minor niggle.

The bad news is that this now has to be approved by a new committee of the EBU, the "Club Committee". Now don't get me wrong - I think it is perfectly right that clubs should have an input into this process. But now is not the right time. The views of clubs should have been sought during the initial period of consultation - in fact they were, I believe, though if the EBU's committee had already been set up at that point then perhaps the consulation could have been done more effectively through them. But when it comes to a final decision, that ought to be solely the job of the L&E. The L&E is perfectly capable of taking into account the needs of its club players when making its decisions; in fact, while I can't speak for the committee, I am quite sure that this has always been their number one consideration.

Instead, having already put up with the awful 2006 rules for two years, the implementation of the new rules is being delayed by at least another few months, despite the fact that we already know what they should be. And this is all assuming that the Club Committee actually approves of the idea. The real reason why you shouldn't have two committees looking at the final proposal is what happens if they come to different conclusions? Then the L&E would be faced with either not being able to implement what they know is right, or pushing it through and having it look like they aren't listening. It's just not good political sense to put yourself in this position.

But no complaints with our elected members here, since it was evidently not their decision.

6.2.4. Rewording of OB 3E.

This is the section on how asking questions can transmit unauthorised information. England has a reputation for being much harder on this than other countries. The new wording doesn't do much to change this, except in the case of asking about doubles:

3 E 2 Questions asked during the auction about the meaning of an opponent's double shall usually not be considered to pass Unauthorised Information, nor to have the potential to mislead declarer about the questioner's shape or values. However, the TD may still use his discretion to give an adjusted score if the nature of the questioning clearly provides partner with unauthorised information.

Presumably this is linked to the proposed change to alerting (it wouldn't make much sense with the current rules). I am very happy with this new wording. But it does seem oddly inconsistent with the rules for other situations. Why say this about doubles but not about alerted bids, or bids above 3NT? I think there is a better case for saying "questions about alerted calls are usually not considered to pass UI" than there is for saying the same thing about doubles.

Busy Week

2008-06-08T14:19:00.002Z

It certainly has been a busy week. First of all for me personally: in a few days' time I'm going back home for my dad's birthday, and before I leave I really need to have finished a draft of the main section of my thesis. So, as you can imagine, I've been working pretty hard. On a similar note, congratulations to my friend David Hodge who submitted his own thesis down in Cambridge on Monday.

In the bridge world, there was the vote on the EBU's strategy proposals at Wednesday's EGM. The proposals were voted through, with 52 in favour and 31 against, meaning that Pay-to-Play is to begin in 2010. As you know, I think this is misguided. But I'd like to echo what Jeff Smith said at our county's AGM which took place the following day: now that the proposals are a reality, it's important that everyone helps to make it as successful as possible. If the proposals are implemented well, then it may be unpopular but the EBU will survive. But if mistakes are made there is the potential for disaster. I would have to say that in the past the EBU has been very bad at communicating its ideas, even the good ones. This can't be allowed to happen for something as important as these changes. The number of clubs that have said they would disaffiliate is really quite shocking, particularly here in Manchester and in my home county of Hampshire. I hope that many of these clubs can be persuaded that they should remain a part of our NBO. I'm sure that some of the objections are things that could be overcome by better understanding.

Thursday was the first time I'd been to my county's AGM. It took three-and-a-half hours, but actually I was quite impressed by the relatively small amount of pointless argument. My contribution was to suggest that, in order to try to reduce the number of teams who withdraw from the first round of the cup without playing their scheduled match, teams should not be allowed to enter the plate unless they actually played their first-round cup match. (Teams do have the option of entering straight into the plate, if they do not want to play in the cup.) Apart from this I managed to keep quiet, and avoided being given any jobs to do (having the excuse that I may be leaving the county at the end of the summer).

Also on Thursday was a meeting of the L&E. It appears that they have made a decision concerning the alerting of doubles, but details have not been made public yet. Mr Stevenson said that before being adopted it would have to be looked at by the new "Club Committee" of the EBU. That's slightly scary since I get the feeling a widely held "club" view is that everything the L&E tries to do is wrong; but perhaps we can hope that an official committee would be more constructive. Anyway, it looks like some progress has been made.

Why I Oppose the EBU's Strategy Proposals

2008-05-14T13:33:00.006Z

The EBU exists to promote and organise the game of bridge in England. It is the "promotion" part that we are interested in here. Bridge is a great game: the more people that play it the better. If the EBU can do something to increase the number of people playing then they can rightly say that they are a successful organisation. In fact it seems that the number of people playing bridge is declining; the EBU is understandably worried about this and is trying to do something about it.

But let's be clear about this - what we care about is the total number of people playing the game, whether or not they are members of the EBU. The success of the EBU is not defined by the number of people they have on their membership list, but by the total amount of bridge being played in the country. That's what it really means to promote the game.

The core idea of the EBU's strategy proposals is for "universal membership" - that is, all members of EBU-affiliated clubs would automatically be members of the EBU. Even if a large proportion of clubs decide to disaffiliate, this proposal will still surely increase the number of EBU members. But will it actually do anything to stop the decline in the number of people playing the game?

The most controversial aspect of the proposals is that they would change the way the EBU is funded. Rather than having an annual subscription, the proposal is to charge players a certain amount for each session of bridge that they play, taken out of the table money. The intention is for the scheme to raise the same amount of money as the current scheme does; however, if you consider individual players, there will inevitably be some players for whom bridge becomes more expensive to play, and some for whom bridge becomes less expensive.

The way things are at the moment, with the annual subscription, means that the EBU membership contains a disproportionately large number of tournament players and other keen players, compared to the bridge-playing population as a whole. So, in effect, the tournament players are subsidising the rest of the bridge-playing population. Under the proposed Pay-to-Play scheme everyone would be contributing. The net effect is to make bridge more expensive for the casual player; their money goes to make bridge less expensive for the serious players. Isn't this a bad thing if we want to promote the game? The keen players are going to continue playing whatever happens. We want to get more people playing the game, but the newcomers are the people who are worst off under the proposed scheme, since at the moment they would tend not to join the EBU until they are more experienced.

My opinion is that the keen players should subsidise the promotion of the game, like they do at the moment. Because I enjoy playing the game, I am keen to see other people learning to play, and I am very happy for my money to be used to get them started. Under the EBU proposals you would instead be taking disproportionately large amounts money from the very people who you are trying to promote the game to. Admittedly the amounts of money involved are quite small, but one of the attractions of the game is that it ought to be a relatively inexpensive hobby. When the table money is typically £1.50, an increase of 30p or so is noticeable.

There is a strange imbalance in the EBU's proposals: having scrapped the annual subscription, they intend to make up for this almost entirely with Pay-to-Play fees from club games. But, as I said, most of the people playing annual subscriptions at the moment do so because they play in county or EBU events. So surely a sizeable proportion of the new Pay-to-Play fees should be coming from tournaments. But for some reason they are not doing this. Instead it is the casual player who pays more. I don't understand this at all.

But really it is not so much about the money anyway. People have strong feelings about the element of compulsion. If people currently are not members of the EBU, that's because they don't want to be members. If you force people to join an organisation that they don't wish to belong to, then that is surely going to be very unpopular. The fact that they have to pay for the privilege just makes things worse.

Let's face it - very little of what the EBU does actually benefits its members directly. You don't need the EBU in order to have a game at the club. But as a national bridge organisation, the EBU has some important obligations. The obvious example, and the most expensive, is sending teams to (and occasionally hosting) international events. Money is also needed to promote the game. These are good causes, and I have chosen to help fund these things through my subscription. But other people might not value these things so highly. That's unfortunate, but it should be their choice to make.

The EBU already tends to get a rather bad press. There is a significant group of players, including both members and non-members, who are distrustful of the EBU, generally feeling that it interferes with the game without giving them anything of value. Some feel that the EBU concentrates too much on serious players at the expense of the ordinary club player. Issues such as the introduction of announcements in 2006 proved to be very divisive. Generally I do not think the EBU deserves the criticism it gets, but I worry that the introduction of compulsory membership for players at EBU-affiliated clubs will only add to the antipathy that already exists. The critics will see it as just another way in which the EBU is trying to impose its influence on people who do not want anything to do with it.

While the details of the proposal have been well publicised, it has been quite difficult to find out why they want universal membership. The reasons that have been given seem mostly spurious. I went along to a discussion at the Brighton congress to hear what they had to say. Mr Capal pointed out the fact that the EBU membership was made up of disproportionately large numbers of serious players, and that universal membership would make the EBU more representative. This is absolutely true, as I have already said above. But Mr Capal's suggestion was that the EBU would not be able to address the needs of the casual club players unless they were members. This is utter nonsense. Of course the EBU should be listening to the club players; they should find out what these players want from their NBO and make sure that the EBU works for the benefit of everyone. But this has absolutely nothing to do with whether those players are members. The EBU should be working for all the bridge players in England, whether they are members or not. If the EBU has in the past ignored the large body of bridge players who are non-members, then that is a terrible failing. But it is something that can be put right. And it certainly has nothing to do with the way the EBU is funded.

I was particularly unimpressed by the long list of things that the EBU would provide for its clubs. Perhaps the most interesting idea was the proposed new "ranking" scheme, but there were also more mundane things like free software. Now, there was nothing wrong with any of the things on that list. But again, the problem is these services have nothing to do with the way the EBU is funded. The EBU should always be seeking to improve its services to clubs, but you don't need to impose universal membership in order to do this.

Finally, and only quite recently, the EBU did present one valid reason for universal membership. If the EBU has more members, then it can potentially get more money from sponsorship and advertising (particularly from the members' magazine), and could have more influence as a political force. It's quite depressing to think that what is basically an accounting trick ("in order to get more members, we'll just redefine who is a member") could actually make a difference to the influence the EBU has. Perhaps this is how the world works. But personally, I do not believe that this advantage is enough to make it worth alienating all the bridge players who do not want to be members of the EBU. I don't think the EBU is a popular enough organisation to get away with forcing people to join. Even the EBU itself is anticipating a mass of disaffiliations if the proposal goes ahead.

The final vote on the proposals is taking place in three weeks' time. It will not be the end of the world if the proposals are voted through. But if the EBU really wants to get more people playing bridge, there are plenty of things it could be doing to help achieve that - and these things have nothing to do with universal membership or Pay-to-Play. And for an organisation which already has trouble with public relations, the proposed strategy will only make things worse.

Everyone Needs a Forcing Raise

2008-04-17T14:54:00.003Z

This is not really a bidding theory post, it's more of a practical thing.

In my regular partnerships I play very complex systems. But I also play with lots of different people from the club, and then we play simple versions of Acol. Now, I'm not a big fan of Acol, but if it's just for the odd evening I don't really feel I miss anything from my more complex systems ... except for one thing.

Traditional Acol has no bid which shows a forcing raise of a suit opening. If partner opens a major and you have a game-forcing hand with 4-card support, you are supposed to start by bidding a new suit, and then support partner at game level on the next round (a "delayed game raise"). With a very strong hand you might have to start with a jump-shift. (These days splinters have become very popular - widely understood even at the club - but they don't help you when you don't have shortage.)

The problem is that this just doesn't seem to work. Either you or your partner has to guess whether to go past game, and my experience is that it is very difficult to guess well. In order to have a sensible auction, you really need to tell partner that you have a game-force with support before you reach game level. So, you need a forcing raise.

For me this really became very evident in the last few weeks. I saw six hands suitable for a forcing major-suit raise - three in a beginners' class, two in the club duplicate and one in a league match. Of these, there were two missed small slams, one grand played in game, one poor slam going off and one hand played at the five-level with three losers. Only one time was the hand bid to the right contract. But in each case where it went wrong you couldn't say anyone had made an obvious mistake. And in each case the hand would have been trivial to bid with a forcing raise (apart perhaps from the grand slam, which might only reach six).

So it's clear to me now: if you have a new partnership - even for just one evening, and no matter who your partner is - you have to agree a forcing raise. Forget about defences to 1NT or other such trivial matters. You can do without those. You can't do without a forcing raise.

This applies even to beginners. Generally you would like to teach a beginner basic natural methods, leaving any unusual conventions to people who have reached a more advanced level. But for raises it's totally the opposite way round. A beginner is hopelessly lost without a bid which shows this hand, whereas it takes expert judgement to play delayed game raises. This is a rare example of how adding a convention actually makes the game much easier to play. Club players are often criticised for using Blackwood too early in the auction; but in many cases this is because they have no reasonable alternative. If they haven't been taught a forcing raise, what else would you expect?

The good news is that the EBU's teaching methods now appear to be recommending 3NT over a major-suit opening as a "pudding raise" (showing a raise to game without a shortage to splinter in). But this hasn't yet permeated through to the ordinary bridge player in the way that splinters have. A pudding raise is excellent for beginners or for a one-off partnership, though it doesn't solve all problems and so a lower forcing raise would be preferable (but requires more complicated responses). When I played with David H at Cambridge we thought we couldn't afford to give up our natural inviatational 2NT response (I might have a different opinion now!) and so we used 3C as a raise instead. We started winning IMPs every time it came up. I've never seen a convention which made such an immediate improvement to a system as this one did.

This was all assuming a major-suit opening. And indeed it is more important to have an artificial raise for the majors than for the minors. But this is only because of frequency: with, say, 4-4 in a major and a minor, if partner opens the major you need to raise immediately, whereas if he opens the minor it's more normal to bid the major-suit first. Thus a minor-suit raise is only really needed when we have a single-suited hand - but when this does come up it is no less important than it was for the majors. In a simple system I might like to use a jump in the other minor as a game-forcing raise. Admittedly, when it comes to the minors, if you're playing in a one-off partnership you might just hope it doesn't come up. That wouldn't work for the majors though.

I've heard some traditionalists say that you can get by without an artificial raise. Perhaps you can, just about, get by. But as I said, it takes expert judgement to play delayed game raises with any sort of effectiveness. And if you then go and look at the systems the experts are actually playing ... they are unanimous that an artificial raise is a good idea.

So my conclusion is not so much that it's nice to play a forcing raise - because I'm sure you knew that already - but that if you have a beginner who is learning Acol, or a new partner who plays old-fashioned methods, this is one thing you really must add to their system.

Stayman v. Keri

2008-04-14T15:37:00.002Z

Keri is Ron Klinger's system of responses to a 1NT opening, as described in his book "Bid Better, Much Better After Opening 1NT". I played this in my partnership with Mark. But since then I've gone back to ordinary Stayman, and in this post I'll try to explain why.

In Keri a 2C response forces opener to bid 2D. There are then three basic sequences which take care of the hands which would have bid Stayman in standard methods:

1NT : 2C , 2D : 2M shows an invitational hand with 4 or 5 cards in the major.
1NT : 2D , 2H : 2S shows an invitational hand with both majors. (The 2D response in Keri is a transfer to hearts, but differs from a standard transfer in that in can have only 4 hearts if it is invitational with both majors.)
1NT : 2C , 2D : 2NT shows a game-forcing hand.

The first of these sequences is the one we need to focus on, since it is the only really fundamental part of the system. (There are variants of Keri which deal with game-forcing hands differently to the "book" version above.)

The idea is that after 1NT : 2C , 2D : 2M opener will pass with a minimum hand with 3 or 4 cards in the major. Thus a big advantage of Keri is being able to stop in 2M - particularly when this is a 4-4 fit (where a Stayman auction would have reached 3M after 1NT : 2C , 2M : 3M) or a 5-3 fit. There are plenty of examples of this in the book. The disadvantages, on the other hand, are not so clearly spelt out!

The main problem with the 1NT : 2C , 2D : 2M sequence is the ambiguity in responder's major-suit length. It could be either 4 or 5 cards - and having to cater for both is a little uncomfortable. In particular, it makes a difference to the the type of hand on which opener wants to accept the invitation. When responder has only 4 cards in the major he is mainly interested in whether opener is minimum or maximum in high cards. But when responder has a 5-card suit, fit tends to be more important. In an attempt to cater for both types, Keri uses a 3C bid by opener to show a minimum with good fit - but of course when you do this you are losing the chance to play in 2M, which was supposed to be the advantage of playing Keri. And in any case this still doesn't solve the problem that there can be a big difference between 2- and 3-card support when responder has 5-cards, but there isn't when responder has only 4.

Another issue is that you frequently play in a 4-3 fit. Opener passes the 2M bid whenever he is minimum with 3-card support. As Klinger's book points out, this often works quite well. But it does rather depend on the hand. Playing a 4-3 fit looks great when responder has a good suit and opener has a weak side-suit doubleton. It looks rather less clever when responder's suit is bad and/or opener is flat. The difference is highlighted at matchpoints where you are going very much against the field (and if 2M makes the same number of tricks as no-trumps you will score badly). Unfortunately the system forces you to play 2M every time. So you end up with some good results and some bad results. Klinger's book seems to be trying to persuade us that it is a winner on average; this wasn't my impression from playing it.

There is no doubt that when responder has a five-card suit and the invitation is rejected, you are pleased to be able to play in 2M. But here Stayman can be even better than Keri, at least when the suit is spades. Playing Stayman we can use 1NT : 2C , 2red : 2S to show an invitational hand with 5 spades. When this comes up we get all the benefits of Keri but without the ambiguity about spade length. As mentioned above, this helps opener in knowing when to accept the invitation. But, even better, it means that opener can pass with a doubleton. A 5-2 fit does tend to play better than no-trumps, particularly if responder is unbalanced. In Keri you have to bid 2NT over 2S with a doubleton spade, in case responder has only four. But when responder has a 5-card suit you would generally prefer to play 2S in the 5-2 fit rather than 2NT.

This is not available when the suit is hearts. If we play Stayman we have to start with a transfer on an invitational hand with 5 hearts. My preference is that opener should be keen to super-accept with a good heart fit, so when responder has a borderline invitation he should transfer and then pass 2H. This can also work better than Keri on those hands (since we play 2H rather than 2NT opposite a doubleton). On the other hand, a sound, fairly balanced invite with hearts is certainly better bid in Keri.

One nice thing about Keri is the continuations after a transfer: because 2NT is not needed as invitational, it can be used to improve the game-forcing sequences instead. However, this is not really an advantage of Keri since it can also be easily incorporated into a Stayman-based system. Playing Stayman-then-2S as an invite frees up 1NT : 2H , 2S : 2NT just like in Keri; and if we are playing Stayman we don't need to use 1NT : 2D , 2H : 2S for 4-4 majors like Keri does, so there is plenty of room here as well.

There are more problems if you play the "book" version of Keri. One that particularly bothers me is that while Stayman is notorious for giving away information to the opponents unnecessarily (when opener shows or denies a major that responder is not interested in), Keri is, if anything, even worse in this respect. After 1NT : 2C , 2D : 2NT opener reveals whether or not he has a doubleton, even though this information may not be needed by responder. A similar thing happens after 1NT : 2C , 2D : 2M if opener has enough to accept the invite. Against opponents who are good enough to make use of the information this is a very bad idea.

Finally, you do need to think carefully about how you will cope with interference, and the book is a little short on detail here. I remember once, after bidding 2C and hearing a 2S overcall, not being sure whether 3D would now be weak or invitational. (It may not even be possible to distinguish.) In the Junior Camrose this year a player responded 2D to 1NT on an invitational hand with 5 spades and 4 hearts, and then heard a 2S overcall! This should have gone for a four-digit penalty, but instead they had a misunderstanding and ended up in a silly contract. A transfer which only guarantees 4 cards does tend to cause problems in competition even if you are well-prepared. More generally, you'd better be sure you know how much of the artificiality applies in a competitive auction. This significantly increases the amount of work involved.

My conclusion is that while Keri is a decent alternative to Stayman, it certainly isn't "Much Better" as the title of the book claims. Perhaps the best thing about the system is that if you and your partner both know the book, you can agree "Keri" and immediately have a complex, rather effective system ready to go, without needing to develop it for yourself. But, in my opinion, if you had a book which was based on Stayman that could be even more effective.

L&E Minutes for Feb 2008

2008-03-03T15:20:00.001Z

So, this post is the second instalment of my not-so-regular feature discussing what's going on with our L&E. The latest meeting is particularly interesting for me because the main thing they discussed was the issue I've ranted about more than anything else on this blog. (You know what I mean.) The minutes are on the EBU's website here.

There were some other things of interest. In particular, there is the very important job of explaining to the EBU membership what the changes are in the new Lawbook. The job has been given to DWS and Mike Amos. This is promising. I wish them luck!

It also looks like there may be some new stuff allowed at Level 4.

But let's cut to the chase.

It's fantastic that they are now discussing the problems with alerting of doubles. There seems to be a genuine enthusiasm to do something about it. Even though they failed to make significant progress at the meeting, it seems that the issue is still very much on the agenda.

The concern now is that, while they have spent plenty of time discussing what to do, they haven't yet come up with a viable, specific proposal. And there really isn't much time left if they are trying to do this by August 1st (given that it would have to be properly advertised).

But what was really disappointing - and the reason I actually felt the need to post about this - was what happened to the idea of alerting only "highly unusual" doubles. This idea is probably not optimal, but it would be workable if done properly, and it's surely miles better than what we have at the moment. And yet it was sabotaged.

David Burn had produded a paper on this idea. And the paper was pretty good. I agreed with more or less all of the points he made, and in a couple of places I felt he really hit the proverbial nail on the head. The problem was, the paper was manifestly not about alerting only highly unusual doubles. And I don't mean just in the wording - he changed from defining "unusual" to defining "expected", which ought to end up with much the same thing - I mean that the effect of his suggestions didn't have anything to do with alerting only unusual doubles.

He gives as an example:

1D : (Pass) : 1H : (1S) , Double.

which he defines as "expected" to be penalties - thus a take-out double would be alertable. The problem is, a take-out double is not unexpected. If a pair plays this double as take-out they will not believe they are doing anything "highly unusual" - because they aren't. The whole point of the idea of alerting only highly unusual doubles is that it will only affect the (minority of) players who play weird methods. Once you start defining perfectly normal methods to be alertable this is no longer the case. Mr Burn writes, "The idea is that players will alert the doubles their opponents need to know about without actually having to read the list at all, let alone memorise it." I couldn't agree more with that philosophy. But you can't achieve this if you arbitrarily define some perfectly normal agreements as being alertable.

