DBT9: Homogeneity is Bad!

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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.