It seems that Mr Burn fell into the trap of wanting just one agreement to be "expected" in any given situation. But in examples like the one above, a double might be take-out or penalty or value-showing: none of these things would be unexpected. So if you were actually going to base your rules on the idea of only alerting very unusual doubles, none of those things would be alertable. Indeed I would say that trying to have just one expected agreement is the mistake which causes all the problems in the current rules. This is precisely what we need to get rid of!

My point is that alerting only highly unusual doubles is a workable approach, but it isn't what the L&E was presented with. So they may have dismissed the idea of alerting highly unusual doubles on the basis of a paper which had nothing to do with alerting only highly unusual doubles. That would be a pity.

I'm certainly not saying that this would have been the best approach. There are two alternative approaches that I think are better: the first is the one on my webpage, and the second was actually mentioned at the meeting, attributed to Sally Bugden:

Mrs Bugden suggested that a possible way forward would be to not alert take out or penalty doubles ...

This really would be an excellent basis for a regulation. The problem is that it is not a "finished product", so my fear is that it could go the same way as the idea of alerting only highly unusual doubles. The main issue to be sorted out is that sometimes a take-out or penalty double can be extremely unusual. This doesn't invalidate the general rule; it just means you need to consider whether it is worth having a very small number of specific exceptions (like we have for alerting above 3NT at the moment). For example, a double of a natural suit opening bid is expected to be for take-out: in this situation a penalty double might catch people out if it was not alerted. A complete proposal would have this as an exception. It would also need to sort out what happened for doubles of artificial bids, and other techincal points. My worry is that without a complete proposal, people would see issues like this and dismiss the idea.

Systemic Opening Pass (part 2)

2008-02-21T17:36:00.005Z

Following on from the previous post, let's assume we are playing a system which uses a natural 2C opener, and have agreed to pass hands of minimum opening strength with 1=4=3=5 or 4=1=3=5 shape.

The reason we might pass 1=4=3=5 hands was explained in the previous post. Hands with 4=1=3=5 shape are very similar: in particular, the singleton heart gives us a way to get back into the auction later if opponents bid hearts. The 4=1=3=5 shape is not quite so good for passing as 1=4=3=5, but the problems with finding an opening bid are the same. (In a standard "natural" system, on the other hand, it would be ridiculous to pass 4=1=3=5 hands with opening strength: there is no problem with either the opening bid or the rebid.)

Now, if a pass can be made on up to 13 HCP, we need to make some changes to the methods we use as a passed hand. In particular, there is a problem if partner opens 1-of-a-suit in third or fourth seat. Here we have the values for game unless partner has made a tactical light opening, but using traditional methods it is difficult to see how we can bid the hand. A natural 2C would normally be played as non-forcing by a passed hand, and in some circumstances a 2C response might even be played as artificial (Drury).

Since the "strong" hand types have such specific shapes, I think the solution is to use a specific response to show these hands. For example, over a 1S opening we could use a jump to 2NT to show the 1=4=3=5 type with 11-13 HCP. Normally most jumps by a passed hand are used to show hands with support for partner, but these do not come up particularly often, and with both opponents passing there is no particular need to have lots of bids which show support. So it makes a lot of sense to use some of the jumps for a new purpose.

If it is the opponents who open the bidding, there is not so much need for specifically-designed methods. If they bid one of our long suits there is no need to come into the bidding at all. If they bid our short suit, on the other hand, it is quite safe to come into the bidding even at relatively high levels, since a take-out double describes the hand very well. A take-out double does not necessarily show the "opening pass" type of hand - it could just be a normal maximum pass with ideal shape - but partner will be aware of the possibility.

The systemic pass on minimum 1=4=3=5 and 4=1=3=5 shapes makes a big difference to the 2C opening bid. The traditional Precision 2C opening shows either 6 clubs or 5 clubs and a 4-card major. Playing a systemic opening pass we can guarantee that if the hand does have only 5 clubs, it will be at the maximum end of the range. This is because, for weaker hands:

With 1=4=3=5 or 4=1=3=5 we can pass;
With 2=4=2=5 or 4=2=2=5 we can pretend the hand is balanced;
With a hand short in diamonds we have an alternative opening bid available: a three-suited opening bid in traditional Precision, or a 1C opening in Polish Club.

When responding to a 2C opening this information is very helpful: it means we can investigate game with an invitational hand knowing that if opener does not have the values for game, he will always have a six-card club suit for us to fall back on. Whereas in standard Precision we might play an uncomfortable 2NT contract after 2C : 2D , 2M : 2NT, if minimum 5-4 hands are passed this sequence should probably be played as forcing, which in turn makes life easier for responder when he holds a strong hand.

Playing this agreement means that a 2C opening bid will only very rarely have precisely 5 clubs. Ideally we would like 2C to absolutely guarantee a 6-card suit. Some versions of Precision do this by putting the other hands into 1D, but a systemic pass is a very good alternative for the minimum hands. A more extreme version of the systemic opening pass would pass all hands in range for 2C if the shape was right, but now you get to the point where partner will want to allow for the strong type when deciding whether to open the bidding; once this happens you are not really playing a standard system any more. Of course, there is not necessarily anything wrong with unusual systems, and it would be amusing to see how a genuine two-way pass system would fare, for example:

Pass = 0-10 HCP any shape, or 11-16 HCP unbalanced with 4+ clubs and a 4-card major
1C = 11-13 HCP balanced / 44(41), or any hand with 17+ HCP
1D = 5+ diamonds, 11-16 HCP
1H = 5+ hearts, 11-16 HCP
1S = 5+ spades, 11-16 HCP
1NT = 14-16 HCP balanced / 44(41)
2C = 5+ clubs, no 4-card major, 11-16 HCP

Partner would be expected to open in 3rd or 4th seat with any 9+ HCP. Perhaps this sort of thing should not be taken too seriously, but it might be worryingly playable. (Except that it's almost certainly illegal, of course.)

Systemic Opening Pass

2008-02-21T14:17:00.001Z

Suppose we hold this hand as dealer, playing Polish Club:

S 8
H KQ73
D AQ7
C JT653

What do we do? The normal opening bid with this shape is 2C, but the club suit doesn't really look good enough for that. Alternatively we could consider opening 1C, but then partner will expect a balanced hand, not a small singleton in spades.

I believe that by far the best option is to pass this hand.

Now, certainly, this hand is better in terms of playing strength than a typical balanced 12-count which is an automatic opening bid. But when deciding whether to open the bidding it isn't all about strength. In particular it is perfectly appropriate to consider how well our system deals with the hand. Hands with this 1=4=3=5 shape are particularly bad for systems with a natural 2C opening, so there is no need to open them on minimum values. With only 12 HCPs, passing is not an unbearable risk.

As well as being a bad hand type for opening the bidding, there are also some reasons to think that passing will work quite well. This is essentially because of the singleton spade. The singleton improves the prospects for a pass in two ways:

We are not so worried about the hand being passed out - firstly because the other players at the table are more likely to open if they have length is spades, and secondly because there is a good chance that if the deal is passed out, it actually "belonged" to the opponents in a spade contract.
If the opponents do bid spades, this hand has a good way back into the auction via a take-out double.

So if you were ever going to consider passing a hand with opening strength, a 1=4=3=5 shape is the best candidate. Indeed the same is probably true in a natural system, though there the problem is not so much in finding an opening bid, as finding a rebid after 1C : 1S.

Having observed that it can work out well to pass, we could just use this as an occasional alternative on borderline hands. But it becomes much more interesting if it is an agreed part of the system. The systemic opening pass works like this:

We identify some specific shapes where passing seems to work well with minimum opening strength. (Let's say just 1=4=3=5 and 4=1=3=5.)
We agree that pass is allowed with these shapes on a little more strength than normal - say up to 13 HCP.
Now when a passed hand shows this sort of shape, partner will be aware that it can be relatively strong.
We can also define some specific bids which show these hand types as a passed hand.

Although partner will be aware of the possibility of a stronger hand, it would be a mistake to let this affect things like our style of opening the bidding in third seat. The relevant hand types are very rare. The whole point is that we would expect passing to work well even without partner doing anything differently - at least until the passed hand gets a chance to clarify what he has. So on the first round at least, partner should just bid as normal.

Once the partnership's methods are designed to cater for these hands being passed, the pass becomes even more attractive. So we could pass hands with these shapes even when the club suit is not so bad, perhaps even with a hand like this:

S AJ96
H 5
D 753
C AQJ63

Note that these hands are still relatively bad for opening a natural 2C, because of the difficulty in investigating whether we belong in spades.

In the next post I'll go through some more implications of this agreement.

Interference over Natural Suit Openings

2008-01-04T13:20:00.000Z

There is an old debate about whether a new suit by responder (e.g. 1S : (2C) : 2H) should be forcing or not. Either method is very useful when the appropriate hand type comes up - and causes difficult problems when you pick up a hand of the opposite type. If forced to choose one or the other throughout, I would prefer to play a new suit as forcing (which is standard in most parts of the world). Though non-forcing free bids do look very attractive when the suit is a major that can be shown at the 2-level.

But there is no need to choose. By using artificial tricks such as transfers we can usually show both hand types at an appropriate level. Unfortunately, different situations require different gadgets. Below are the methods I'm currently using for 2-level interference over 1D/1H/1S openings, which demonstrate all the various ideas that might be used.

1. Over a 2C overcall.

Here we use switch: that is, of the two unbid suits, a bid in one of them shows length in the other one. So:

Over 1D : (2C), 2H shows spades and 2S shows hearts.
Over 1H : (2C), 2D shows spades and 2S shows diamonds.
Over 1S : (2C), 2D shows hearts and 2H shows diamonds.

This essentially gives us both a forcing and a non-forcing bid in the higher-ranking suit, while not raising the level on the lower-ranking suit.

Note that the "switch" relies on both unbid suits being at the same level. So if you are fond of this method you could use it over spade overcalls as well, and also over 1S : (2H) and suchlike. But we actually do different things there.

2. Over 1M : (2D)

Here we free up some space by giving 2NT an artificial meaning. This allows for the following structure:

A bid of 2 of the other major is natural and not forcing.
2NT shows clubs.
3C shows the other major (stronger than the NFB).

3. Over 1D : (2M)

Again it makes sense to use 2NT as a transfer to clubs here. Unfortunately this time there is a real shortage of space, since while we would like to use 3C to show the other major, it would also be nice to have a way to show a good diamond raise below 3D. We can't realistically do both.

I currently play 3C as the diamond raise, so over 1D : (2S) we have to play 3H the traditional way, natural and forcing. Over 1D : (2H) we have 2S as a NFB and 3H showing a stronger hand with spades.

4. Over 1M : (2OM)

This is where transfers really come into their own. Again starting from 2NT we can play

2NT shows clubs
3C shows diamonds
3D is a raise. (When we have two artificial raises available below 3M, as with 1S : (2H) : 3D/3H, we use them to distinguish between 3- and 4-card support.)

Exactly the same transfers work if opponents bid 2M Michaels over our 1M opening.

The Monkey Option

2007-09-21T15:01:00.000Z

Congratulations to the 94 EBU members who managed to vote for

"2-level suit openings should all be alerted"

in the EBU's online survey.

I would like to think that they were making some ironic statement about the deficiencies in the EBU's polling methods.

Half-Astro

2007-09-05T21:04:00.000Z

This is a simple defence to 1NT that I've been playing recently. It's my own invention, though given how simple it is, it would be surprising if no-one had tried it before. It works like this:

2C = both majors
2D = spades and a minor
2H/2S/3C/3D = natural

Double is normally for penalties. (A possible variation by a passed hand, or perhaps against a strong NT opening, is to play double as showing hearts and a minor.) And a 2NT bid would probably show the minors, though there are other possibilities for this as well.

The advantage compared to other Astro variants is that it is easier to play. In particular, overcaller's partner is is a better position when one of the two-suited bids comes up. For example, we can compare it to "Asptro" where 2C shows hearts and another suit and 2D shows spades and another suit, showing the weaker suit with both majors. Asptro is good at finding the right major to play in when overcaller has both majors (unlike "Astro" or "Aspro"). The problem is that for both 2C and 2D there are three different possibilities for the second suit, and it is not always easy to cater for all three. It is particularly difficult over 2D, where overcaller's partner can be faced with problems like these:

Holding 3 spades and 3 or 4 hearts, and no interest in game. Here we want to play in 2H if overcaller has hearts. But bidding 2H invites partner to bid 3 of his minor if he has a 5-card minor. This may not be what we want: we would often prefer to play in 2S in that case (for example with 3=3=5=2 shape).
Holding a decent hand with 4+ good hearts, where we are interested in game if partner has hearts as his second suit but want to stop in a part-score otherwise. This is impossible to handle because if we bid 2H (or 2S) then partner will pass when he has hearts, which is not what we want.

Playing Half-Astro there are not so many hand-types to worry about: instead of three possible two-suiters in each bid, we have only one (for 2C) or two (for 2D). And after either of these bids, overcaller's partner can use the next step to ask which suit is longer.

Of course, what Half-Astro does not have is a way to show hearts and a minor. With these hands we have to bid naturally (or pass if we do not have a suit good enough to overcall). But this is not such a huge disadvantage, since showing two-suited hands without spades is less important - sometimes when we could find a heart fit opponents might be able to bid spades over it.

I play this defence because it is effective and yet very simple. You could agree it with a new partner and expect not to have any mishaps. It's one of the very few conventions I've come up with which has been taken up by people who aren't my partners!

Polish Club: Responding to 1C

2007-07-24T17:14:00.000Z

Since I posted the link to the Polish Club system notes last week a few of us have been practising bidding on BBO. Some parts of the notes have been clarified, and we've made some slight changes to the auctions after 1C : 1D , 1M. I expect there will be a few more details changed while we get used to playing the system. The latest version is on the webpage.

This post is about the response structure that we've chosen to use.

The responses are built around a 1D negative; 1H and 1S are natural with 6+ HCP. This is not the only possible way of doing things, but it is by far the simplest, and it's not obviously worse than anything else. When playing Polish Club, a 1D negative is very useful so that all the other responses can promise enough strength for game when opener has the strong hand. With more natural systems many people have started to use transfer responses to 1C, but if these were incorporated into Polish Club you would have to worry about how to show a strong hand while leaving open the possibility of playing in a part-score. While it is interesting to investigate how you might get this to work, I don't feel it offers any improvement on the simple negative. Another possibility is to keep the 1D negative but invert 1H and 1S; this seems to be more trouble than it's worth, forcing the bidding to 2S when opener has clubs and spades, which is worse than forcing to 2H when he has clubs and hearts.

So, our 1D, 1H and 1S responses are essentially the same as in most Polish Club variants. The other responses are perhaps a little more unusual.

In WJ05, the 2C response is forcing (with at least invitational strength), and weaker hands with clubs have to start with 1D. We prefer to bid an immediate 2C on the hands which want to play in 2C when partner has a weak NT. So 2C shows about 6-10 HCP with a 5+ suit. This works particularly well if the opponents interfere: then we are pleased to have got the club suit in immediately, whereas if we had started with 1D we would be worried about missing a club fit and do not have a strong enough hand to compete at high levels without help from opener. Even if the auction is uncontested, the 2C response is an excellent way to start when opener has a strong hand, because responder has shown a suit and limited his hand, and opener's rebids are all very easy, forcing to game with 18+.

Of course we have to find somewhere else to put the strong hands with clubs, and we use the 2H and 2S responses for this. These bids are not particularly useful as natural bids. In WJ they are natural and show strong hands, but this does not come up very often, and if opener has a weak NT (as usually happens) we have so much space available after 1C : 1M , 1NT that there is no problem showing the strong hands there. In a natural system I like to use 1C : 2M as weakish (maybe 4-8 HCP), but the main advantage of this is that 1C : 1M , 2C : 2M can then be an invitational hand (rather than having to jump to 3M). This is not needed in Polish Club because the 2C rebid promises extra strength. Using 1C : 2M to show an even weaker hand would just pre-empt partner in the very likely event that he has the strong type. So none of the normal, natural meanings for 2M make much sense in my opinion. This, then, is the perfect place to put some strong hands with a minor suit. In fact we use 2H to show precisely 5 clubs and 2S to show 6 or more.

Next we need to think about the 1NT response. It's actually rather difficult to find a suitable meaning for 1NT. Here are two possibilities that we considered:

7-10(11) HCP balanced, no 4-card major. This has the advantage of preventing LHO from bidding a major at the 1-level. It's also a good start to the auction if opponents do compete. On the other hand, playing 1NT this way means that the sequence 1C : 1D , 1M : 1NT is underused and gives away too much information to the opponents (they could deduce that they have half the deck).
Showing 5+ diamonds (6+ diamonds if less than a game force). This would probably be used in conjuction with a 2D response showing 5 diamonds and 4 clubs. This has the advantage that all unbalanced hands with positive values can show their longest suit immediately over 1C, putting us in an excellent position in competitive auctions. The problem with using 1NT this way is that if the partnership has the values for game, it has probably wrong-sided the potential 3NT contract. We like to play methods where responder can show shortage when he has an unbalanced hand, but it is not so good to point out this weakness to the defence if this hand is going to be declarer.

In the end we have chosen to do neither of those things: our 1NT response is natural and shows invitational values opposite the weak type (a good 10 or 11 HCP). This is one of those bids which is a bit infrequent but is great when it comes up; it avoids having to go to 2NT to make an invite. In fact we might use this bid even on some hands with a 4-card major. We can compare this to the 1NT response in WJ05, which shows 9-11 HCP. This seems an odd choice: it is not a genuine invite, and if you allow opener to bid 2NT on a maximum weak NT you might play an unnecessary 2NT with 14 opposite 9. If you're happy bidding 1C : 1D , 1M : 1NT on an 8-count, it seems much more sensible to do this on 9-10 as well, so that 1C : 1NT can be a real invite.

Our 2D response shows 6-10 HCP with 6+ diamonds, similar to the 2C response showing clubs. This means that our 2-level responses look rather similar to those in some Swedish Club systems (2C/2D natural and not forcing, 2H/2S show strong minor-oriented hands). However, we cannot bid 2D on hands with a bad 5-card diamond suit because we frequently have shortage in diamonds for our 1C opening. So hands with 5 diamonds in this range have to go through the negative instead - these hands will either be balanced or have 4+ clubs, since we would bid 1M with a 4-card major. We also have to start with the negative on strong hands with primary diamonds.

Our 1D "negative" in fact has four possibilities:

0-6 HCP, any shape.
Up to 10 HCP with no 4-card major: balanced or 5D-4C.
Game force with 5+ diamonds, or invitational with 6+ diamonds.
Balanced game force with no 4-card major, not wanting to be declarer in no-trumps.

As with most Polish Club variants, this means that if the auction begins 1C : 1D , 1M both partners could still have a very wide range of hands. But it is very easy to sort things out: responder bids 1NT if he wants to play there opposite a weak NT type, and now opener can make a very descriptive rebid if he has a stronger hand. We use responder's 2C and 2D rebids artificially: 2C shows the strong hand with diamonds, and 2D shows the 5D-4C type with 6-10 HCP. We do not need to worry too much about interference in this auction because both opponents have passed at least once already.

Latest Developments in EBUland

2007-07-18T16:06:00.000Z

For the bidding theorists amongst us, this minute from the latest meeting of the Tournament Committee is of interest:

The committee considered a letter from Bob Rowlands, addressed to various parties, including the Laws & Ethics Committee. The issue raised was the use of a system of transfer openings and responses [presumably moscito or something similar - DC] by a pair competing in the National Pairs Final. The pair was also the subject of previous similar correspondence regarding the National Inter-Club Knockout.

Mr Rowlands felt it was totally inappropriate that such a system should be allowed in events involving short rounds, when opponents have little chance to prepare themselves, and also in events such as the NICKO, which should be used to encourage club players to participate in national tournaments. If the EBU should stand by its decision to run all events at level 4, then this system should not be allowed at that level.

The committee unanimously agreed with Mr Rowlands’ sentiments, and wished to strongly recommend to the L&E that they reconsider their stance.

Despite playing a Level 4 system myself, I have to agree with this - in fact I said so in an earlier post. It just reinforces my belief that the "correct" level for general tournament play is somewhere "between" Level 3 and Level 4. It will be interesting to see what the L&E has to say about this, since they previously decided that it was "a Tournament Committee matter" ...

Polish Club System Notes

2007-07-17T18:43:00.000Z

One of the reasons I haven't posted much on my blog recently is that I've been writing up my system notes for Polish Club. This is a system that I've been playing recently with Mike Bell, and we've tried to come up with a version which is an improvement on standard Polish Club variants such as WJ.

The notes can now be downloaded from this page.

The notes focus only on the 1C opening, and are very detailed, with a particularly extensive section on dealing with interference.

A few things that make our version different from other Polish Club variants such as WJ05 are:

All balanced hands without a 5-card suit in the 12-14 HCP range are opened 1C.
Not all 18+ HCP hands are opened 1C: some are opened 1D or 1H instead.
The 2C and 2D responses to 1C are not forcing; we have artificial sequences to deal with game-forcing minor-suit hands.
The 1NT response to 1C is invitational.
After an overcall, we use a mixture of natural bids and transfers by responder.
There are many other artificial sequences, both in an uncontested auction and in competition, including frequent use of opener's diamond rebids as artificial.

Some of the reasons for these things have already been discussed in this blog. I might write about a few of the other ideas at some point.

Doubles Webpage

2007-06-08T12:51:00.000Z

I've created a new page to explain why I believe the EBU rules need to be changed.

Alerting of Doubles

Hopefully this means I'll be able to avoid cluttering up this blog with further rants on the subject. :)

Invitational Jump-Shifts

2007-06-01T15:50:00.000Z

This method is quite popular amongst players of 2/1 GF: after a major-suit opening, a jump to 3 of a lower suit is invitational and shows a good suit (6+ cards). Personally I think this is a truly dreadful idea.

The problems aren't too difficult to spot. It's a very space-consuming response. This means that it will make subsequent bidding difficult, and you can't afford to make the bid on too wide a variety of hands.

In my experience the invitational jump-shift is almost guaranteed to put opener in a difficult position. Let's try these very ordinary hands, after the bidding starts 1S : 3D -

S AJ974
H J3
D Q5
C AKT4

Here perhaps partner can stop the hearts and you can run lots of tricks in NT. Or perhaps he can't. How are you going to find out, with no bid available below 3NT?

S KQJ52
H AQJ83
D 3
C 84

Here if partner has heart support you might belong in 4H, but alternatively the hand could be a complete misfit not making anything higher than 3D. Make the hand a little stronger and you know you should be in game, but will you find 4H if that's the best spot? How will partner know you have five hearts?

S AK965
H A53
D K842
C T

A lovely hand in support of diamonds, but how do you distinguish this hand from all the other different shapes that might want to raise?

Of course, if you play a 2/1 as absolutely forcing to game, you do need somewhere to put these invitational hands. But not all invitational hands with a good suit are suitable for an IJS. It is dangerous to make an IJS on hands with tolerance for parnter's major, or with four cards in the other major, because of the possibility of missing a major-suit game. So playing IJS does not really solve the problem of what to do on these hands.

Much better, at least when one of these invitational hands comes up, is to be playing a system where a 2/1 is not absolutely forcing to game, with responder's rebid of his suit showing the invitational type. Starting at the lower level gives you so much more flexibility: not only does opener have an extra chance to describe his hand, but responder can make the bid on hands which are not such pure single-suiters, because he is not committed to showing the IJS type. For example, over 1S, hands with four hearts and a six-card minor are no longer a problem, because after a 2/1 response, responder can afford to raise a heart bid to game, and will only rebid his minor to show an IJS hand if opener does not have hearts.

Naturally this would make life more difficult when you do actually have a game-forcing single-suiter. But personally I think it is relatively easy to find a way to bid these hands. Even if constrained to play natural methods, I would much prefer to be playing 2/1 "GF except rebid" than absolute game-force. And with a bit of artificiality there is plenty of room in most cases to distinguish invitational from game-forcing hands without having to invent suits or NT bids. Certainly in a natural GF system, responder's 2-level rebids (when available) tend to be underused, and can be redefined to include the game-forcing single-suited type. Really I think that using a cheap response like 2C solely for natural game-forcing hands is a serious waste of space.

An alternative for people who want to keep their 2/1s as game-forcing is putting the invitational single-suiters into the 1NT response. This has several drawbacks. You don't get to show either the suit or the strength immediately, and if you later bid your long suit it might be difficult to distinguish this from a weaker hand. Also if 1NT is not forcing, you may well be missing a better contract if opener passes. It works better over a 1H opening than over 1S - particularly if playing Kaplan Inversion so that the "forcing NT" hand bids 1S rather than 1NT - because responder has a 2S rebid available as artificial to distinguish weak single-suiters from invitational ones. Even then, I still prefer making a two-over-one response, showing the suit immediately, if the system can be arranged to allow for it.

What does "Natural" mean?

2007-06-01T13:38:00.000Z

Most bridge players understand roughly what to expect from a "natural" bid, but it's quite a difficult term to define precisely. This is unfortunate because, as well as being a useful word for describing what a bid means, it's also often used in system regulations and alerting regulations, where you really need a good definition.

The meaning also varies slightly depending on where you live. Let's look just at suit bids. In America, most people seem to consider a suit bid to be natural if it promises length in that suit, even if there is some additional information given. For example, a Muiderberg 2S opening (showing 5 spades and 4+ cards in a minor) would be described as natural. They would say it is "natural but conventional". The WBF, on the other hand, defines "natural" to be the opposite of "conventional". Of course, "conventional" is another term which is extremely difficult to define, but it is clear that the Muiderberg 2S is conventional, and so is not natural according to the WBF's definition.

In England our understanding is somewhere in between. The old Orange Book (pre-2006) summed it up quite well: a natural suit bid was

a bid of a suit which shows that suit and says nothing about any other suit. ...

So a Muiderberg 2S opening is not natural, because it shows length in another suit (even though that suit is unspecified). But, unlike with the WBF's definition, it is still possible for a natural bid to be conventional. We would say that the opposite of natural is artificial. An example of a bid which is conventional but not artificial is a 1D opening which promises an unbalanced hand. This certainly shows diamonds, and says nothing about any other suit, but there is an additional agreement about the hand as a whole which makes it conventional.

Because I learnt my bridge in England, this is the definition which feels most right to me (and not just because I'm an avid reader of Orange Books! - this really is what people mean by "natural" in England, give or take some of the details). Unfortunately, both of the conditions in that old OB definition are slightly faulty.

First of all, what does it mean to "show that suit"? The old OB definition continued:

The suit shown will be at least four cards before opener rebids but may be three cards from then on; exceptionally a bid of 2C in a 3=4=3=3 hand precisely in response to 1S is considered natural.

This definition appears to make bids such as 1H (pass) 2H artificial if they could be made on three cards. In practice, this oversight was just ignored - no-one was suggesting that these bids should be alerted - but it did look a bit silly. It was corrected in the new version of the OB, where the definition of a natural suit bid is:

A bid of a suit which shows that suit and does not show any other suit; the suit shown will be at least three cards long except that preference bids and raises may be on shorter suits. Note that in earlier rounds of bidding a natural suit bid usually shows at least four cards.

This is a much better definition of what it means to "show" the suit bid. It's also an improvement for the bids which show only three cards suit. According to the old OB defintion, a 3-card 1H opening was alertable because it was not considered to be "natural". But this doesn't seem right - it surely is a natural bid, but ought to be alerted because it is unexpected.

The second part of the definition is much harder to get right, and neither of the two EBU versions really works properly. According to the old regulation, a natural bid should "say nothing about any other suit". Presumably this was discarded when it was realised that nearly every natural bid shows something about the other suits, even if this is only from the negative inference that some other natural bid could have been made instead. And, for example, a pre-emptive opening bid which is played as denying a side 4-card major should still be considered to be natural. But the new version goes too far in the other direction, so that (for example) a 3H bid which shows heart length and club shortage is considered natural. This isn't a problem for the alerting regulations because club shortage is still unexpected, and therefore alertable, but it doesn't correspond to what we really think of as being "natural". I think the old definition is closer to the truth here, and they just needed to make an exception so that a bid could still be natural if it denied a certain amount of length in another suit (or suits).

Still, there isn't really any obvious way to define it perfectly, and it's interesting to see how various different authorities try (and fail) to do it. And that's without even considering what a "natural" no-trump bid should mean.

1M:2C Artificial: Slam Bidding

2007-05-21T14:10:00.000Z

When responder has a balanced hand and is interested in slam, he can use a relay-like sequence to find out about opener's shape. Depending on the continuations being used, it may be possible to find out opener's complete shape below game level. But even if not, it should be possible to find out the most important aspects - that is, the suits where opener has length (by which I mean 4 cards or more) and where he has shortage. If you work it through, you should find that for most hands these things can all be described at or below 3NT, but for some hands with a 6-card suit or 5-5 shape, a complete description may involve bidding 4C or 4D.

We need to know how to continue after this. Relay systems have to use very different slam-bidding methods to natural systems. However, because the relay-like scheme only applies when the asker has a balanced hand, you do not need many of the very complex methods found in the most advanced relay systems. This is because when you have a balanced hand, you know that nearly all of parnter's high cards will be "working". And since you know partner's shape, you can tell which of your own cards are useful as well. So, if you are able to get a good description of the strength of partner's hand, you will be able to deduce very accurately how many important high cards your side is missing.

Standard high-card points are not a particularly good way of describing the strength of a hand for slam purposes (not for suit slams, at least); a better approach is to count points on the scale A=3, K=2, Q=1. These are called "queen points" or "slam points": I'll use SP for short. Playing standard opening bids, a minimum opener will usually have 6 or 7 SP. A hand with 9+ SP can be considered significantly better than minimum for slam purposes, and when dividing opener's strength into "minimum" and "maximum", it makes sense for the maximum range to start at 9 SP unless playing very limited opening bids.

An important question is how much to count for honours in short suits. A singleton king or queen should probably not be counted at all, though of course it could still turn out to be a useful card. A doubleton queen is more interesting. I think it is best to count a doubleton queen as worth 1 SP unless you have a 5-5 or longer two-suiter. The reason is that the main value of the queen in Qx is that it can set up an extra trick for a discard, but when you have 5-5 shape a discard is unlikely to be useful. It may make sense to compensate for this to some extent by requiring only 8 SP for a "maximum" when holding 5-5 shape. (There is no problem with having different requirements for different hand types, because responder always finds out at least this much about shape before asking for a detailed description of strength.)

The main slam-bidding tool, then, is a bid which asks opener to show his exact strength measured in SP. After responder has heard enough about shape, his 4C bid can ask about strength. Simplest is to have step replies, so that if opener has shown a minimum,

4D = 6 SP (or fewer, but this would be very rare)
4H = 7 SP
4S = 8 SP.

Whereas, if opener has shown a maximum,

4D = 9 SP
4H = 10 SP
4S = 11 SP
etc.

Sometimes 4C is not available because opener bid that to show a shapely hand, in which case 4D would be the strength asking bid. (And similarly, some agreement is needed as to what to do when opener's shape-showing bid was 4D or higher, if such a thing exists.)

Here's an example of a possible hand for responder:

S Q4
H KQJ3
D A82
C KJT5

Suppose that after a 1S opening bid, opener shows a minimum hand with 5 spades, 4 hearts, 3 clubs and a singleton diamond. We can see that the missing cards are the ace and king of spades, the ace of hearts, and the ace and queen of clubs - a total of 12 SP. The king and queen of diamonds are not important because of partner's known singleton.

Say we bid 4C asking about opener's strength and he bids 4D showing a minimum 6 SP. Then we know that there are 6 important SP missing. This could be two aces, or an ace together with the SK and CQ. Either way, this will not be a slam we want to be in, and we can sign off in 4H.

If opener bids 4H then we are missing 5 SP, which can only be the SK and an ace. Since there is no way to dispose of four of partner's spades, a 6H contract would be at best on a spade finesse, and could have no play at all. So we know to stop in game.

If opener bids 4S then we are missing only 4 SP, which must be the CQ and an ace. This time we can see that the contract should be at worst on the club finesse (barring some very bad splits), and could be much better than that if the spades are solid enough. So, this time, even without any further investigation, it looks like 6H should be worth bidding.

Generally, if you are missing 5 or more SP you are very unlikely to want to be in slam; whereas missing only 3 SP slam is likely to be good. The hardest hands to judge are those where 4 SP are missing. There you would often like more information. The example above is made relatively easy by the fact that we have the minor honours in our long suits: take away the HJ, CJ or even the CT and it is more difficult to know what to do. This is fairly inevitable because our way of describing strength does not count these cards.

So, after having found out about SP, what else might be useful to know? This is a difficult question because often there are various different combinations of cards which would make slam good. But notice that it is certainly not necessary to play any form of Blackwood. If the partnership was missing two aces, then you would find out that you were missing at least 6 SP, and this is too much for slam. Similarly, if you are missing one ace together with the king of your potential trump suit, responder will discover that at least 5 SP are missing, and this is nearly always an indication that slam is not playable. Thus, if you have enough strength to warrant bidding slam, you can't be missing two key-cards.

Sometimes it's impossible to bid slam with confidence (or avoid a bad slam) without finding out the precise location of opener's high cards. Unfortunately there is nowhere near enough space to be able to do this. We need to decide which things responder is most likely to want to know. There are two things in particular which seem to come up relatively often:

Minor honours in opener's long suits. If your prospective trump suit is Axxxx opposite xxx, you have no chance of making slam whatsoever. Whereas, if you have AJT9x opposite xxx, there's an excellent chance of avoiding two losers. More generally, the jack and ten of opener's long suits can make a big difference to the slam chances. It is often very useful to be able to ask about these cards.
Kings and queens in doubleton suits. When either responder or opener has a doubleton, honours in that suit are often much less valuable than if they were elsewhere. It is useful for responder to be able to pinpoint a particular suit and ask whether that is where some of opener's SP are. Opener should make a discouraging bid if holding the king or queen, and encourage with nothing in the suit or just the ace (which is always a useful card). This is generally more effective than asking about suits where responder wants to find honours, becuase there are usually two or three suits where honours would be useful.

So it is worth finding ways to ask about these things. Bids in suits where opener has shown two cards or fewer cannot be to play, and so they can be defined as specific asking bids. However this does not usually result in many bids being available. One way to free up more bids is to define some of responder's bids as setting trumps. For example, in situations where 4C is the normal strength ask, 4D can be used to set a particular suit as trumps (maybe opener's second-longest suit). The replies to 4D still show SP, but afterwards any bid below slam level except in the named trump suit can be an asking bid.

Another issue is the meaning of a 4NT bid. If opener has shown a 6-card suit then this should not be natural and can be used as an asking bid (but remember that Blackwood is useless). If opener only has five cards in his longest suit then 4NT should be natural - to play if the bidding is already at the 4-level, and quantitative otherwise. A quantitative 4NT is often useful when there is no big fit and responder isn't particularly interested in SP because jacks and maybe tens would be helpful as well.

1M:2C Artificial: Continuations

2007-05-15T16:06:00.000Z

Since I wrote about an artificial 2C response to 1-of-a-major, some people have asked me about continuations. There are certainly plenty of options. There are a few complete schemes available on the web, but I'd imagine that for most people who want to play this sort of thing, part of the fun of the method is in designing their own structure - and doing it yourself also makes it easier to remember (though perhaps not for partner!) Still, there are a few things that can be said about how best to go about it.

First of all, natural bidding works adequately well and is a good place to start. The important thing, in my opinion, is to distinguish responder's balanced hands from hands with clubs as soon as possible, and if you play natural continuations this means responder always bidding 2NT at his next turn if this is available. It follows that you can have a problem if opener's reply to the 2C bid is 2NT or higher - these rebids do not allow an easy, natural way to continue. So ideally these replies should not be too frequent, and the natural meaning probably is a little too frequent.

At the same time, opener's 2D rebid is rather underused if played as natural. So a big improvement on strictly natural methods is to bundle some more hand types into 2D. Glen Ashton has written up a convention he calls "2Dlay" (see here) where the 2D bid shows a hand which would have rebid 2D or 2NT or 3C playing natural methods. After the 2D bid, responder can rebid 2H to ask which hand type is held (with 2S showing most hands with diamonds). If you are looking for a simple approach, this is a very good idea, since it makes the system much more efficient while still quickly leading to natural bidding later in the auction.

However, natural-based continuations have their faults. My main concern is that there is often no easy way for either partner to show the strength of their hand. This is a common problem in 2/1-based systems: hands with extra values can be difficult to bid. I feel it is much better to show something about strength explicitly as soon as possible, and this can only be done using artificial methods. Now, you can arrange things so that opener describes his strength, or so that responder describes his strength. I prefer it to be opener, because responder has some catching up to do in terms of describing his shape, and having to have two ways of showing a balanced hand would make life difficult in various ways.

But since showing shape is also very important, the description of strength cannot be too detailed, and so nearly all the methods I have seen divide opener's strength into just two ranges. For simplicity we can call the ranges "minimum" and "maximum", though if the opening bid is wide-ranging this is a bit misleading - the upper range would typically start at about 14 HCP, and the very strongest hands would have to make a further move later.

Playing artificial relay-like continuations, there is actually enough space available for opener to describe his complete shape, as well as whether he is minimum or maximum, below game level. This is what responder would want to happen whenever he has a very strong balanced hand. However, being able to do this is not the only important consideration when devising continuations. There are two reasons why responder may not want opener to describe his hand completely: firstly, it may be possible to name the final contract without having had a complete description (and further information would only be helpful to the opponents), and secondly, when responder holds an unbalanced hand he might want to make a descriptive bid himself.

Trying to take these things into account, let's look at a method which is based around the following rebids for opener:

2D = any minimum
2H = maximum, balanced or 4+ cards in a minor
2S = maximum, 4+ cards in the other major
2NT = maximum, 6+ cards in the suit opened, not 4+ in the other major

After 2H or 2S, 2NT will be a further asking bid (implying a balanced hand), whereas after 2NT, balanced hands will have to continue by bidding 3C. More interesting is the scheme after 2D: using 2H as responder's next relay, opener will reply:

2S = balanced or 4+ cards in a minor
2NT = 6+ cards in the suit opened, not 4+ in the other major
3C+ = 4+ cards in the other major: bids show the same shapes as after 1M : 2C , 2S : 2NT.

Notice the symmetry here: once opener has begun to show shape, any further bids are the same for minimum hands as for maximums.

This scheme works particularly well when it comes to responder breaking the chain of relays. As said above, the first reason responder might want to do this is if he already has enough information to be able to name the final contract. In order to achieve this, the replies to 2C are arranged so that we get the most important information first. In particular, it is very useful to know immediately if opener is minimum, since responder is unlikely to be able to sign off confidently if he does not have that information. A common auction is 1M : 2C , 2D : 2H , 2S, where opener has shown a minimum and denied four cards in the other major. This may well be enough for responder to place the contract in 3NT or 4M. [Actually, making one more relay is more common, since opener could still have an extreme shape such as 6-5 with a 5-card minor. One useful idea is to use 3D as a "weak relay" in this auction, asking opener whether he has a 5-5 shape, promising that responder will be able to set the contract otherwise. This gives away the minimum amount of information.]

It is also important for opener to make a good start at describing his hand in case responder is unbalanced. If this happens then relays will stop, and the partnership will revert to natural-based bidding. So we want to ensure that opener's first reply to 2C does not make subsequent natural bidding too difficult. Most importantly, opener's more space-consuming replies must be very well defined. This is why, in the scheme above, 2S shows a more specific hand type than 2H. Over 2H, responder can bid 2S with an unbalanced hand (artificial showing 5+ clubs), which leaves room for opener's hand type to be revealed. This would not be possible if 2H and 2S were reversed.

Some aspects of opener's hand are particularly difficult to describe using natural bidding, and so we need to use the reply to 2C to help with this, in case responder declines to relay afterwards. This is the main reason why the very first thing we do is distinguish between minimum and maximum hands: showing strength is very difficult in natural bidding, particularly if you are unable to identify a trump suit quickly. Another thing which is difficult to show naturally is a hand of 5-5 shape. In order to describe these fully in natural methods, you would have to bid and rebid the second suit. So ideally, when you hold a 5-5 hand you would want your reply to 2C to show the second suit. However, in the scheme above, we only do this on maximum hands with both majors. Other two-suiters can cause a problem if responder needs to know about the fifth card in the second suit. This is particularly likely to be problematic if the second suit is the other major. For this reason, it seems to be a good idea to use opener's currently undefined 3C response to show a minimum hand with at least 5-5 in the majors (5-6 after a 1H opening).

When working out the replies to responder's 2NT or 3C relays, I feel that showing shortage is most useful. So for example, after 1M : 2C , 2H : 2NT (and 1M : 2C , 2D : 2H , 2S : 2NT) we could use

3C = no shortage (i.e. 5-3-3-2, or 5-4-2-2 with a 4-card minor)
3D = 5+ diamonds
3H = shortage in the other major
3S = shortage in diamonds
3NT = shortage in clubs

[This assumes that 5-5 hands with clubs are put somewhere else: this is possible if you use 1M : 2C , 3D for maximums and 1M : 2C , 2D : 2H , 3D for minimums. The latter sequence is not needed for a major two-suiter if that hand would bid 3C directly over 2C.]

Further asking bids are possible over 3C, 3D and 3H, but usually once opener has shown shortage it should be possible for responder to work out what the best game should be, and in particular whether 3NT will be a good contract.

After that you would need some slam-bidding methods. The sort of slam-bidding conventions you find in natural systems aren't really appropriate here. You can go a long way just using 4C as asking about general strength. I'll write a post about this at some point.

Using 1S:2D as a Transfer

2007-04-17T12:57:00.000Z

This follows on from the explanation of the artificial 2C response to major-suit openings. If playing natural 2/1 responses (apart from 2C), 1S : 2D and 1S : 2H would both promise five-card suits. This works fairly well, but there is a lot to gain from switching the 2D and 2H responses round, so that 1S : 2D shows hearts.

Clearly this will improve the bidding of hands with hearts at the expense of hands with diamonds. But because of the importance of major suits, this seems to be worthwhile.

The most important gain is on hands not worth forcing to game.

S K5
H AQJ73
D 52
C 8742

Suppose that you respond to 1S with 1NT on this hand, and partner rebids 2D. This gives you a difficult rebid problem. You could try 2S or 2NT, but neither of these show your lovely heart suit. Alternatively you could rebid 2H, but this doesn't express the strength of the hand very well. This is the sort of hand that the 2D transfer was designed for. You respond 2D on this hand, and if opener completes the transfer by bidding 2H, you continue with 2S. The 2S rebid is non-forcing and mildly invitational. Not only does this sequence get the heart suit into the picture, it also perfectly describes the strength.

The 2D bid should promise a decent hand. The minimum strength is about the same as a traditional Acol 2H response:

S 8
H AKJ963
D 9863
C 84

This hand is just about worth a 2D response: this time we will pass opener's 2H rebid. However, when holding only five hearts and shortness in spades, it is better to respond 1NT unless the hand has genuinely invitational values (that is, it should be good enough for a 2NT rebid).

Of course, game-forcing hands with 5+ hearts must respond 2D as well. After opener's minimum rebids, they have to bid a minor suit in order to create a forcing auction, like in Acol.

Opener is not obliged to complete the transfer, but, apart from raising hearts, the only alternative with a minimum hand is to bid 2S. This shows 6+ spades, and will tend to be short in hearts (but if the spade suit is sufficiently good opener might have heart tolerance). Opener's minimum rebids are not forcing: responder would pass with the minimum 8-point hand above. With a stronger hand, opener bids as in Acol, except that I would play 2NT as showing a good hand with 6+ spades (forcing to game).

As was said above, the problem with playing 2D as a transfer is that you have to work out what to do when responder actually has diamonds. Balanced hands with diamonds are not a worry, since they can be put into the artificial 2C response. But unbalanced hands with diamonds have to respond 2H to 1S. The loss of a step can make life difficult - especially from opener's point of view, when he holds hearts. Some further artificiality is likely to be needed to try to deal with these problems.

An alternative approach is to put all the hands with diamonds into the 2C response. This frees up 1S : 2H to be used as a spade raise. (And similarly, 1H : 2D could be used as a heart raise.) I rather like this idea, but it means that the 2C response becomes incredibly complicated, though there does seem to be just enough room to make it work. I wrote out some notes for a complete system of artificial 2/1 responses here.

2NT Showing a 6-card Suit

2007-04-14T18:37:00.000Z

This is another way to try and improve bidding after a 5-card major opening, but unlike the artificial 2C response this convention is very simple. It involves opener's 2NT rebid after a 2-level response, for example 1H : 2D , 2NT. Particularly if you play a strong NT opening and often open 1NT on balanced hands with a 5-card major, the natural meaning for 2NT does not get used very much. Minimum balanced hands should be happy rebidding the major instead.

A more useful meaning for the 2NT rebid is showing a hand with 6+ cards in the suit opened and better-than-minimum values. These hands are extremely difficult to bid if you do not have such a convention available. In Acol, you would have to jump to the 3-level. This is problematic because it takes up so much space: there is a well-known problem with trying to decide which of responder's rebids should be cue-bids and which should be natural, and the reason this is so difficult is because there is not enough space to have both things. In 2/1, the jump to the 3-level promises an excellent suit, and hands without such a good suit have to rebid the major at the 2-level. It then becomes virtually impossible to show the extra strength of the hand.

The conventional 2NT rebid solves all these problems. It describes the important features of the hand immediately, while leaving plenty of space for further exploration. The best thing is that the continuations are very simple: all of responder's rebids at the 3-level are natural. For example, after 1H : 2D , 2NT if responder wants to set hearts as trumps and start cue-bidding he simply bids 3H. Whereas, if he wants to show a two-suiter or rebid his diamonds, he can do those things too. A jump to 4C would be a splinter.

The main drawback to this convention, apart from having to find another bid with a natural no-trump hand, is the possibility of wrong-siding a no-trump contact. However, because the bid promises a 6-card major, there is a high probability that the hand will be played in the suit instead. I feel that the advantages of being able to show the hand more than make up for this occasional problem.

This really is one of my favourite conventions. It can be added to most 5-card major systems (though it is not so good with a weak NT) and requires hardly any partnership discussion apart from the basic definition.

1M:2C Artificial

2007-04-13T10:37:00.000Z

If you play 2/1 Game Force (or "GF except rebid"), you need to decide what you will do on a hand worth forcing to game over a 1-of-a-major opening but without a good suit. For example, over a 1S opening:

S K5
H AQ52
D A84
C J862

The standard method is to bid 2C, establishing the game force. However, if you do this then it can become difficult for opener to know whether you have a "real" club suit or not, which makes slam bidding harder. In fact, it may sometimes be necessary to make a two-over-one response in a three-card suit (change one of the clubs in the example above to a spade).

One attempt at solving this problem is to play a natural game-forcing 2NT response. Removing balanced hands like the one above means that 2-level suit responses virtually guarantee a 5-card suit. However, there are three problems with this idea. First of all, the 2NT response consumes a lot of space, making further exploration on those hands difficult. Secondly, the range of game-forcing hands which do not have a 5-card suit is very wide: they can be any strength from 12 HCP up, and include 4-4-4-1 distributions as well as balanced hands. It is not really practical to put these all into 2NT, and so the 2NT response does not completely solve the problem it was designed for. And thirdly, it means that you can't use the 2NT response for other purposes (it is more commonly played as showing a good raise of opener's suit, of course).

A much better idea is to put all game-forcing balanced hands into the 2C response. So, 2C becomes an artificial two-way bid: it shows either real clubs or a game-forcing balanced hand. In some situations the hand might contain only two clubs.

Obviously this clears up the other two-over-one responses, since they now promise a 5-card suit. You might think that there is still a problem with the 2C bid, since we are putting even more hands into it than in standard 2/1, but in fact by making it explicitly a two-way bid, it becomes much easier to distinguish in the subsequent auction when responder actually has genuine clubs.

To see how this works, let's assume for the moment that we will play natural continuations over the 2C response. Now, assuming that opener rebids at the 2-level, we will require that responder always rebids 2NT with the balanced hand. Any other bid will show an unbalanced hand, and thereby implies a decent club suit. So for example, with the hand from earlier,

S K5
H AQ52
D A84
C J862

we will respond 2C to 1S, intending to bid 2NT at our next turn, even if opener's rebid is 2H. In standard methods it would be more normal to raise a 2H rebid to three, but playing a two-way 2C response the direct raise should show the "natural" hand type and promise good clubs. Of course, there is no reason why you couldn't bid this way even if your 2C response was defined as natural, but turning it into a two-way bid makes everything seem much clearer, as well as improving the definition of the 2D response.

Notice how by rebidding 2NT we put ourselves in the same position as those people who play a natural game-forcing 2NT response, except that opener has had one extra chance to describe his hand. We have gained an entire round of bidding, which is extremely useful.

So far this has all been very simple. However, it is possible to add a vitually unlimited amount of artificiality to the continuations after 2C. There are a number of reasons why it helps to move away from natural bidding.

First of all, consider a natural auction such as 1S : 2C , 2H : 2NT. What do opener's bids mean now? If you play natural methods then 3H, 3S and 3NT have obvious meanings, but 3C and 3D are less clear - presumably these would show a fragment, but considering that these are such cheap bids the meaning is not terribly useful. Furthermore, neither partner's strength is well defined - it would be better to give some information about strength at this point. So it seems better to use artificial continuations, for example 3C showing a minimum hand with 3D as a further artificial asking bid after that. This sort of scheme can be used throughout the system. Once you start doing things like this, the system starts to look rather like a relay system. Indeed, the 2C response is sometimes called a "relay".

Next, you might decide that it is not always most efficient to use 2NT as the bid which shows a balanced hand. Particularly after a 2D response to 2C, it makes a lot of sense to bid 2H with most balanced hands and use 2NT for something else. Doing this makes it look even more like a relay system.

And finally, it is possible to do a lot better than natural responses to 2C. In particular, using opener's 2D rebid to show diamonds is not particularly efficient: you want to use 2D much more frequently than that, particularly when responder's 2H rebid shows the balanced hand. Also, opener's bids at the 3-level need to be better defined. A typical scheme might look something like this (played by Bocchi / Duboin):

2D = any minimum without 4 cards in the other major
2H = any hand with 4 cards in the other major
2S and above = better than minimum, without 4 cards in the other major

Again, this looks very much like a relay system, with the minimum and better-than-minimum hands being treated symmetrically (1M : 2C , 2D : 2H , 2S/2NT/3C show the same shapes as 1M : 2C , 2S/2NT/3C).

Putting all these things together, the resulting scheme can be extremely complicated. But this is an area of system which rewards a bit of hard work. Balanced game-forcing hands are quite frequent, and are very difficult to bid in standard systems. A relay-like scheme is ideal for them: relays work best when the asking hand is balanced and fairly strong.

Announcements: More! More! More!

2007-04-03T19:05:00.000Z

If my blog posts so far have been pretty esoteric, I suppose this is the one where I completely lose touch with reality. Yep, this is about how we should have more announcements. Never mind the fact that the ones we have already are so controversial that it would be suicidal for the L&E to try and impose any more - this one is straight out of the "If I Ruled the World" folder.

But I don't want you to think that I believe every situation can be dealt with using announcements. Far from it. The consequences of having too many announcements are much worse than those from having too few. We got along well enough without any announcements before last August. Announcements are only of use in a very limited set of circumstances. Let's start by listing three conditions that are absolutely necessary for announcements to work:

The rule must be easy to understand and remember.
Announcements must only apply in situations where players can be expected to know exactly what their agreements are.
The announcements must actually have a purpose - they must be justified by one or both of the reasons I gave in the previous post. (That is, avoiding alerts for common artificial bids, or avoiding unauthorised information from asking questions.)

These are absolutely non-negotiable. To give an example, it was once suggested that all take-out doubles should be announced as "take-out" and all penalty doubles should be announced as "penalties". This scores well in terms of being easy to understand, and does solve disclosure problems, but it still would be an awful regulation because of the second condition: in complicated auctions, no-one has firm agreements about the meanings of doubles (though they might have general agreements which are relevant), so they can't be expected to make an announcement.

In addition to the above points, there are two other things that would be helpful:

Ideally, new announcements should only affect pairs playing unusual methods.
Announcements work best when the agreement can be described easily and effectively in a short phrase rather than with a long explanation.

However, these are not as essential as the three main conditions above, and indeed these two things tend to work in opposite directions: unusual methods will generally be more difficult to describe.

Given these conditions, there are only a very restricted number of situations where announcements might usefully apply. Two in particular stand out, and I would like to talk about those.

1. "Negative" Doubles

This forms part of my wider ideas on the alerting of doubles. In contrast to the proposal mentioned above where all penalty and take-out doubles would be announced, which I think is a terrible idea, there is one particular situation where announcing doubles might well be useful. This is when there has been an opening bid, followed by a natural suit overcall from opener's LHO (below 3NT) and a double from opener's partner. Ignore for the moment the importance of making the rules in this situation consistent with the rules for doubles in general. What would be the best rule in an auction such as 1S : (3D) : Dbl ? My suggestion is this:

If the double is for penalties, then do not alert or announce;
If the double is for take-out, then announce as "negative";
If the double has some other meaning, then alert.

This would solve two problems that we currently have in this situation: firstly that some players who play double as penalties don't realise they have to alert, and secondly that when a double is not alerted, some opponents feel the need to check that it really is a take-out double as it is supposed to be.

But perhaps the best thing about this rule is that it also works when the opening bid was at the 2-level, or was in NT. In the auction 1NT : (2H) : Dbl , for example, the traditional and most popular meaning is penalties: so again the current rule means we have problems with people not alerting penalty doubles, but here it's worse because opponents might get the wrong idea even if it is disclosed correctly. And in the auction 2S : (3C) : Dbl , I've seen people very angry to find out that they were supposed to have alerted a penalty double. The EBU's current rule (an unalerted double is take-out) does well in minimizing alerts when the opening bid was a natural 1-of-a-suit, but people find it terribly confusing in the other situations.

Of course, my suggested rule wouldn't fit in with the rules we have at the moment about alerting for doubles in other situations. It is designed to be part of a system where, with the one exception for negative doubles, only very unusual doubles are alertable. In fact my specific suggestion was that apart from the negative double situation, no doubles would be alertable except:

Doubles of natural opening bids. (Below 3NT, a double of a natural suit opening is expected to be for take-out; a double of a natural no-trump opening is expected to be for penalties);
Certain very specific unusual doubles. (Perhaps just anti-lead-directing doubles.)

So really while the rules for the specific negative double auction may appear slightly more complicated than the current ones, the scheme as a whole is much simpler.

[Incidentally, I could do with some help in lobbying about this, so if you think this is a good idea, or even if you just agree with the basic principle that neither take-out nor penalty doubles should be alertable in auctions more complicated than the "negative double" auction, please grab your nearest L&E member or other influential person and tell them.]

2. Opening bids which are currently alertable

This is an obvious candidate for announcements because opponents will very often want to know the meaning of such a bid. As with a natural 1NT opening, the problem is opponents asking questions. For example, after a 1C opening it is easy for an opponent to ask a question in such a way that he reveals that he has clubs himself. While we could say that opponents should be able to find out the meaning by looking at the convention card, experience suggests that even when a convention card is available, opponents still like to ask directly.

In theory, all opening bids which are currently alerted could be announced instead. That would certainly be a simple enough rule to understand. But it might be wise to look at narrower categories of opening bids.

Two-level suit opening bids. Currently all two-level opening bids are either alerted or announced. If the alertable bids were announced instead, then that would make the rule for such bids very simple: they would all be annouced. This makes a lot of sense, particularly when the opening bid is 2 of a major, since the introduction of announcements means that an alerted 2H or 2S bid is now quite surprising, so opponents will very often ask anyway.
"Short" 1C and 1D opening bids. An announcement for these would be useful in order to distinguish them from the "genuinely" artificial minor-suit openings which are currently alerted. The same goes for a natural opening bid which is alertable because of some unexpected agreement (e.g. 1D "natural but could have longer clubs"). This would also have useful consequences for the alerting of doubles under the current rules - a double of a natural or short minor is expected to be take-out whereas a double of an artificial bid is expected to show the suit bid.

So there are particularly good arguments for those opening bids to be announced. Note that this wouldn't make the rules much more complicated, since "announce natural 2-of-a-suit bids" becomes "announce all 2-of-a-suit bids" and the "short" 1C/1D is an unusual method which most players would not need to worry about. Having said that, I think there is still a good case for all alertable opening bids to become announcements instead.

But there is one difficulty which I've avoided talking about so far. That is, there is such a wide variety of possible meanings for these bids, it would be impossible to define "official" wordings for announcements for them all. I used to think that this made the idea of announcements for these bids a non-starter, but now I don't believe it would be a serious problem at all. The solution is to allow players to word their annoucements in whatever way they think best, but to have a list of recommended announcements for the more common methods. (These recommended announcements would include the short ones we already have for natural two-level suit bids.) Add to this a little bit of common sense - for example if a relatively long explanation is given the first time a bid comes up, a shorter form would be acceptable if it comes up again against the same opponents - and I think it would be fine.

The 3NT Opening

2007-04-03T14:10:00.000Z

It's difficult to find a good meaning for the 3NT opening. The "natural" strong balanced meaning doesn't work very well because there's too little space to bid constructively over it. More often 3NT gets used as showing a pre-empt in one of the minors, either "Gambling" (promising a solid suit) or showing a normal 4-minor pre-empt so that the 4C and 4D opening bids can be used for other purposes. However, this wrong-sides the possible 3NT contract, and, particularly when 3NT does not promise a solid suit, it can be difficult for partner to know whether to play in 3NT anyway. Also, using 3NT for any sort of pre-empt gives the opponents more options than they would have if you had made a natural opening bid.

I prefer to use 3NT to show a hand which is not interested in playing in no-trumps at all. One possibility which a few pairs have adopted is to reverse the usual "Namyats" opening bids so that instead of 3NT showing a minor-suit pre-empt and 4C/4D showing good major-suit pre-empts, 4C and 4D become natural and 3NT shows a good pre-empt in either major suit. This seems like a reasonable thing to do. But what I would like to recommend is the simpler approach where 3NT shows specifically a good pre-empt in hearts.

You make life a lot easier for yourself by showing a specific suit. As I said here, I'm generally wary of agreeing to play multi-meaning pre-empts because there is so much which needs to be discussed. Also, slam tries are more effective when the suit has already been shown because you don't need to waste time confirming which suit opener has.

Of course, this gives up the chance to show a good 4S pre-empt. But there are good reasons why being able to show hearts is more important than being able to show spades. When you have hearts, you are worried about the opponents competing in spades. You want to make a pre-emptive bid to keep them out of their possible good spade fit - or to put them into a bad spade fit. And also if you open at a lower level you might get pre-empted yourself. For example, if you open 1H, the opponents may be able to bid up to 4S and leave you unable to show your one-suiter without going to the 5-level. When you have spades you are less worried about keeping the opponents out since you can outbid them on any level. Note also that a 3NT opening prevents the opponents from bidding spades below the 4-level, the same as a 4H opening would. If you have spades, then an opening bid which shows a good 4S pre-empt will allow the opponents to get in a heart bid at the 4-level, so this is significantly less pre-emptive than a 4S opening would be.

Announcements in the EBU

2007-04-02T16:51:00.000Z

Eight months on from the big changes to our alerting regulations, announcements are still a very controversial topic. It's difficult to tell exactly what the level of opposition is, because inevitably it's the people with the strongest opinions whose voices are heard, but it's certainly clear that a significant number of people don't like announcements. One interesting feature of the debate is that there is an apparent distinction between "club players" and "tournament players", with a common perception amongst the club players being that the EBU's rules are there to cater for the tournament players, at the expense of the "ordinary" club players. While the EBU might disagree, it is difficult to shake off this criticim, since it is genuinely difficult to cater for everyone at once, and there is no doubt that announcements work best in more serious events. But in spite of all the criticism, I still believe that announcements are a good thing. I'd like to explain why I think it is that despite announcements being good for the game, there are so many people who are unconvinced.

First of all, we need to understand what the point of announcements is. I feel that the EBU did not do a good job of explaining this, which was a big mistake. The most common short explanation was, "It gives the opponents information immediately, without them having to ask for it." But that's nothing more than a restatement of what an announcement is, it doesn't explain why we should have them. In fact there are two distinct reasons why we have announcements:

1. Avoiding alerts for very common artificial bids.

This is the reason why we announce Stayman and transfers. The "basic" rules for alerting in the EBU say that artificial bids should be alerted. If this rule applied here (as it did before 1st August 2006) then Stayman and transfers would be alertable. However, this would mean that when the auction went 1NT : 2C / 2D / 2H, this would nearly always be alerted. This in itself would not be a problem: the problem comes when a pair turns up who don't play normal Stayman or transfers, but play some more unusual convention instead. The danger is that their opponents will see the alert and assume it was Stayman or a transfer since that is nearly always the reason for the alert. I used to play "Keri" over 1NT where the 2C response forced partner to bid 2D: many opponents went wrong because they had assumed it was Stayman, and occasionally some of them got very upset about it, even though we had done all we were required to do. The announcement of Stayman and transfers solves this problem, because now if such a bid is alerted opponents will know that it is something unusual. (Or of course it could be a Stayman bidder who has simply forgotten the regulations, but this will be clarified easily enough.)

2. Avoiding unauthorised information from asking questions.

This is the reason why we announce the range of 1NT openings. The point is that opponents will very often want to know what the range is. But asking about the range can lead to problems - particularly if opener's left-hand opponent asks and then passes. Asking tends to suggest that the player was interested in bidding, and now the Laws say that the player's partner must "carefully avoid taking advantage" of that information. Sometimes this is not a problem, but on other occasions a director may have to be called to sort things out. Or perhaps even a director should be called, but the players don't like calling the director. Either way, it would be so much better if the unauthorised information had not been passed in the first place: then this problem would not arise. This is why we announce 1NT openings: it gives the opponents the information they need, without them having to ask a question which might give their partner ethical problems.

For the other type of announcement that we have - natural two-level suit openings - both of the above reasons apply. (Before the announcement was brought in, an alerted 2H or 2S opening was nearly always a natural "weak two". And, like with a 1NT opening, opponents will very often need to know the meaning of a 2-level suit opening.)

As I said, I do not think that the EBU did a good job of explaining these things. So it is no wonder that so many people thought the announcements were pointless. The way the announcements were presented made them seem very arbitrary - just rules for rules' sake. Even if you ignore the attempts at explaining why we should have announcements and just look at the explanations of the rules themselves, there was a lot that could have been improved. The completely unreadable "easy guide" that the EBU produced is one of the most hopeless attempts at an explaining something that I have ever seen.

But of course it can't all be blamed on the publicity. Even if the L&E had handled that as well as possible, announcements were always going to be controversial. The fundamental problem is that the two reasons for having announcements aren't really things you'd expect a club player to be interested in. Let's look at those two reasons again:

1. Avoiding alerts for very common artificial bids. The announcement is designed to make opponents aware when a pair is playing an unusal method (ie. one which is alertable but is not Stayman or a transfer). However, these unusual methods are so rare at club level that club players will hardly ever come across them. So there is little need for them to be protected by annoucements.

2. Avoiding unauthorised information from asking questions. Most club players aren't interested in subtle Laws issues like this. Some people won't understand what the problems are in the first place, while others that do have some idea of the Laws are happy to ignore any problems that come up, since they don't like calling the director anyway. In a "friendly" game where people don't mind little bits of unauthorised information occurring, there seems little need to use announcements to prevent it.

Notice that the underlying problems - unsual systems and ethical issues - are not just specific to announcements, but cause a variety of difficulties in trying to apply the Laws of bridge to non-serious events. People who enjoy themselves playing in a club where everyone plays the same system and the director is hardly ever called about unauthorised information are not going to appreciate rules which are designed for unusual systems and scrupulous adherence to the Laws.

But to a "serious" bridge player, this looks so wrong. Announcements do genuinely solve the problems with unusual systems and unauthorised information that I have mentioned. And they come at little cost since once you've got used to them an announcement is no more difficult than an alert. But how do we sell this to our club players - do we tell them they're wrong not to care about these things? I think that is pretty much what we're saying. So while we may believe that announements improve the game for every type of player, it's no wonder that so many club players think that the rules are not designed with them in mind.

Polish Club: Minimum Balanced Hands

2007-03-28T13:00:00.000Z

One of the main issues to be resolved in a Polish Club system is whether to open 1C or 1D on minimum balanced hands with four diamonds. In WJ05 these are opened 1D (though there is some freedom to choose: you might open 1C if the diamond suit was weak). I think that the decision is close but prefer to open 1C on all such hands.

Showing the strength of these hands is not a problem in either method. Both 1C and 1D promise a minimum of about 12 HCP, and this is a fine description of the strength of hands of up to 14 HCP. The real issue is showing shape. If you open 1D then you show 4+ diamonds, whereas if you open 1C you show a balanced hand.

I feel that showing a balanced hand is marginally more useful. As has been said before, the weak NT hand type is the dominant hand type in the Polish 1C opening, and so responder will play for that until proven otherwise. This makes it easy for responder to bid 5-card suits, particularly major suits. Since it is very important to show 5-card suits as soon as possible, and majors are more important than minors, I find that this gives the advantage to the 1C opening. 4-4 fits can often be found later with a take-out double.

Of course, this decision has an effect on the 1D opening as well. It will be opened on a 4-card suit only when the hand is unbalanced. This is a helpful inference in many auctions, in particular making it easier for responder to raise. The resulting opening bid is essentially the same as the Siege 1D opening, and I like to play the Siege 1D agreements as part of Polish Club. This works particularly well with my preference to open 1D on hands in the 18-21 HCP range, since Siege includes sequences to deal with that.

However, the Siege 1D opening also requires you to open 1C on balanced hands with five diamonds (since after a 1D opening bid, opener's 1NT rebid is artificial). Sometimes this is a good thing (when it enables partner to bid a 5-card suit in competition), but sometimes it is not. From the point of view of description and homogeneity, I would probably rather open 1D with the 5-3-3-2 pattern - again, it is usually best to show 5-card suits. In fact, it is sometimes possible to get away with opening 1D on these hands in Siege. With precisely 3=3=5=2 shape, opening 1D works because we can raise a major-suit response to the 2-level. With 3=2=5=3 shape, you might open 1D intending to rebid 2C after a 1H response, but obviously this is best only if the hand "looks" like a minor two-suiter rather than a balanced hand. With 2=3=5=3 shape you are forced to open 1C unless you fancy opening and rebidding in diamonds. So most of the time you will have to open 1C. But fortunately this does still give you the benefits of showing a balanced hand, and freeing up the 1NT rebid after a 1D opening is a great help.

Interestingly, the decision to open 1C on balanced hands with 4 diamonds also often helps when partner makes a negative double. For example, suppose you picked up a minimum 3=3=4=3 hand and were playing a system where this was opened 1D. Now if LHO overcalls 2C and partner doubles, you are a bit stuck for a rebid. Consider the same hand after a Polish 1C opening - if LHO still overcalls a natural 2C and partner doubles, you now have an easy 2D response. You actually benefit from not having shown a suit immediately. If this sounds paradoxical, the explanation is that partner now needs to have support for three unbid suits in order to double, rather than just two. So he can't actually make the double so freely. But then again, the 1C opening makes it easier for partner to bid a suit of his own, and he may be able to do this instead of doubling. Obviously you do lose sometimes - for example if responder has 4=2=4=3 shape after a 2C overcall and would have been able to raise diamonds - but we knew that when we decided to show the balanced hand rather than the diamond suit.

Polish Club

2007-03-27T15:09:00.000Z

Polish Club is one of my preferred systems, and it demonstrates many of the things I've talked about in my series on bidding theory. It features a multi-way 1C opening bid fairly similar to the simpler example, Swedish Club, which was discussed there. But there is an additional natural hand type that is included in the bid, making it essentially a three-way bid. The definition of the Polish 1C opening is usually something like this:

12-14 HCP, balanced (usually without 4 diamonds) or 4=4=1=4;
15+ HCP with a real club suit;
18+ HCP with any shape.

The other opening bids in the system are mostly natural. The 1D opening promises 4+ diamonds, but may have a longer club suit. 1H and 1S are natural 5-card major openings. 1NT is 15-17. And 2C shows a minimum opener with 6+ clubs, or 5 clubs and a 4-card major, "Precision-style". Higher opening bids are pre-emptive.

Some slight variations on this are possible. The above is what seems to be the standard, as described in "WJ05".

One variation which is a significant change is to discard the Precision 2C opening, and open all natural club hands with 1C, freeing up the 2C bid either for another pre-empt, or to show some very strong hands. This makes a huge difference to how the 1C opening works, and I would hesitate to call such a system "Polish Club", though the name does still get used. Furthermore, I think this version is inferior, and I won't be considering it here.

But WJ05 is not perfect either, and I would prefer to make some changes. Most of the changes would be to some of the more detailed sequences later on in the auction, but some other changes are to do with the opening bids. In the rest of this post I'll explain why I like the opening bids in Polish Club, and how I would try to make things even better than in WJ05.

First of all, the natural 1D, 1M and 2C bids are an excellent way of showing shape, particularly the 5-card major openings which are very homogeneous. With 1D promising 4+ cards, this is clearly better than in systems like Standard American where a 3-card suit is allowed with 4=4=3=2 shape.

A strong NT opening is, as we saw, an excellent way to ensure that you show strength on balanced hands. In Polish Club, the strength of any balanced opening hand of up to 17 HCP will be adequately shown by the opening bid. For stronger hands, the strength is not shown immediately, so these hands are treated as two-bid hands. This is sometimes a problem, though of course it is a problem shared by most standard systems. In competition at high levels, opener's double tends to show this sort of hand.

The advantages of the 1C opening itself are similar to those of the Swedish 1C opening. It is important to remember that, when compared to the 1C opening in standard systems, the Polish 1C opening does a much better job of describing minimum balanced hands. In competition, responder will initially assume the weak NT hand type, and this means can bid his suits much more freely than he would be able to opposite a standard 1C opening since he can expect some support. Essentially, the advantage here is that we are showing the shape of minimum balanced hands, as well as the strength. While strength is usually more important for balanced hands, being able to show the shape as well is a huge advantage over standard systems, particularly since these hands are so frequent. Of course, playing a weak 1NT opening would do this just as well, but by playing Polish Club you can describe the shape and strength of both the weak NT and the strong NT hand types.

The main problem with the Swedish 1C opening is the lack of flexibility: the "strong" hand types have to take a second bid (or else risk not showing their strength), which does not work well if those hands are not pure two-bid hands. Polish Club is slightly better in this respect since it is a more conservative system. In Swedish Club, the strong hands typically start at 17 HCP, whereas Polish Club requires about one point more than that. This may not sound like much of a difference, but it does tend to make the strong types a little more pure.

I like to modify this so that the strong hand types are even purer. As I've said, I don't believe that playing limited openings is an end in itself: rather, it is important to look at whether a natural opening bid would be a better start to the auction on some types of strong hands. One particular hand type to look at is where diamonds is the longest suit:

S 9
H AQ52
D AKJ96
C KQ4

My feeling is that it is much more effective to open hands like this with 1D, compared to 1C. They are difficult to describe after a 1C opening because (amongst other things) a 2D rebid is usually defined to be artificial. Also, in competition, it will be difficult to describe the shape of this hand in one bid: you might be able to make a take-out double of spades, for example, but this wouldn't tell partner about the diamond length. And if the opponents bid some other suit (say they compete to 3C) it is a very difficult hand to get across. Opening 1D makes it much easier to describe the shape of the hand, usually either by reversing into hearts or making a take-out double of spades. If you change the hand to be a diamond single-suiter then it is less clear, but I still prefer to open these 1D in order to clarify the rebids after a 1C opening.

So in my version of Polish Club the 1D opening is not limited: it can be anything up to 21 HCP or thereabouts - only with a game-forcing hand would the opening bid be 1C.

When the longest suit is a major, things are different. The 1C opening is an excellent description of strong major single-suiters. So we definitely want to continue opening 1C with these. But with a more flexible hand, or a two-suiter, a natural opening might work better in competition. My preference, for hands with exactly five cards in the major, is to open 1H holding hearts but 1C holding spades. So 1H is not a limited opening (though it denies a single-suited hand with 18+ HCP), but 1S is. The reason for the difference is mainly that you are much less afraid of competition when holding spades. Holding the boss suit you can outbid the opponents on any level. Also, on a flexible hand you have the option of doubling and correcting partner's response to spades. This would often not be possible if you held hearts, since correcting a spade bid to hearts would mean raising the level of the auction. By opening 1C you get the advantages of showing strength. Note also that contructive bidding is slightly easier over 1H than over 1S (you have more space) so there is a little bit of extra room to fit in the additional hands which are opened 1H.

By moving many of these strong hands from 1C into 1D and 1H, particularly the "flexible" hands with 18-20 HCP or so, the remaining hand types in 1C are more likely to be pure two-bid hands, or at least are easier to describe with the second bid. This is what we wanted from our multi-way 1C opening.

Of course, getting in the way slightly are the "medium club" hands, which are the main difference between Polish Club and Swedish Club. The natural option of the 1C opening bid contains hands of 15-17 HCP which are almost certainly not pure two-bid hands, and so these can be a problem. These hands are also present in the 1C opening in standard systems, but there you have the option of rebidding in a new suit - this is not usually possible in Polish Club since such a bid would show the strong variant. Generally, if the bidding is at a very low level (certainly at the 1-level), you are better off than in standard systems since when you rebid clubs partner knows you must have at least 15 HCP. But if the bidding has reached the 3-level then life is much more difficult. Perhaps, though, the most important auctions to consider are when the bidding has reached the 2-level. This can happen because of an opponent's 2-level bid, but it will also frequently be due to partner bidding at the 2-level "to play opposite a weak NT". Unless opener has support for partner's suit, his usual action in this situation will be to rebid 3C. But this obviously requires a decent club suit. So you have a problem with a hand like this:

S AQ54
H 4
D AJ2
C KJ643

There's not really much you can do about it: this is precisely the hand you do not want to hold playing Polish Club. The biggest worry is that the auction might go 1C : (1S) : 2H and now you're hopelessly stuck. I don't offer any easy solution to this nightmare hand, but one thing I am certain of - you should aim to open 1NT as often as possible. Change the hand slightly to

S AQ54
H 42
D AJ
C KJ643

and now I would say a 1NT opening is clear despite the weak doubleton. This works best when you are at the minimum end of the range for 1NT, since there is less chance then that your extra shape will cause you to miss a game. Hands with six clubs in a 6-3-2-2 pattern can also be opened 1NT if the club suit is weak, but single-suiters are less of a problem for a 1C opening since they are generally happy to rebid 3C if necessary.

There is one more big change that I like to make to the opening bids in Polish Club, which I will explain in the next post.

DBT14: Conclusion

2007-03-25T20:07:00.000Z

I've now finished all that I wanted to say on general bidding theory. It has only covered one particular aspect of bidding theory - the opening bid. And indeed it is even more specific than that, because I've been concentrating on what I would call "protecting against opponents' pre-emption", or, to give a shorter term, "description". There are other factors to consider when choosing your system of opening bids, which will often conflict with the desire to describe hands as well as possible. I'll just mention two of these things here, though of course they really are huge subjects in their own right:

Pre-emption. As well as trying to bid our own side's hands as effectively as possible, we also want to make life difficult for the opponents. Some opening bids will be explicitly defined as pre-emptive, usually at the 2-level or higher. These pre-emptive openings tend to be fairly independent of the constructive part of the system - except of course that the more pre-emptive bids you want to use, the fewer bids you have available for constructive hands. But also, the system's "constructive" bids can have a pre-emptive effect, and this aspect has to be considered at the same time as all the issues to do with describing hands. A weak 1NT opening, for example, is an extremely good bid from the pre-emptive point of view, but weak NT systems can have descriptive problems as we have seen.
Accuracy in uncontested sequences. As was said right at the beginning, competitive auctions tend to be more important, certainly for 1-level opening bids. But obviously there are many deals where opener's side will have a free run in the auction, and these need to be considered too. What happens in an uncontested auction will depend to a large extent on the continuations used, rather than the opening bid itself. But the definition of the opening bid can still make a huge difference to how things turn out. Most importantly, the accuracy of the continuations will depend on how much space there is: there must be enough room to look for the important information without going past the side's best contract. So again there is a conflict with trying to describe hands as well as possible - while a good description is still desirable in uncontested sequences, there is also the need to leave plenty of space for further investigation, which means that the cheapest bids will need to be used more.

Still, while you can never say that one idea is more important than anything else - it is so much more complex than that - description is the main thing that I look for in a bidding system. And it is all too easy to overlook description if you are not careful: while pre-emption is generally easy to spot, and leaving holes in uncontested sequences will also be easily picked up, protecting your side against opponents' bidding is a much more subtle problem.

Let's end by listing the main principles we've come across:

Think-Competitive. When deciding how to arrange your opening bids, it is most important to consider what will happen in a competitive auction.
One-Bid-Or-Two. Your system should ensure that one-bid hands are be described as accurately as possible in one bid, while two-bid hands are described as accurately as possible in two bids.
Unbalanced-Hands-Show-Shape. You must show your suits, in order to find fits.
Balanced-Hands-Show-Strength. The strength of a balanced hand should be bounded from below as accurately as possible.
Homogeneity. In any particular bid, the one-bid hands should be homogeneous.

How often have you looked at your hand and thought, "I haven't described my hand as well as I would like, but I don't have a good bid available." This problem is exactly what we are trying to avoid. It doesn't require lots of artificial bidding - indeed one of the main themes is that standard natural systems are very effective. But whether your preference is for natural systems or for lots of artificiality, by following these principles as far as possible your hands will be easier to bid.

DBT13: Limited Suit Openings

2007-03-25T15:55:00.000Z

Playing a Strong Club (or Strong Diamond) system means that natural opening bids can be limited to a maximum of 15 HCP or so. Since these opening bids do show shape, their maximum strength is useful information. (Even the nebulous 1D opening found in some versions of Precision at least carries the negative inference that opener does not have (or is very unlikely to have) a 5-card major, and this is a useful type of shape information since it limits how good a major-suit fit the partnership can have.) Indeed, it is often said that having limited opening bids is the real purpose behind playing a Strong Club system.

However, I would not say that it is such a great advantage. For simplicity, let's consider just the major-suit openings. The hands which are removed from 1M by the Strong 1C opening are strong and mostly unbalanced, and so these hands are usually worth a second bid in competition (though they may not be completely pure two-bid hands). So whether these hands are opened 1M or not does not really affect the homogeneity of the 1M opening bid. Responder will initially be trying to cater for opener's minimum hands, and so excluding hands of 16+ HCP from the opening bid rarely makes a difference to responder's bidding on the first round. On later rounds, opener will have had the chance to show his strength more precisely.

Of course, knowing that opener is limited is not completely useless to responder. In particular, when responder has a minimum game-forcing hand, the limited opening may be sufficient to rule out the possibility of a slam. This means that responder can take a direct route to a game contract, rather than having to leave room in case opener had a very strong hand and wanted to make a slam try. The most well-known example of this is responder's direct raise to 4 of opener's major. In natural systems this bid would only be made on a weakish but distributional hand, based on excellent trump support. But in Precision it is also possible to raise directly to game with stronger hands: those which are worth game based on high-card strength, maybe 13 HCP or so with 3-card support. By reaching your best contract in two bids you avoid giving information away to the opponents, and if an opponent has a hand which might be worth competing over the game bid, it will be more difficult for him to judge correctly now that the jump does not promise a big fit. However, responder is aiming at quite a small target here. Even opposite a very limited opening, there are not very many hands that can be certain of wanting to play in game but also fairly confident that there is no slam available. Opener may be limited in high-card strength, but he is not limited in distribution, and there are very often some well-fitting distributional hands which would make slam good. And also, if the opponents do compete, it is now opener who is disadvantaged by not knowing responder's hand.

In any case, the immediate raise to 4 is rather a special auction. There are not many other situations where the limited opening bid is immediately useful to responder. For example, if opener's LHO overcalls 3C, then responder will have to bid 3NT (say) on almost exactly the same hands as he would if the opening bid was unlimited. Of course, when holding a good hand for the bid, responder will be happier opposite a limited opening because this reduces the chance that a slam will be missed. But the point is that when opener has a weaker hand the bidding will be the same after a limited opening as it would have been after an unlimited one. When this is the case, in order to compare different systems we only need to look at the stronger hands, and ask whether they are better opened with a natural unlimited opening or an artificial strong opening.

You see the real advantage of limited openings when opener gets to make his rebid. Playing unlimited suit openings, opener's rebids have to cover all the strong hands. With limited openings these strong hands are ruled out, and so opener's rebids do not cover such a large range and can be more descriptive. But note that it's not actually necessary to remove all the strong hands in order to do this. If the natural opening contains a restricted number of strong hand types, this still makes the rebids more descriptive than a standard unlimited opening: it doesn't matter that the bid would still be wide-ranging in terms of pure high-card strength. It might make sense, therefore, to use a strong (or multi-way) opening only for hands which are particularly easy to describe by starting with a strength-showing bid (such as strong major single-suiters), and use natural openings for other strong hands.

All in all, it is not the immediate definition of maximum strength which is the advantage of limited openings. Rather, limited openings are a way of re-arranging the meanings of opener's rebids, in the hope that hands will be better defined after the second call (and with easier continuations) than if you were using unlimited openings. But of course there are very many other ways you might try to do this, and it should be better to analyse the various hand types more closely, trying to find the best way to show shape on unbalanced hands and strength on balanced hands.

Pairs who play limited openings often open lighter than is standard. That is, while they have removed a large number of strong hands from the natural bids, this is compensated by opening more hands at the minimum end of the range. However, while there is a lot to be said for opening light, I feel that the argument that light openings go naturally with a limited opening system is largely fallacious. As was said earlier, removing the strong hands from a bid does not really affect its homogeneity, since the hands removed are mostly two-bid hands. But opening light does affect the homogeneity of the bid - the hands that are added are definitely one-bid hands. So it doesn't matter whether you decide to play limited openings or not, opening light makes your bids less homogeneous. Again, limited openings may help with the rebids, but not with the initial description of the hand. So by all means play light opening bids, but you don't need a limited opening system to do so. You would only see an effect if you were prepared to play a strength-showing opening which took out significant numbers of one-bid hands, and that would mean it would have to start at about 14 HCP - maybe even less. This might be necessary if your opening bids start really light (an 8 - 13 HCP opening bid is playable whereas 8 - 17 HCP is probably not), but including lots of unbalanced one-bid hands in a strength-showing opening is not such a good idea, as we have already seen.

DBT12: Strength-Showing Openings

2007-03-24T01:43:00.000Z

Nearly all opening bids give some information about strength, but here we want to look at bids which show only the strength of the hand, giving little or no information about shape. The most important example here is the Strong 1C opening in systems like Precision. Also, "natural" systems often use 2C as a strength-showing opening, but because of the low frequency of the bid and the fact that all hands opened 2C are two-bid hands, it is something of a special case and does not really define the system in the same way that the 1C opening is fundamental to Precision. We will be more interested in 1-level strength-showing openings.

The two main problems with strength-showing opening bids have already been discussed in earlier posts, but are worth repeating.

First of all, there is a danger of violating the Unbalanced-Hands-Show-Shape principle. On one-bid hands in particular, it may turn out to be impossible to say anything about the shape of the hand if you start with a strength-showing opening bid. But even on two-bid hands, while you will get the chance to say something about shape, it might not be possible to give such a complete description as you would if the opening bid had already begun to show shape information.

The second problem is that it is difficult to give a good definition of the strength of a hand in isolation, since its power depends a lot on how it fits with the other hands at the table. So, information about strength is most useful if the shape is also well defined. For this reason, if a system has a bid which limits strength very precisely, that bid will usually show shape precisely as well - as for example with a natural 1NT opening. A bid which showed a 3-point range of high-card strength without showing anything about shape would be very suspect - the upper limit on strength is almost useless, since hands can become much more powerful than expected if there is a big fit. Limited openings (ie. those where the maximum strength is very restricted) only really make sense if they show something about shape.

Information about the minimum strength is still useful, of course. As was said in "Balanced Hands Show Strength", if our hand has close to the minimum strength permitted for the opening bid that we choose to make, we can say we have "shown" the strength of the hand even if some much stronger hands are opened with the same bid. So one of the main advantages of strength-showing bids is that they satisfy the requirements of the Balanced-Hands-Show-Strength principle, for balanced hands near the minimum end of the range. For unbalanced hands the information about minimum strength is also undoubtedly helpful, but not as much as it would be if we had shown something about shape as well.

Looking specifically now at a "Strong" 1C or 1D opening bid, this typically promises a minimum of about 16 HCP, maybe slightly more or slightly less depending on how aggressive you want the system to be. Obviously, playing a Strong 1C or 1D opening has a huge effect on the other bids in the system as well, but for now we just want to look at the strength-showing bids themselves.

Such bids are unusual in terms of the proportions of one-bid and two-bid hands that they contain. Most 1-level bids are dominated by one-bid hands. But in a strong opening bid there are very few one-bid hands. Certainly, balanced hands of 16-17 HCP fall into this category. But that is about all. An unbalanced hand with this strength looks more like a two-bid hand: it may not be a pure two-bid hand, but the system really treats it as if it is, because having not shown shape with the opening bid, there is a lot of pressure to do so later. And once you start looking at even stronger hands than this, they might not like to take a second bid in competition, but they don't like to pass either. There is certainly a lack of pure one-bid hands. So these strength-showing openings have essentially the opposite problem to the very limited opening bids discussed in a previous post: while 8-12 HCP opening bids wasted space because they hardly include any two-bid hands, strong openings waste space because they hardly include any one-bid hands.

The small number of one-bid hands also gives responder an unusual problem. Suppose that he has to deal with a low-level overcall (somewhere between 1H and 2S, say). When he has a "positive" hand, good enough to force to game opposite opener's known strength, things are generally fairly easy. But more interesting is when he has a slightly weaker hand, a "semi-positive". These are not good enough to force to game immediately, so they have to be bid carefully, not going past the best part-score. Much of the time, it will be best to pass and wait for opener to describe his hand. However, since opener can occasionally have a one-bid hand, passing may result in the overcall being passed out. So responder is forced to act on a semi-positive hand if he wishes to compete for the part-score opposite a one-bid hand.

Now, if opener actually turns out to have extra values, any action from responder effectively commits the partnership to game. So the range of strength for the semi-positive hand types needs to be very narrow - not good enough to force to game immediately, but happy to play in game if opener has any extras. This does not seem to be very efficient: you are using an awful lot of system (the semi-positive responses and their continuations) to cater for a very small number of hands (opener's one-bid hands). This takes away space that could be used for more common hand types. Well-designed systems can use transfers or suchlike to combine the semi-positives and the positives into a single bid, but you still see the problem with semi-positives when responder makes a double, or where there isn't room for transfers, or when opener is prevented from showing his hand by having to cater for responder's possible minimum.

You can contrast this with the multi-way opening bids discussed previously. The equivalent of "semi-positive" hands for Swedish Club are those hands which want to compete opposite a weak NT hand, with the auction 1C : (2D) : 2S being a classic example. This has a much wider range. At the lower end, it only needs to be good enough for game opposite the strong option, so perhaps 6+ HCP. This is almost the same as opposite a strong opening bid. But the upper limit is determined by whether it is good enough to force to game immediately, which is much higher for the multi-way opening. So these semi-positive responses, which use up most of the available space, are much better used after a multi-way opening.

Some Strong Club systems go so far as to make responder's pass forcing over certain overcalls. In a sense this avoids the problem of having a small number of one-bid hands to deal with, by requiring opener to always take a second bid. But of course this takes away one of the main advantages of strength-showing openings, which is that they describe the strength of their minimum hands (particularly balanced hands) without opener having to take a dangerous second bid.

There are also a few systems which remove minimum balanced hands from the strength-showing opening completely, perhaps putting them into a strong NT opening instead. The idea is to increase the purity of the two-bid hands remaining in the strong opening, which works well when you do actually hold one of those hands. But again, you are losing the very thing that strength-showing openings are best at, which is describing the strength of balanced hands at the minimum end of the range, according to the Balanced-Hands-Show-Strength principle.

L&E Minutes for March 2007

2007-03-23T21:55:00.000Z

The minutes for the meetings of the EBU's various committees are published on their website. I always take a particular interest in what the L&E are doing. Here are some thoughts on the latest set.

2.2.3. Use of the term "self-serving".

In the previous minutes, the comments of a player who was deemed to have fielded a psyche were called "self-serving" by a committee member. That was completely inappropriate. I don't like the term at the best of times, but its usual meaning is for a statement a player makes about their own methods or style or thought processes which would help their case if true but is not backed up by evidence, and so tends to be ignored by a TD or AC unless it is particularly credible. This instance was completely different, since it was a player's honest attempt to put his side of the case on the basis of agreed facts. It is totally out of order to dismiss this as "self-serving" - how can you have a problem with someone arguing their case like that?

The committee added a new comment to say that they didn't find the arguments convincing - fine, I agree with that - but the original comment still sickens me.

3.2. Announcements for "Acol Two"-like openings which fail to meet the definition of "strong".

This has been a known problem since before the new rules were introduced - I certainly asked about it, and I can't believe I was the only one. The problem is that neither "strong" nor "intermediate" really describes the agreement accurately - it falls between the two. I like the approach that the committee decided upon, announcing as "strong or intermediate", but there remains the question of whether the regulation is actually going to be changed to put this right. Or, more generally, what should happen to two-level openings which do not fall neatly into any of the announcement categories. It seems like they've ducked the issue a bit.

[Update 17/7/07: I should have had more faith: it has now been revealed that they actually went ahead and made a change to the OB, coming into force this summer, to address this point. So in fact this is another job well done in my opinion.]

3.5. Correspondence on announcements and alerts in general

Yes, the introduction of announcements has been a PR disaster. The committee really needs to realise that it's not just enough to make the right decision, you also have to communicate it properly to the players. I'm really disappointed in the way it's been handled. A belated consultation about it seems like a reasonable start in trying to put this right, trying to get back the support of the membership. The problem is that this consultation has to offer (or at least appear to offer) the possibility of discarding announcements completely, which would be a huge step backwards of course. All in all, very depressing that it has come to this, though we can hope that the results will be positive.

3.6. Minimum strength for "strong" openings

Brilliant work from the committee here, in the most important decision of the year so far. It's such a difficult subject - some definition of "strong" is essential, but it's so hard to express precisely where the line should be drawn. There was no doubt that the committee had previously got it wrong, making the requirements too restrictive and disallowing many hands which are normal strong openings for many players. The new definition is not exactly a thing of beauty, and people might complain that it is too complicated, but it seems to come pretty close to allowing the right things.

Perhaps even more encouraging than the decision itself was the fact that they've clearly listened to the complaints, sat down and thought about how to do better, and come up with something. You'd think that was an obvious thing to do, but it seems that very often known issues are just ignored because no-one wants to think about what to do about it, or to listen to people that have thought about it. But this time they have. (Eventually.) More of the same please.

The only slight disappointment was the decision to wait until August 1st to implement the new rule. Once you've admitted you're wrong, why let people continue to suffer? In my opinion, the right time for the change is as soon as it can be published in English Bridge (I suppose April would be unrealistic, but how about June?). We saw this with announcements - they were publicised nearly two months before the rules actually changed, and that was too much time for people to remember and keep up their initial "enthusiasm". Particularly for a relatively minor change like this, it should be immediate as soon as it is publicised. Note that the announcement of the change went up on the website immediately and people would be entitled to ask why they should have to wait another five months.

3.12. Moscito

Evidently the L&E has received some complaints that Moscito is allowed in the NICKO (since this competition is now level 4). Well, I agree with the complainants. As I've said before, I feel the standard level for tournament play should be somewhere between levels 3 and 4, and Moscito is just the sort of thing I would leave out. I've played it myself, and I know the amount of disruption it causes. The whole of level 4 would be appropriate for most team events, but the NICKO is intended to be accessible to non-experts and so I do not feel that this is appropriate.

Now, the L&E has decided that "it was a Tournament Committee matter". Very amusing. While this is strictly true, it is the L&E which has caused the problem by getting the "levels" wrong and by recommending that EBU events should be run at level 4. To be fair, there's not much they can do about it now, but it would be nice if they admitted responsibility.

DBT11: Breaking Homogeneity (part 2)

2007-03-05T01:05:00.000Z

The main idea of the previous post was that in an opening bid, the one-bid hands should be homogeneous, whereas the two-bid hands need not be. But there is still an interaction between the one-bid hands and the two-bid hands, even if all the hand types are very pure.

Responder has to choose a call before it is known what hand type opener has. In making this choice, he will be mostly concerned with catering for opener's one-bid hand types. But inevitably, his choice of call will also affect how the auction goes when opener has a two-bid hand type. For a start, it may affect the amount of bidding space available. But also, and more importantly, responder's call provides information which hopefully will be of use when opener has a two-bid hand. In order to have the most effective methods, we would really like to arrange things so that the information responder provides in trying to cater for the one-bid hands also happens to be the information that would be most useful to opener when he has a two-bid hand.

The Swedish 1C opening is a very good example of how this can be achieved. Suppose that opener's left-hand opponent overcalls 2D. Now responder will initially play opener for the dominant weak balanced hand type, which means that the methods used will be very similar to if the opening bid had been a weak 1NT. He will therefore be bidding or doubling on the following types of hands:

Any hand strong enough for game opposite a weak balanced hand;
Any hand with a good long suit, wanting to play a part-score in that suit;
A hand suitable for a double. If double is take-out this means a hand with decent values, short in the opponents' suit.

He will not be bidding on mediocre hands without a long suit: these will be passed unless they are suitable for a take-out double.

This information is exactly what opener needs when he holds a two-bid hand. When opener has a strong hand like this, it is usually more important for opener to describe his hand, rather than have responder describe instead. So opener does not want responder to bid in front of him unless he has something particularly useful to say. The main thing that would be useful for opener to know about is if responder had a good suit of his own. And as we said above, this is indeed one of the hand types that responder will be bidding with. The characteristic auction for Swedish Club is something like 1C : (2D) : 2S. Here the 2S bid simply shows a hand which wants to play in 2S opposite a weak balanced hand, but the information that responder has at least five spades is also very useful when opener is strong.

This only works because the one-bid hands in the 1C opening are so well defined. In a standard system where 1C could be a weak unbalanced hand, responder would need a rather better spade suit in order to bid safely at the two-level. But in Swedish Club any half-decent five-card suit will do, such as KJxxx. If we had to pass with this sort of holding, then not only would we have difficulty in getting to a 2S part-score when that was right, but it would also be much harder to describe the hand accurately on the next round if opener turned out to have the strong option. Note also that if responder has a hand good enough to compete over an overcall, it is almost certain to be good enough for game if opener has a strong hand - this makes the continuations very easy. In summary, the weak option and the strong option of the Swedish 1C opening go particularly well together because in each case opener wants to know when responder has a moderate hand with a good suit. Of course, responder will also be bidding with strong hands of any shape, or with a hand suitable for a take-out double; again this is useful information if opener happens to have a two-bid hand. But really you see the biggest advantages of the two-way 1C opening when responder is able to show a suit.

We can contrast this with a similar-looking two-way 1C opening which shows either a minimum hand with 4+ clubs, or a strong hand of any shape. It would be very easy to build a system around this bid. And the one-bid hands here are nicely homogeneous, so responder does not have any immediate problems. However, it does not work so well, the reason being that the hands that responder will take action on have changed. In particular, he is going to be bidding on hands with moderate club support. Knowing that responder has four clubs (say) is really of very little use to opener when he has a strong hand - he is much more interested in 5-card suits, particularly major suits. And because opener's one-bid hand types no longer promise tolerance for the majors, responder will be much less willing to introduce a major suit into the auction. While we were happy to bid 1C : (2D) : 2S on a spade holding of KJxxx opposite a Swedish 1C, we would have to pass or double if the weak option just showed clubs (unless the hand was strong enough to force to the 3-level). So opener will get much less information about the majors: information is skewed towards the club suit.

The 1C opening showing "either clubs or a strong hand" is not particularly widely played. A more popular convention is a 2C opening bid which shows either a "weak two" in diamonds or a very strong hand. This has a very similar problem. If responder plays for the dominant weak hand type, then he will want to be raising diamonds on many hands with 3- or 4-card diamond support. However, if opener has a strong hand he is not interested in 3-card diamond suits at all. Indeed, a diamond "raise" may take away space that opener wanted to use to show his strong hand. Admittedly, on any given deal responder is likely to be able to guess whether opener is strong or weak. But there is much more uncertainty than you might imagine, and the price for getting it wrong is high. Furthermore, even if responder is able to work out what is going on, the partnership agreements still have to cater for both hand types, and this reduces the amount of space you have. Really, the two hand types are not particularly compatible, with information that is extremely skewed towards the diamond suit being of little use to a strong opener.

More generally, if the dominant hand type (the weak option) shows length in a particular suit, opener is going to get lots of information about responder's length in that suit, which is only going to be of use if opener's strong options have length in that suit as well. So again we see that simple natural bidding gets this right. For a standard natural 1H opening, responder is initially trying to cater for minimum hands with hearts, but if he supports the heart suit then this is still helpful to opener even when holding a much stronger hand. A more exotic example would be a 2H opening bid which shows either a "weak two" or a "strong two" in spades: here opener would be delighted to hear about spade support no matter which hand type he has (though these transfer pre-empts are problematic for other reasons, and clearly an immediate raise could make slam tries difficult with the strong type).

If you do want a wide variety of two-bid hands, then you are much better off making the weak option nebulous, or showing a balanced hand as in Swedish Club. While clearly the Swedish 1C opening has its flaws (the main one being a lack of purity in its two-bid hands, as discussed earlier), in terms of the interaction between one-bid and two-bid hands it's really as good as you can get.

DBT10: Breaking Homogeneity

2007-03-04T17:11:00.000Z

Some systems have bids which are explicitly defined as multi-way bids. Perhaps the archetypal example of a multi-way opening bid is the "Swedish" 1C opening, which shows either a weak balanced hand (11-13 HCP, say), or a strong hand of any shape (typically played as 17+ HCP). Natural systems do not use this sort of bid; however, many opening bids still contain a wide variety of possible hand types. For example, playing strong NT and 4-card majors, a 1H opening could be anything from a minimum balanced hand to a very strong 1- or 2-suiter. Clearly these are very different hand types, so the bid can be thought of as a multi-way bid in much the same way as the Swedish 1C is. The only difference is that the hand types in the natural bid are not separated by such a clear dividing line.

In either case, the important thing is to make sure that the various possible hand types go well together.

The One-Bid-Or-Two principle is very relevant here. If opener has a pure two-bid hand, then he will be able to reveal which hand type he has with his rebid. But if he has a one-bid hand, he may be unable to add anything to the initial description except to deny a hand suitable for taking a second bid. So, although responder's bids must cater for all the possible hand types opener can have, it is opener's one-bid hands which you need to be most concerned about. The opening bid must provide sufficiently good information about the one-bid hands that responder will know what to do. This does not necessarily mean that responder must be able to place the contract immediately, but he must at least be able to control the auction.

The easiest way to do this is to make the one-bid hands homogeneous. That is, while the opening bid as a whole may be a multi-way bid with a variety of different options, it is a good idea for all the one-bid hands to be covered by a single hand type - or perhaps by a small number of homogeneous hand types. The reason is simple: responder needs to know immediately what he should do opposite a one-bid hand, and a homogeneous opening bid is the best way of providing immediate information. All of the ideas about what makes a good homogeneous bid apply here.

For the two-bid hands, homogeneity is not so important: it is possible to have different rebids showing different hand types. The Swedish 1C opening is an excellent example of this. The one-bid hands are very homogeneous, consisting of a single hand type (11-13 HCP balanced), whereas there is much more variety in the two-bid hands: any shape is possible for the strong option. Many other well-designed multi-way bids work the same way: they have homogeneity in their one-bid hands, but it does not extend to their two-bid hands.

One problem with this sort of opening bid is a lack of flexibility. The different hand types are very clearly separated. So, if opener has a hand which is supposed to be treated as a two-bid hand, it is important to follow up by actually making the rebid which shows the hand. Unfortunately, as we know, not all hands are "pure" examples of one-bid or two-bid hands. A balanced 17-count is certainly not a pure two-bid hand. But if you open a two-way 1C, then this hand is treated as belonging to the strong variant. So if you are unlucky enough to have LHO overcall 2S, say, and responder raise to 3S, you will be in a difficult position. If you pass then partner will play you for a weak balanced hand, but there is no safety in making a free bid either. The lack of homogeneity between the different hand types is the problem here.

So this sort of bid works best when the "strong" hand types are genuine two-bid hands - as pure as possible. Ideally, they should either have overwhelming high-card strength (20+ HCP should ensure that the hand is a two-bid hand) or be very distributional - though in the latter case you need to be careful that you can actually describe the shape well with your rebid. (Single-suited hands are best for this.) In practice, most systems will have to allow some dubious hands into their strong options because of a lack of better places to put them, but clearly the strong option in our favourite example (17+ HCP, any shape) is already rather light, and anything weaker than this would be really asking for trouble.

Typically, if the one-bid hands are going to be homogeneous, this would mean that there is a particular hand type which responder will play opener to have until proven otherwise. We would call this the dominant hand type. Obviously the dominant hand type in the Swedish 1C opening is the weak balanced hand, but the term also makes sense for natural bids. For example, playing a standard 5-card major system, the dominant hand type in a 1S opening bid is a minimum hand with precisely 5 spades. More generally, the dominant hand type would usually be the most frequent one-bid hand type that opener can hold. We can state a general "homogeneity principle" in these terms:

All the one-bid hands in an opening bid should be as

close to the dominant hand type as possible.

The idea from a previous post that the "average" length (or strength) promised by an opening bid should be as close as possible to the minimum length (strength) is really just a special case of this. But we can now see that the average should be taken over only the one-bid hands. Two-bid hands do not need to be close to the dominant hand type, provided that they are pure two-bid hands. With an "in-between" hand you have a slight problem - it may work adequately well to treat them as two-bid hands, but it would also be helpful to have them be fairly similar to the homogeneous one-bid hands, in case the auction prevented opener from showing the precise hand type.

Bids which have a wide range of one-bid hands, or where there is no single dominant hand type, are much more problematic. But they do exist, with the most obvious example being the multi-2D opening bid. A multi-2D shows a weak hand with either hearts or spades (possibly with other strong options which are genuine two-bid hands). Although the strength promised is the same no matter which major suit is held, clearly in terms of distribution this is not a homogeneous bid. In a case like this, you have to find particular reasons why the bid "works" - why should responder be able to cater for both hand types at once? In general there is no guarantee that it will be possible.

There are a few reasons why the multi-2D is an effective bid. In particular:

It is a pre-emptive bid, and will hopefully cause even more problems for the opposition than it does for opener's side.
It is highly likely that responder will have at least as many cards in the other major as he does in the suit that opener actually holds. If opener has hearts and responder has 3-card heart support then the partnership should probably be playing in at least 3H; provided that responder has at least three spades as well, he will know that it is safe to bid 3H because his support for a spade suit would be just as good.
If this is one of the rare deals where responder is actually shorter in the other major, then the opponents will almost always have a fit there and probably ought to be playing in that suit. If they do bid that suit, then this will let responder know what is going on.
Because opener has a long major, if the hand belongs to opener's side, the most likely denomination is opener's suit. So responder will not often need to find out much more information than what opener's suit is. If opener's suit was a minor there would be much more information needed, and this would be difficult to get since you are already a step behind by not knowing what opener's suit is immediately.

But the important thing to note is that these points are very specific to the multi-2D bid. If you were to think of a different multi-way bid which did not have homogeneity in its one-bid hand types, you would have to try to find different ways to justify it. In many cases, the bid simply does not work. If you ignore the homogeneity principle you have to be very careful indeed.

DBT9: Homogeneity is Bad!

2007-02-22T15:07:00.000Z

A homogeneous bid is good for giving immediate information to partner. However, you must also make proper use of your ability to refine the description of your hand later.

It would be very silly to play a system in which no hands were ever opened 1S. After all, we only have a very small number of opening bids to work with, and not to use one of them would be a terrible waste. That much is obvious. But in a similar way, suppose that in your system there are no hands which, after opening 1C, would rebid 3S after the auction started 1C : (1D) : pass : (3D). Surely that is wasteful as well. In order to make maximum use of the space available to you, you would really want to make sure that not only are all the opening bids given meanings, but also all the rebids as well.

This is why homogeneity is not always a good thing. If you tell partner all the important information with the opening bid, then that's great for helping him make an immediate decision, but it leaves you with nothing else to say later.

Of course, it is not always possible to make full use of opener's rebids. If you expect partner to pass your opening bid a large proportion of the time (as for example with a 1NT opening), you cannot expect to have the chance to rebid. So the rebids cannot be defined. Having this sort of opening bid in your system effectively decreases the total amount of space available to you. This may be a problem that you are willing to accept (I quite like natural 1NT openers myself), but it is still a problem.

The difference between one-bid and two-bid hands comes up again here. Opener's high-level rebids can only be used on two-bid hands. So, if you want to make full use of the space available in each opening bid, then these opening bids must each contain a fair number of two-bid hands.

Limiting the strength of your opening bids is bad from this perspective. An extreme example would be a 1H opening in a Strong Diamond system, which might show about 8-12 HCP with 4+ hearts. Hands in this strength range are hardly ever going to be two-bid hands. So after any reasonably high-level competition you would have to make disproportionate use of pass. The other rebids may get used very occasionally - and would therefore be very descriptive when they do come up - but the vast majority of hands will not be further described. To put it another way, there will be fewer sequences in your system available for the genuine two-bid hands (because none of them start with 1H), so these will not be described so well.

In contrast, a "standard" 5-card major opening, with a range of 11-21 HCP or so, makes much fuller use of the two-bid sequences (arguably too much). The beauty of this bid is that it is on the one hand a nice homogeneous bid (partner knows about the 5-card suit immediately) but there is also plenty of potential for making descriptive rebids.

It's important not to confuse this with arguments about the frequency of the opening bid. Indeed, trying to analyse systems by looking at the frequencies of their opening bids is very unreliable. For example, suppose you were to play a 1C opening showing a balanced hand with 10-13 HCP. Then this has a frequency of about 15% in first seat, much higher than standard systems which typically have 1C openings with a frequency of 10% or less. However, this 1C consists of a single hand type with no two-bid hands, and so hardly any of opener's rebids are utilised. So we might say informally that "you are not opening 1C enough", but really this argument is not about pure frequency at all, rather the number of different hand types in the opening. You could easily add, say, all 20+ HCP hands to this 1C opening. Indeed this could result in quite a respectable system, as we shall see later.

DBT8: Homogeneity is Good

2007-02-14T22:59:00.000Z

Let's consider a particular opening bid, say 1H. A bidding system will typically require somewhere between 5% and 10% of hands to be opened 1H in first seat. Of course, if you were to choose 5% of hands at random, they wouldn't make a very good 1H bid: we have to choose them so that the opening bid provides useful information to partner. Particularly useful is if all the hands which are opened 1H share a property (or properties) in common, as then partner will be able to make deductions without having to wait for further clarification.

For example, suppose that our 1H bid promised exactly five hearts. Then if partner holds an average hand with four hearts, he can deduce that it is likely to be safe to compete to the three-level in hearts. This is based on the Law of Total Tricks, which admittedly is far from infallible, but is a good guide when you know exactly how many cards your partnership has in the suit.

It is fairly unusual to have a bid which shows exact length in the suit. More common would be a bid which shows five or more hearts. In this case, partner would still be justified in bidding to the three-level on an average hand with four hearts, but now if opener turns out to have more than five hearts there is a fair chance that bidding only to the three-level would be under-competing the hand. Similarly, if the 1H opening could occasionally be only a four-card suit, if responder still bids to the three-level there is a danger that this will be too high. Of course, there are many other factors which affect how high we should be competing, but trump length is very important, and so the more specific the information responder has about suit length, the better his chances of getting the decisions right. This is just part of the obvious general principle that a homogeneous bid - one where all the hands opened with that bid have some property in common - is good for providing information to responder. And the more specific the property is, the better.

Let's think a bit more about this 1H bid showing length in hearts. As mentioned already, in most systems the bid does not show exact length: rather there is a range of possible lengths. In this case, there are two properties of the opening bid which become important:

The minimum length promised by the opening bid; and
The average length promised by the opening bid.

For example, in Acol, where the minimum length for a 1H opening is 4 cards, the average length is close to 5. (I'm deliberately being a bit vague about what I mean by "average", but usually this would be interpreted as the arithmetic mean.) But other systems can have very different numbers - even if you consider only 4-card major systems, there is a lot of variety in how often 1H is opened on a 4-card suit.

This poses a problem for responder. If you are in a position where you have to make a decision without further help from opener, then you will have to decide - do you play opener for the minimum length, or for the average length in hearts? Playing opener for his average length will be right most of the time, but if he turns up with fewer cards than the average there is a danger that the partnership will be too high, or even playing in the wrong denomination. Whereas, if you anticipate opener holding his minimum length, you may very well be under-competing. There is not really any good solution to this, you are forced to hedge your bets.

But this is much more of a problem for some systems than for others. The key is this:

It helps to make the minimum length for your bids
as close to the average length as possible.

This is how you avoid responder's problem of what to play for.

And this explains the big advantage of playing 5-card majors.

5-card suits are much more common than 6-card or longer suits. So when you open 1H or 1S showing 5+ cards, the average length is still close to 5. The distinction between minimum length and average length therefore does not worry responder: he can happily play opener for a 5-card suit. From the point of view of homogeneity, a suit opening which promises 5+ cards is about as good as you can get, short of showing the exact length.

4-card opening bids are much worse in this respect. Assuming that you still open 1H or 1S when the major suit is five cards long, the average length for these opening bids is going to be closer to 5 than 4. This means that responder will find it difficult to judge hands with support for the major. (Of course the corresponding advantage that these systems have is that you get to find major-suit support more often in the first place.)

The worst possible case is if you play 4-card majors, always open your longest suit, and tend to open the lower of two 4-card suits. Then virtually the only time you open 1S on a 4-card suit is when you have precisely 4=3=3=3 shape. Here the average length is over one card more than the minimum length. Indeed, I would hardly say it is a homogeneous bid at all: it basically shows either a 4=3=3=3 hand or 5+ spades, and this is very bad news for responder since the first hand type is not particularly great for playing in spades at all, whereas the second type is excellent for spade contracts. How is he supposed to know what to do with spade support? I hope you would not be so foolish as to play this system - the balanced hands are so rare that it's much better to take them out of 1S somehow and guarantee five cards as the minimum. If you're going to play 4-card majors, you need to open them on four cards as often as you possibly can. This brings the average suit length down much closer to the minimum. This is another good reason why if you are playing a strong NT, it makes sense to open 1H or 1S on minimum hands with a 4-card major even if holding a longer minor.

The same principles apply when we are considering the strength promised by an opening bid, rather than the length. That is, we would ideally like to have a precise description of strength, but if forced to use a relatively wide range, we really want the minimum to be as close to the average as possible. For an opening bid which promises 12+ HCP or thereabouts, this usually happens fairly automatically, since hands with higher HCP values are less frequent. But it doesn't always work that way. For example, if you play a short 1C opening and a weak NT, the 1C opening is very often a "strong NT" hand type. This means that the average strength (perhaps it is more helpful to think of the mode here) is not so close to the minimum. Of course this analysis is rather too simplistic, as there are some definite advantages arising from the "multi-way" nature of this bid - opener is known to have either real clubs or extra strength - but having the most common hands so far away from minimum strength should still be a cause for concern.

System Regulations

2007-02-10T13:23:00.000Z

As you can see from this blog, I am fascinated by bidding theory. However, when it comes to actually sitting down at the table and playing the game, I do not believe that people should be allowed to experiment with unusual methods without restriction. System regulations are a necessary part of the game.

In an ideal world, two things would happen:

People would be allowed to play whatever methods they thought were best; and also
People would have the opportunity to come up with the best defences to all of their opponents' methods.

However, in practice these two things are incompatible. In most events, players do not find out what their opponents' methods are until just before they begin to play, and if these methods are sufficiently unusual there is not enough time to discuss an adequate defence.

So if the two objectives are incompatible, what do we do? The anti-regulation lobby would have us believe that freedom to choose our methods is the most important principle, and that opponents should try to cope with this as best as they can. I do not agree with this: if forced to choose, I think the right to be prepared for opponents' agreements is the more important. This may well involve "generic" defences which work against a variety of possible conventions. However, it is not reasonable to expect people to have generic defences for everything the opponents might want to throw at them.

Fortunately, system regulations offer a compromise. The people whose methods are disallowed might not see it as a compromise, but really it is:

Players may only play methods which are permitted by the system regulations; but
Players must be prepared to defend against all the permitted agreements.

From this we get the important principle of what the convention regulations should be:

The permitted methods should be precisely those things which it is reasonable to expect pairs to be prepared to defend against, given the amount of time available for discussion.

So for example, in a duplicate pairs event, there is virtually no time for discussion at all, so the permitted methods should only be those things which players are expected to already know their defences to. Whereas, in a knock-out teams event where players can find out their opponents' systems in advance, there can be a much wider range of agreements allowed. Of course it also depends a lot on how good the players involved are: there can be much greater expectations on players in a top-level event than those in a club event. So the principle of having multiple "levels" of system regulations, depending on the event, is a good one.

So, I am very much in favour of restrictions, provided that they are for the right reasons. The right reason for disallowing a convention is if it is considered to be so unusual that players would not know how to defend against it. Note that the important question is whether the opponents would know what their bids meant. There are some conventions which make life difficult for the opponents simply because they are obstructive - this should not be a matter for system regulations: provided that the opponents can understand the methods, they should be allowed. What really annoys me is when there is a convention which is not difficult to defend against (in terms of the opponents having agreements about what their bids mean), but which is disallowed for some other reason. This should not happen.

The other big problem with convention regulations is when they are poorly written. It is very important that the regulations are clear and consistently applied, since players must be able to know whether their conventions are allowed before turning up at the event. The worst possible thing is when different TDs have different views on what the regulations say. Fortunately, apart from a couple of well-known issues, the system regulations here in the EBU are largely free of serious problems, though there are a few little corners that I wish the L&E would get round to tidying up.

The EBU's system regulations are unusual in that they are extremely detailed. But in terms of how much is permitted, we seem to be fairly near the average. (North America, in particular, is much more conservative, whereas countries like Australia are more permissive.) In fact I would say that the EBU has got the level almost exactly right. If anything, the recent decision to use Level 4 in the EBU's competitions seems to me to allow a bit too much for duplicate events. I think it would be better for the game if the standard level for tournament play was somwhere between level 3 and level 4; the rest of level 4 would be allowed in teams events provided that those conventions were disclosed in advance.

At the very highest level, such as the world championships, I do think that agreements should be unrestricted. My argument here is simply that these events are planned so long in advance that players would have enough time to prepare for all of the opponents' systems. In other words, the "ideal world" scenario really ought to be achievable here. Some players might still complain that even with all the time available it is still not possible to develop defences which they consider to be good enough, but I think there comes a point where the organisers have to say: perfection might not be achievable, but there is enough time to be adequately prepared.

I've Learnt my Lesson

2007-02-09T19:27:00.000Z

I can usually be relied on to have an opinion about any convention, whether I've actually played it or not. But I feel particularly strongly about the ones that I have played, and decided that they aren't any good. Here are some conventions that I would never agree to play again.

Kickback

Do not, under any circumstances, agree to play this convention. The idea is that you use the bid above 4 of the trump suit to ask for key-cards. However, if this bid is a suit, it's often far too difficult to distinguish it from a natural bid in that suit. You could have detailed agreements to try and ensure you always knew which was which, but no matter how good the agreements are there always seems to be more potential for confusion. Besides, I don't rate key-card asks as being particularly fundamental to slam-bidding, certainly not enough to warrant having all this extra space given to them.

Rusinow (leading 2nd from honour sequences)

Most of the time this is OK; however there are some situations in which you will want to lead unsupported honours, and then Rusinow doesn't work so well. You could agree to make exceptions, for example in partner's suit. But defining these exceptions carefully enough is not so easy, and the supposed advantages of Rusinow over standard methods seem to me to be far too tenuous to warrant all the effort.

Raptor 1NT overcall (showing a 4-card major and a longer minor)

I actually play this at the moment with Mark, but I wouldn't want to play it with a new partner. The problem is obvious - what do you do with a hand suitable for a natural 1NT overcall? Well, either pass or double, presumably, but I really dislike both of these options.

More generally, I really hate playing methods which give me difficulties on hands which "standard" systems would have no problem with. It's incredibly frustrating to be playing some clever gadget, and then have to admit that if you were playing standard methods you would have had no problem at all, whereas your gadget has made the hand unbiddable.

So my policy is to only play gadgets if they come at little or no cost. It doesn't matter if they have compensating advantages - if a convention puts me at a clear disadvantage compared to standard methods on a common hand-type, then I don't like it. That's why I won't play Raptor.

3NT opening showing a 4-minor pre-empt

The more traditional "Gambling 3NT" is OK, but when the minor suit need not be solid it doesn't work so well. There is more variation in the hand types, and so continuations are more difficult. Partner might not even be able to tell which suit is held. The convention would probably work well enough if you had enough time to discuss all the follow-ups and pass/correct bids. But for such a low-frequency opening you probably don't want to put that amount of work in.

For similar reasons I dislike any high-level multi opening. Even playing the multi-2D, which I've been using regularly for a long time and comes up a lot, I worry about all the unclear sequences that it generates.

Gerber

OK, maybe this one's too obvious. We all know Gerber is a bad convention. But I agreed to play it with my partner in the local league because he really wanted to, and I wanted to keep my partner happy. What I learnt was:

Never agree to play Gerber,

even if it's just to keep partner happy.

DBT7: Balanced Hands Show Strength (part 2)

2007-01-22T21:42:00.000Z

Some systems are very good at showing strength on balanced hands. For example, many Italian pairs bid balanced hands something like this:

12-14 HCP: open 1-of-a-suit (usually 1C)
15-17 HCP: open 1NT
18-19 HCP: open 2D (showing exactly this hand)
20-21 HCP: open 2NT
22+ HCP: open 2C

Here, the strength of a balanced hand is never more than 2HCP above the minimum promised by the opening bid, even for very strong hands. This is taking the Balanced-Hands-Show-Strength principle to extremes, and of course most systems will not make it such a high priority. But even if you do not build your entire system around showing strength on balanced hands, you should still be aware of the hands where it is most important, which are those with a strength of about 15 or 16 HCP. On weaker hands there is rarely a problem, because unless you play very light openings, those hands will not be significantly better than a minimum opening bid. And once you increase the strength to 17 or 18 HCP, you start to reach hands which are usually good enough to take a second bid (though they can still be a problem if the intervention is high enough, as with the example in the previous post). So it is the hands in the middle, about 15-16 HCP, which are most likely to cause a problem.

Most weak NT systems violate Balanced-Hands-Show-Strength on these hands. Here is the very first example from part 2:

S KJ7
H KQT4
D 97
C AQ53

When we play a strong NT we can open 1NT and this is a very pure one-bid hand. When we play a weak NT we have to open 1C or 1H, and now it is a nightmare hand. Supposing for the moment that LHO overcalls 2S, what is going to happen now?

Well, if 2S gets passed back to us, we will have to pass it out. This hand is nowhere near worth a second bid over a 2S overcall. So it is up to partner to do something if he wants to be in game opposite a 15-16 HCP balanced hand. The problem is, if partner does do something, and finds that you actually have a weak unbalanced hand after all, you will not always have a good fit at the three-level. And if he does bid at the three level, are you invited to bid game with a balanced 15-count, or is it merely competitive? Responder really needs to have ways to do both things, which puts a lot of strain on your system.

This assumes that partner passed at his turn. But even if he made a bid, or perhaps a negative double, there still may not be any safety in us taking a second bid. In these situations, weak NT players often use opener's double to show a balanced hand (and at least 15 HCP). This gets the strength across, but it is rather dangerous since there is no guarantee that it is right for us to compete. If we had observed the Balanced-Hands-Show-Strength principle, and described the strength of these balanced hands already, then the double could be reserved for hands which genuinely wanted to compete.

People that do play Acol or K-S, or similar systems, will accept these disadvantages and hope to gain instead on other types of hands. The weak 1NT opening itself has many advantages, being both very descriptive and also a good pre-emptive bid. It is particularly useful in first seat, and when the vulnerability is favourable, because of the pre-emptive effect. But my feeling is that in other positions it comes nowhere near making up for failing to show strength on the stronger balanced hands.

But it is possible to play a weak NT without violating the Balanced-Hands-Show-Strength principle. In Fantunes, Millennium Club and Nightmare, a 1C opening shows a better-than-minimum hand: 15+ HCP if balanced and not much less than that if unbalanced. And so opening 1C does show the strength of hands in the 15-16 HCP range very well. It turns these "strong NT" hands back into pure one-bid hands, which is what they naturally are. Also many Strong Club systems do a similar thing (though they may promise slightly more strength with the 1C bid, which puts pressure on hands with 15 HCP). If you want to play a weak NT without giving yourself huge problems on the "strong NT" type, you should play a system like this.

DBT6: Balanced Hands Show Strength

2007-01-21T18:13:00.000Z

This is the companion to Unbalanced-Hands-Show-Shape. Showing shape is always a good thing, because fit is all-important in competitive auctions. But, as explained in that post, there are various reasons why showing shape is more important with unbalanced hands. In particular,

When you hold an unbalanced hand, your side's fit is most likely to be in your own long suits, so you need to tell partner what your long suits are. Whereas when you hold a balanced hand, your side's fit will be in partner's long suit.
Holding an unbalanced hand increases the chances of the deal being a big fit, and so increases the chances of there being a high-level competitive auction.

At the same time, it is more important to show strength when you hold a balanced hand than an unbalanced one. Before going into the reasons for this, we need to look at exactly what it means to "show" the strength of a hand.

The problem with trying to evaluate the strength of a given hand is that everything depends so much on the context - there is a big difference between "offensive strength" and "defensive strength", and both of these are significantly affected by how well the hand fits with partner's. Even so, we have to be able to speak about the "strength" of an individual hand. Without wanting to go into detail about hand evaluation (personally I think that coming up with detailed formulae is neither worthwhile nor particularly interesting), everyone would at least agree that the strength of a hand depends on both the high cards and the distribution. But the value of high cards depends much less on the context than the value of distribution, and so when we talk about "showing strength" this will mostly based on high-card strength.

Now clearly, a 1NT opening bid with a narrow range, such as the Standard American 15-17 HCP, does show strength very precisely. The minimum strength and the maximum strength are both useful pieces of information for responder. However, a bid which has a much wider range, like a Standard American 1C opening (showing 12-21 HCP or so) is still considered to be a good description of strength for hands which are near the lower end of the range. The reason is that partner will play you for a hand of minimum strength unless you do something which shows otherwise. So the fact that you have at least 12 HCP is very useful information for partner - it means that he can bid a game if he holds a similar amount of strength himself - whereas the lack of a maximum is not a problem because he was not going to play you for much more than the minimum strength anyway. This works fine, provided that there is enough space to tell partner when you do in fact have a better-than-minimum hand. (In the case of a 1NT opening bid you obviously don't have enough space to do this, so it is necessary to have a narrow range.)

So, the statement of our new Balanced-Hands-Show-Strength principle is that when we have a balanced hand, we should try to make sure that partner's idea of our minimum strength is as close to the true value as possible.

Why is this so important? Well, as mentioned above, if we have substantially more than the minimum strength we have promised, then partner will not play us for a hand that strong. This would not be a problem if we could make a rebid which showed our extra strength. However, the important thing about balanced hands is:

Balanced hands are not two-bid hands.

As was said in the discussion of One-Bid-Or-Two, the stronger and more distributional a hand is, the more likely it is to be a two-bid hand. Since a balanced hand is, by definition, not at all distributional, it would have to be extremely strong in order to be a genuine two-bid hand.

S QJ9
H AT2
D AK5
C KQ92

This hand is a full 19 HCP, but if you open 1C and the opponents reach 3S before you have the chance to rebid, you are faced with a difficult problem. Doubling or bidding 3NT could very easily be wrong, showing that this is not a genuine two-bid hand. But neither is it safe to pass. The problem is precisely that we have not shown strength with the opening bid - partner could easily have enough for game, but he would have no way of knowing.

Fortunately, if we have a very strong balanced hand like this one, high-level interference is quite rare. But still, it's extremely difficult to cope with when it does happen, if we have not already shown strength. With an even stronger hand we would probably have to take a second bid regardless - there comes a point when any type of hand is strong enough to be a two-bid hand - but the vast majority of balanced hands are one-bid hands, and for those we really want to show strength immediately.

DBT5: Different Ways of Showing Shape

2007-01-20T15:37:00.000Z

As explained in the previous post, showing shape with the opening bid is very important, particularly for unbalanced hands. The question is, what is the best way to do this? The most common approaches are either to show length in a particular suit, or to show a balanced hand (i.e. length in every suit). "Natural" systems use only these two methods, whereas other systems may show shape in more unusual ways.

It's important to remember that the reason we show shape is in order to find a fit. (Indeed, we need to be able to find out both where the fit is and how good it is, though these things generally come together.) So, the best shape-showing bids are the ones which maximise partner's chances of knowing (or finding out) what our fit is. Some bids which appear to show shape are actually not particularly helpful for finding fits. The most extreme sort of example is if your system has a bid which shows a hand of 5-4-3-1 shape, but does not indicate which suit is which. If your only aim was to reveal the complete shape of the hand then this would be a fine way to start - later bids could reveal the order of the suits - but for finding fits quickly it's absolutely hopeless.

The standard method of bidding unbalanced hands is to start by bidding your longest suit. One obvious reason why this is sensible is that, a priori, this suit is the one most likely to be your side's best fit. However not all systems work this way. An alternative is "canapé" style, where we bid the second-longest suit if holding a two-suited hand. Pure canapé is rather uncommon, but many systems vary between opening the longest and the second-longest suit depending on the hand type.

The obvious problem with canapé is, how are you going to find out whether you have a fit in your longest suit? You can't rely on partner to bid the suit, because your side might have a fit there even if he does not have a very remarkable holding. Essentially, the only way you can discover a fit in your longest suit is if you are able to bid it yourself. And this may not always be possible. Unless you have a pure two-bid hand, you might not be able to take a second bid at all.

But this doesn't necessarily mean that canapé is a bad idea on one-bid hands. Take a hand like this, for example:

S Q4
H KQ52
D 82
C AJ984

Would you rather open this 1H, showing 4+ hearts, or 1C, showing 4+ clubs? There is a lot to be said for the 1H opening. If partner will expect four cards in whatever suit you bid, then the 1H opening is no less descriptive than 1C. And major-suit fits are more important than minor-suit fits. If 1C did not promise four cards (say you were playing a more artificial system) then it would be even more clear that 1H was a better initial description of the hand. The problems, if there are any, come when you try to refine the description of your hand with a rebid: you would like to be able to show both of your long suits. But since this is a pure one-bid hand, you only expect to get one chance, and so it is reasonable to bid on the assumption that you will only get to show one suit. In that case, showing four hearts must be at least as good as showing four clubs.

So, concealing your longest suit works fairly well when you have a pure one-bid hand, provided that the bid you choose to make is still a good description (if you were concealing a five-card major, it would be much worse). The real problems with canapé come when you have a hand which may be worth a second bid, and particularly if it is neither a pure one-bid hand nor a pure two-bid hand, but somewhere in between.

S 5
H AK93
D QT4
C AQJ62

You open this 1H, LHO bids 2S and it is passed back to you. Now you certainly don't want to pass, but what do you do? Well, this would depend on your methods, and there are many different possibilities, but nothing looks particularly attractive. The natural method would be to show the club suit directly, but this gives up on playing in diamonds or defending spades. Alternatively you could double, if this is defined as take-out, but now you haven't revealed your longest suit and so your continuations will be hampered by having to find this out. You also have the difficulty of trying to distinguish this type of hand from one with five hearts, if those are also opened 1H. Indeed, it seems that your initial shape-showing bid is not helping you at all: if you had opened with a strength-showing bid like a Precision 1C, then a take-out double of 2S would describe the shape of this hand equally well as anything you can do after opening 1H.

Similarly, if the opponents instead overcall in diamonds, there is still a fair chance that we have a fit in clubs, but it is dangerous to look for one because if a fit is not found then we have nowhere else to go.

This exposes a basic problem with not showing your longest suit the first time: if you get the chance to take a second bid, then you will not know what to do. On the one hand, you would like to show your longest suit, because this is by far the suit most likely to be a fit: but on the other hand, you can't commit to playing in your longest suit, because there is no guarantee that it will be right.

And so, if you see a pair playing canapé, or other methods involving not showing the longest suit with the opening bid, they will generally do so only with

pure one-bid hands, where the problems with taking a second bid are not important; and/or
pure two-bid hands, in cases where it is almost certain that a good description can be given with the second bid.

For example, playing strong NT and 4-card majors, it is reasonable to open 1H with a hand like my first example above. But we would never open 1H on a similar hand with an extra king, because then it might be worth two bids. (In fact it might well be opened 1NT in that case, in order to turn it back into a one-bid hand.) Similarly, canapé often goes together with a strong club, where the natural suit openings show fairly weak hands, which are unlikely to be worth more than one bid. Though here, hands near the top of the range for a limited opening can still be a problem.

The more traditional method of opening the longest suit really comes into its own on these difficult "in-between" hands. If the auction goes in such a way that it is too dangerous to take a second bid, then at least we have already shown the most important feature of our hand. Whereas if we do get another chance, we now have plenty of flexibility in deciding what is the next most important feature to show. Flexibility is the key: having shown the longest suit already, we could later decide to bid a second suit naturally, but we could also choose to double for take-out, or bid no-trumps, or repeat the first suit, or even make a conservative pass. If we had bid some other suit first, then these options might still be available, but they would not all tell partner about our long suit, so we would have failed to give such a good description of the hand in our two bids, as demanded by the One-Bid-Or-Two principle.

Of course there are other good reasons why you might want to open the longest suit. For example, it increases the average length shown by your opening bids. This is part of a much bigger topic on homogeneity that I will come to later.

Defence to Artificial 1m Openings

2007-01-13T21:55:00.000Z

Most regular partnerships will have a defence to a strong 1C opening - there's a space for that on the convention card. But what about openings which don't promise such a strong hand? There are many conventions of this sort which may or may not have the suit bid, for example:

A "short" 1C opening (playing 5-card majors and 4-card 1D)
A 1D opening showing either diamonds or clubs (in a Strong Club system)
A multi-way (e.g. Polish) 1C opening

These conventions can cause much confusion when they come up, if opponents have not properly discussed their defence. I have a defence which applies to all of them. (It doesn't apply to conventions which promise a suit other than the one bid, such as a 1D opening showing hearts.) The defence is called:

"Treat as Natural"

And it's very simple: the idea is our bids have exactly the same meanings as if their opening was natural.

I do mean exactly. So for example, if they open an artificial 1C,

(1C) : Dbl = take-out of clubs;
(1C) : 2C = Michaels (assuming you play this over a natural 1C);
(1C) : 1H : (1S) : 2C = cue-bid showing heart support.

Now, the main advantage of this defence is in being confident that we know what we are doing, not just with the overcalls but with all the continuations as well. But I believe it's also a good defence in the theoretical sense. It's important not to get carried away with crazy defences to these sorts of opening bids. The main weakness of nebulous opening bids is that they allow the defenders to get into the auction easily and reach their best spot. The opening side can't do much about this, because they are relatively unlikely to be able to make a pre-emptive bid before it is revealed what opener has. (Contrast this with a weak 1NT opening - made on a hand type often included in these artificial 1m bids - which often manages to keep the defenders out of the auction completely.) So we exploit this weakness by bidding constructively. Though having said that, it is also a good idea to make pre-emptive overcalls a little more freely than we would over a natural opening bid.

Of course, if you play the "Treat as Natural" defence you cannot show a hand with length in the suit bid by opener. Or at least, you can't show it immediately. If you hold this hand, you have to pass initially and hope to be able to show it later. This is, again, exactly what you would do over a natural opening bid, although the situation does not come up so often in that case. The general principle is that if a cue-bid on the first round would have been artificial, then a pass and later action shows length in that suit. So for example:

(1C) : p : (1H) : p , (1S) : 2C = natural clubs, decent hand;
(1C) : p : (1S) : p , (2S) : X = take-out of spades, implying some length in clubs.

However if partner has bid in the meantime then the situation may not be so clear. This sort of auction is particularly important:

(1C) : p : (p) : 1H , (p) : 2C

Is 2C natural here, or is it a good raise of hearts? Both meanings are useful. I have a trick for this situation, which is that when we pass over a minor opening and partner bids a major suit, bidding opener's minor is natural, but bidding the other minor shows a good raise of partner's suit - the reason being that if we had a hand worth a bid in the other minor, we could have overcalled on the previous round.

Of course, in the spirit of the "Treat as Natural" defence, all such tricks apply equally after a genuinely natural opening. Whatever you agree over natural openings also applies to the artificial ones, and vice versa.

All of this applies when you are on opener's right, as well. Not only that, if they play a 1D response to 1C which is a sort of negative or relay, we go ahead and treat that as natural as well. Though this does mean you need to know what you play in sequences like

(1C) : p : (1H) : ...

A sensible approach is to play 2C and 2H both as natural here, and that fits in well if 1C is artificial. On the other hand, when the response is 1D there is a lot to be said for playing 2D (or 2C, or both!) as Michaels. A double traditionally shows the two unbid suits, but I like to define it as "take-out of the suit doubled", i.e. take-out of hearts in the sequence above. This makes it clear that a response of 2C is natural, whereas 2H would be an artificial cue (even if LHO makes a bid). Indeed, all continuations are the same as if we had doubled a 1H opening.

DBT4: Unbalanced Hands Show Shape

2007-01-12T19:41:00.000Z

Let's restrict our attention to constructive opening bids (as opposed to pre-empts) and consider how to define these in order to describe hands as well as possible. For the moment we'll ignore the main other desirable quality for opening bids, which is that we want them to be obstructive to the opponents.

Bidding systems generally define constructive opening bids in terms of just two things:

The shape of the hand (ie. the lengths of each of the suits); and
The overall strength of the hand.

Of course, by describing only these two things we are leaving out much of the detail of the hand, since we will not show anything about how the high cards are distributed amongst the suits. But because we have so few different opening bids to choose from, it is simply not possible describe that sort of detail.

Indeed, even when we restrict attention to shape and strength, there is only a very limited amount of information that we can convey with the opening bid. So we have to decide what is most important. And for unbalanced hands, it turns out that showing shape is most important. That is, while any opening bid will generally tell you something about strength (a standard opening bid might promise a minimum of about 12 points), your main concern should be to describe shape as effectively as possible.

The reason for this is that, according to the Think-Competitive principle, we have to anticipate what is going to happen in a competitive auction. And in competitive auctions, fit is all-important. This is most famously stated in the "Law of Total Tricks": if our side is bidding one suit and the opponents have bid another, then the decision as to whether to compete over an opponent's bid should depend almost entirely on how many cards we have in our suit and how many cards the opponents have in their suit. Strength hardly makes any difference to this decision (though of course it may be important if there are other decisions to be made, such as whether to bid a game). So if we are to get these competititive auctions right, it is vital that we know how good our fit is. In order to do that, we have to show shape.

When we hold an unbalanced hand, this increases the chance that we have a big fit - and also increases the chance that there will be a high-level competitive auction. Furthermore, if our side does have a big fit then it is likely to be in one of our long suits, and so it is essential that we tell partner which suits we have. This gives us our new principle: "Unbalanced-Hands-Show-Shape".

For one-bid hands, then, the situation is very simple: we have to try and describe the shape of the hand as well as possible with the opening bid. In this respect, opening bids which promise long suits are very good: a 5-card 1S opening is an excellent description of a hand which has five spades. The difficulty is in being able to give good descriptions for as many different types of hand as possible, and for one-bid hands this should be done on the assumption that we will only get one chance.

For two-bid hands things are more complicated. We must still try to show the shape of the hand, but now we are going to get two chances to do this. Perhaps this means that we do not need to worry about showing shape so much with the opening bid?

In fact this is unlikely to be true. It will usually take two shape-showing bids to describe the shape of an unbalanced hand well. For example if we hold a two-suiter, we need one bid to show the first suit and another to show the second suit. With a more flexible hand such as

S AQT53
H KJ3
D 7
C AK64

we can show our long suit (spades) with the first bid and then hopefully double for take-out the next time (if opponents bid our short suit). Particularly with these flexible hands, a double is often by far the safest action in a high-level competitive auction, and so if we had not shown our long suit with the first bid, we would be struggling to show it later.

Occasionally, though, we come across a hand like this:

S AKJ9532
H A2
D 4
C KQ9

Suppose we start by showing shape on this hand with a 1S bid, and the opponents bid up to the 3-level or 4-level. This isn't a disaster, since the spade suit is easily good enough to rebid. But rebidding spades doesn't quite express how good this hand is. Look what happens instead if we are playing a strong club or multi-way club system and open this hand 1C. Again, the excellent spade suit means that we have a comfortable rebid even if the bidding comes back to us at a rather high level. But, having rebid 4S or whatever, we now feel that the hand is described perfectly: we have described the shape and the strength. So this particular sort of unbalanced hand - a strong major 1-suiter - is actually very good for strength-showing openings. This can be viewed as being an exception to the Unbalanced-Hands-Show-Shape principle, but really what is going on is that it is a pure two-bid hand and you know you will be able to show shape very precisely with your second bid. Note that a 1-suited hand with a long minor is not quite so good, because it may not be advisable to bid your suit on the next round if this would result in missing 3NT.

The Siege 1D Opening

2007-01-11T17:05:00.000Z

Playing 5-card majors, we have to decide what to open on a balanced hand outside the range for 1NT. In the most widely-played systems, these hands are shared between the 1C and 1D openings. But an alternative approach is to put all these balanced hands into 1C. This is what we do in Siege (as described on Mike Bell's system page here). The result is that 1D promises an unbalanced hand (even 5-3-3-2 shapes with 5 diamonds are generally opened 1C).

We also open 1D on any hand with both minors, even if the club suit is longer. As well as being more descriptive (showing four cards with the first bid instead of two), opening 1D on these hands makes it easier to find a rebid. It also helps the 1C opening a little, since a 2D rebid is freed up for some alternative meaning.

In fact, Siege is far from the only system which uses this sort of 1D opening. There are other very similar short club systems, such as the one played by Welland/Fallenius which Siege was originally based on. And the same 1D opening can also be played as part of a strong club or multi-way club system. It is an essential part of Millennium Club, for example, and I like to use it in Polish Club as well.

The best thing about this 1D opening is that it promises a very suitable hand for playing in diamonds - much more so than a standard 1D opening which could often be weak and balanced. Our 1D opening can be raised almost as freely as a major-suit opening. In particular, a weakish hand with 4 diamonds and a 4-card major can normally afford to raise diamonds immediately rather than bidding the major, since if a major suit does exist it will not be as good as the diamond fit (except in the rare case that opener has a 4-4-4-1 hand). It is good to have several different ways of raising diamonds available, for example:

2D = weakish with 3 or 4 diamonds;
2NT = either a very weak raise, or a game-forcing raise;
3C = invitational raise;
3D = weakish with 4+ diamonds;
3M/4C = splinter.

The continuations after a 1D opening make use of the fact that opener will not have a balanced hand. After a 1H response (which is natural), we use the spare 1NT rebid to distinguish between the various types of minor two-suiters that opener might have:

1NT = both minors, with clubs at least as long as diamonds;
2C = both minors, with diamonds at least as long as clubs.

And so we can usually find our best fit when responder is giving preference.

Over a 1S response it is more useful to use the extra bid available to show hearts, solving the rebid problem that we have holding five diamonds and four hearts in standard methods. So we play:

1NT = both minors, either suit may be longer;
2C = hearts.

The advantage of using 1NT to show both minors, rather than the natural 2C, is so that when responder is (say) 2-3 in the minors with 8 or 9 high-card points he can rebid 2C, keeping the auction alive in case opener has a strong hand. In standard methods after 1D:1S,2C you might give false preference to 2D on this sort of hand, but this is not so attractive in Siege since opener could have only four diamonds.

We also have a 2NT rebid available, and can use this to help solve some difficult problems after a 1-of-a-major reponse:

2NT = Good hand with 6+ diamonds, denies 3-card support for partner's major unless intending to force to game;
3D = Good hand with 6+ diamonds and 3-card support for partner's major (but not forcing).

Opener's raise of a major-suit response to the two-level will frequently be made with only 3-card support. For this reason, when holding a minimum hand with 3=3=5=2 shape we can choose to open 1D, intending to raise a major-suit response. In principle this is the only time that 1D can be opened on a balanced hand in Siege.

DBT3: One Bid or Two? (part 2)

2007-01-04T17:45:00.000Z

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.

DBT2: One Bid or Two?

2007-01-04T01:12:00.000Z

Suppose you deal yourself the following hand:

S KJ7
H KQT4
D 97
C AQ53

Let's say you're playing a strong no-trump opening, and so you open 1NT. Now suppose LHO bids 2S. and this is passed back to you. What do you do?

Pass looks pretty clear, doesn't it?

Suppose instead that LHO had overcalled 3S, would that make any difference? Well, no, now it would be insane to do anything other than pass. What about 4S? Again pass is obvious.

Of course the reason that you pass so happily in each case is that the opening 1NT bid has already described your hand very well. If it was correct for your side to do something, then your partner should have done it already. So I call this hand a "one-bid" hand: you're not planning to take a second bid (or make a double) unless forced to do so.

Contrast this with the following hand:

S AQ9832
H AKJT4
D 8
C 4

You deal and open 1S. LHO overcalls 2D and it comes back to you. Now maybe your choice of bid is not completely obvious, but what is clear is that you must show hearts in some way, describing your hand as a good two-suiter. Similarly if LHO had bid 3D, you would still rebid hearts at your turn. An if LHO had bid 4d? It still must be right to bid hearts. You can probably see where I'm going with this: this hand is a perfect example of a "two-bid" hand.

Perhaps this looks like a completely trivial observation, but I've found that the difference between one-bid and two-bid hands is fundamental to just about everything to do with the theory of opening bids.

Obviously the two hands above are very "pure" examples, in that the decision as to whether to take another bid was pretty much independent of the level of the opponents' intervention. More often you will be faced with a hand which is happy to take a second bid if the opponents interfere at a low level (particularly if they bid our shortest suit), but which is not good enough to take a second bid if the intervention is sufficiently high.

Note also that whether a hand is a one-bid or a two-bid hand may depend on the bidding system. For example, if you held the first hand and were playing a weak no-trump, you would have to open it 1C (or perhaps 1H), but now you would not feel that you had really described your hand until you had rebid in no-trumps. Even so, it is often helpful to describe hands as "one-bid" or "two-bid" hands independently of the system being used. My second example is probably worth two bids no matter what system is being played. Whereas a flat 12-count is only ever going to be a one-bid hand in competition. Clearly, the important factors are the shape and the strength of the hand. The stronger or more distributional a hand is, the more likely it is to be a two-bid hand.

How should all this affect our choice of bid? I think the conclusion is fairly obvious:

When you have a one-bid hand, you should aim to describe it as well as possible in one bid.
When you have a two-bid hand, you should aim to describe it as well as possible in two bids.

Of course, this may be too simplistic in many cases. For instance, if you have one of those hands which may or may not be worth a second bid depending on what interference you get, then you will want to describe it quite well with the first bid, while still leaving yourself easy ways to refine the description with a rebid if the auction allows. Still, the basic principle is very important. I will refer to it as the One-Bid-Or-Two principle.

Here is a very simple example: suppose you have to choose an opening bid with the following hand, playing a natural 5-card major system:

S AKJ73
H J4
D -
C KQJ972

Your choice is between 1C and 1S. Since 1S promises five cards in that suit, whereas a 1C opening only promises three, it might seem like the 1S opening is a better description. But that ignores the fact that this hand is very definitely a two-bid hand, and so you should choose the opening bid which allows you to describe the hand as accurately as possible with two bids. The way to do this is to open 1C: you will virtually always be able to rebid comfortably in spades, and this will inform partner that the club suit is longer. (If the spade suit and diamond suit were switched then it would not be so clear, since while the hand would still be a two-bid hand, it might not be so easy to give a good description with those two bids.)

Finally, is there such a thing as a three-bid hand? Well, not really. That would only make sense if the opponents interfered over our opening bid and then interfered again over our rebid. Since opponents don't tend to do that very often, it's not something which is very important to consider. Indeed, if the opponents are going to interfere then the worst case is when they reach their highest level immediately. So the important thing is whether a hand is good enough to take the second bid. Hence the "One-Bid-Or-Two" distinction.

David's Bidding Theory: Introduction

2007-01-03T23:44:00.000Z

Bidding theory is a huge subject because there are so many different auctions possible. If you're given the first few bids in the auction, you can always ask the question, what are the best meanings to give to the various possibilities for the next call? Depending on what the auction has been, it may be that natural continuations are best; or maybe you should make use of some artificial ideas such as transfers or relays or multi-way bids - or anything else you can think of. Serious partnerships could spend a huge amount of time deciding what they should do in all these different situations.

But there is one situation which is much more important than any other. That is, how will you define your opening bids? This is the aspect of bidding theory that I will be taking about in this series of posts. The opening bids are essentially what determine your "basic system", and I will be discussing what makes some systems better than others.

Let's start with one of the commonest mistakes made by amateur bidding theorists.

When you open the bidding, you can't be sure how the auction will turn out. But there are two main possibilities: either your side will have the auction to yourselves, or the opponents will come in and you will have a competitive auction. Which of these possibilities should you be more worried about?

Well, perhaps the correct answer is "it depends", but most of the time there is no doubt: competitive auctions are the important ones. The reason is simple: it's harder to reach the right contract in a competitive auction, because you have to worry about what the opponents are doing, and you usually have less space available. So, if your system works reasonably well in competitive auctions, it's can't be too bad when the opponents are silent. The converse is not true: if you come up with a set of responses which assume the opponents will be silent, it might all fall apart if they start bidding. Also, competitive auctions tend to be faster than non-competitive ones. If the opponents do not bid then a poorly defined opening bid can be corrected by a subsequent rebid, but if the auction is competitive then by the time you get to make your rebid it may already be too late.

The only time you might be more worried about constructive auctions is when the opening bid itself consumes a lot of space - particularly if it promises a good hand, as with a natural 2NT opening bid.

Admittedly, if you look at a book which describes a particular system, you will probably find that most of it is devoted to non-competitive auctions. That is the way it should be, since you can't play a system unless you know what to do in constructive auctions. Even so, it's the competitive auctions which will decide whether the system is a good one or not. I'll call this principle "Think-Competitive".

No doubt if you're reading this you will have known this principle already. But ignoring competitive auctions is a fairly easy mistake to make. I've often seen systems suggested where a 1C opening is made on a variety of possible hands, and the idea is to reveal which hand type is held with the rebid. Such systems often violate the Think-Competitive principle: if the opponents interfere at a high level, it may be too dangerous for opener to describe his hand. It is of course possible to create a workable multi-way 1C opening, but you have ensure that you can cater for all the various hand types in competition. More on this later.

Alerting of Doubles

2007-01-02T23:40:00.000Z

Bridge regulations vary from country to country. Here in England our Laws and Ethics Committee is particularly keen on coming up with regulations, and as a result we seem to have far more regulations than anywhere else. Fortunately the vast majority of these regulations are very sensible. But inevitably the L&E occasionally makes a mistake. I'd like to talk about what I think is the worst mistake the L&E has made recently.

The rules for alerting of doubles changed in August 2006. The main change was for doubles of natural suit bids: we now must alert these doubles unless they are for take-out. (Before August, the expected meaning of a double was penalties if partner had already made a bid.) I feel that these new rules are a disaster. Admittedly they're not much worse than the old rules - and many players might actually find them better - but the problem is that the old rules were awful as well. And now that we've had to change from one to the other, it's become apparent just how awful both sets of rules are.

The problem is that the EBU rules are primarily designed for simple auctions. Suppose we take a simple sequence like 1S : (2D) : Dbl. You will almost certainly find that:
(i) Everyone knows what their agreements are in this sequence; and
(ii) Everyone knows whether their agreements are alertable.
And so here the alerting regulations work quite well. But in more complicated auctions, both of these things might no longer be true.

People hardly ever have explicit agreements about doubles in complicated auctions. They therefore have to work out the meaning of a double from general principles or from previous experience of similar situations. This causes problems in trying to alert correctly. For instance, what do you do if you're not completely sure what partner's double means? Note that this is much less of a problem for alerting of bids, since even if you're not sure what the bid means, it's usually fairly clear whether the bid is natural or not. Deciding between take-out and non-take-out doubles is much harder.

The other problem is that even if you know what the double means, it's easy to get the alerting wrong. For a start there are some counter-intuitive positions. For example, a double of a natural suit bid is not alertable if it's for take-out, but it's easy to miss the fact that this does not apply to an auction like (1NT) : p : (2C) : p , (2D) : p : (p) : Dbl (because although you are making a take-out double of diamonds, the 2D bid was actually artificial). Also many people forget to alert doubles which are "obviously" penalties, such as (1NT) : Dbl : (2D) : Dbl or 1H : (1S) : 2H : (2S) , 3D : (3S) : Dbl. And the EBU rules make a fine distinction between "take-out" (usually not alertable) and "competitive" (alertable), which many people do not understand.

Admittedly, getting the alerting wrong does not always lead to problems with misinformation or unauthorised information. But it would still be much better if the rules were easier to get right.

Some other countries have the rule that no doubles are to be alerted. This is obviously much better from the point of view of understanding what the rule is. But it means that opponents are not warned about unexpected agreements.

So is there a better way? I think there is.

The point is that the unexpected agreements for which alerts are useful nearly all come in very simple auctions - and these are the simple auctions in which the current EBU rules work well. Whereas, in more complicated auctions there are hardly any agreements which are sufficiently unexpected that an alert is really necessary. So the plan is to use something like the current EBU rules for simple auctions, and change to the "no alert" rule for more complicated auctions. The difficulty is defining what "simple" means in a way that people would understand.

Fortunately, the simple agreements that we're interested in are really simple. In fact they can be limited to just four or five specific auctions. So what we can do is replace the four general rules in the current Orange Book with a similar number of rules each dealing with a specific sequence. Note that it's much easier to learn a rule about a specific sequence than a general rule covering lots of sequences. For example, while most people don't understand all the implications of the current rule about alerting doubles of natural suit bids, they do generally remember that negative doubles are no longer alertable.

The situations where I would have alerting are:

(i) Doubles of natural suit opening bids below 3NT. [Rule: Alert if the double is not for take-out.]

(ii) Doubles of natural 1NT or 2NT opening bids. [Rule: Alert if the double is not for penalties.]

(iii) After an opening bid and a natural suit overcall from opener's LHO below 3NT, a double by opener's partner. [Rule: Announce as "negative" if the double is for take-out; do not alert or announce if the double is for penalties; alert any other meaning.]

(iv) After an opening bid at the 1-level and a pass from opener's LHO, the double of a natural suit response (or raise) below 3NT. [Rule: Alert if the double is not for take-out.]

Note that in (i), (ii) and (iv), nearly everyone plays the non-alertable meaning for the bid, so most players would not even need to know these rules. The important rule to know would be number (iii).

[I would also have to make an exception for "anti-lead-directing" doubles (which are currently alertable even above 3NT) because these are particularly unexpected. But this is probably the only exception which is necessary.]

This was the specific suggestion that I sent in to the EBU. But what is more important than the specific suggestion is the general idea that in most auctions, only very unusual doubles should be alertable. Any regulation which did this would be an improvement on the EBU's ideas. The ACBL regulations do in fact work this way: in some sense my suggestion is simply a more precise version of the ACBL's rules.

I'm still hoping the L&E will concede that they got it wrong.

System Preferences and Prejudices

2006-12-29T01:21:00.000Z

To start things off, here are the systems that I play (or used to play), and my general thoughts about them. Later on I'll go into a lot more detail about the reasons for my preferences. But for now I'll just list the systems and tell you which are my favourites and which are, well ...

Acol (weak NT)

This is the system I grew up playing, and so I'm fairly comfortable playing it with any random English partner. As an undergraduate I played Acol for four years with my regular partner David Hodge. It is a perfectly respectable system.

Still, as a bidding theorist I don't like Acol: it seems to me to be terribly badly designed. I intend to use this blog to explain why Acol is bad as much as I possibly can! But that will have to wait for the moment.

Note that old-fashioned Acol contained a number of silly ideas such as Strong Twos which have been almost universally discarded by modern expert players. When I say I don't like Acol I'm not talking about those old-fashioned methods. It's the fundamental combination of weak NT and 4-card majors which causes all the problems. (Some people play Acol with a strong NT, which is not so bad, but I'll treat this as a different system.)

SAYC and 2/1

These are the most popular systems in America and so you come across them a lot online. I suppose SAYC is the "basic standard" whereas 2/1 is "expert standard". But of the two, I actually prefer SAYC, since I've always felt that 2/1 is too inflexible.

Precision

This is what I play with Mark Reeve in junior events. In fact we play a very complicated version including "symmetric relay". The complexity of it hasn't really been a problem for us - we both seem to have a good memory for that sort of thing. Though I've never been completely satisfied with the relays: I'm sure it must be possible to do better.

Playing Precision has been very interesting, but I've grown to dislike the basic structure of the system. Still, it's fun to play and I'm not going to ask Mark to change any time soon.

Strong + 4

This is always fun to play. I probably wouldn't play it in a really serious partnership since it pretty much forces you to adopt an aggressive style of bidding, which doesn't naturally suit me. But I believe it's an improvement on Acol if played sensibly. I play strong + 4 with Dan Mcintosh and the Manchester crowd.

Polish Club (WJ or similar)

Now this is more like it. I intend to spend a lot of time explaining why PC is so good. Dan Neill has translated the notes for WJ05 into English and if you're interested in bidding systems this is a must-read.

Siege

This is Mike Bell's pet system, though I've had some input as well. It features a "short" 1C opening (used on all balanced hands outside the 1NT range) and a 1D opening which promises an unbalanced hand with 4+ diamonds. This was originally based on the system played by Welland and Fallenius, but a lot of details have been added. I play it with Mike and we think it's rather good.

Millennium Club

This is a multi-way club system played with a weak NT, as opposed to Polish which uses a strong NT. The 1C opening then promises 15+ HCP (or equivalent), though it's not really like a normal strong club. The name "Millennium Club" comes from the system book by Lyle Poe. His system includes transfer responses to 1C. I'm not so sure that those responses are a good idea and prefer to play without them. But the real beauty of the system is in the opening bids. I feel that MC is the best way of playing a weak NT.

First Post

2006-12-29T00:47:00.000Z

Hi, and welcome to my bridge blog.

My name is David Collier, and I'm still a junior as far as bridge is concerned (though not for much longer, sadly). I'm a fairly competent player but not a real expert - what I'm really interested in is the theory of the game. So this blog is intended to be a place to explain my ideas. There will be a lot of bidding theory, and a lot of discussion of bridge laws and regulations. You're not so likely to see discussion of particular hands.

You can often find me playing on BridgeBase Online as col3435. I also post to BridgeBase Forums and bridgetalk.com as DavidC.