Brian Davies
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How you get excited will depend upon your hand and the exact auction.
But these shapely hand can be worth a lot of additional playing strength – particularly if partner has a fit for one of your suits. The flip side is that shapely hands are often worth little in defence – the opponent’s might be ruffing the high cards in your long suits.
Often these hands become competitive and you need to judge how far to compete and this where the adage is most often used.
After a one-level response, I think that reversing with a 15-count without extra shape is dangerous – particularly if you sometimes respond with 5. Personally, I like to keep my reverses up to strength – ideally 17+, or a good 16.
After a two-level response, promising 10 (or a good 9) you can reverse with 15+ and this should be forcing to game.
As always, you need to consider whether your partner’s bid improved your hand (consider upgrading) or weakened you hand (you might downgrade).
Not everyone plays Benji, but I wouldn’t use it on this hand even if we were playing Benji. It is certainly an eight playing trick hand, but the problem with opening this with a Benji 2C is that we have two suits to show and the bidding might be uncomfortably high before we can show the spade suit.
My plan is to open 1D and then rebid spades, twice if possible to get across my shape. In fact the 1H response improves my king of hearts and I now think that I am worth a game-forcing jump to 2S. My auction would be:
1D-1H
2S(1)-3S(2)
4NT(3)-5H(4)
6S(1) Forcing to game
(2) Agrees spades forcing to game and suggesting slam ambitions
(3) Roman Key-card Blackwood
(4) Two key cards.I think that it is bad form to psyche or take extremely light actions on a set of practice hands!
A double followed by a cue-bid of their heart suit is one way to get across that you are very strong. But in some ways the opponents have helped you – they have a diamond fit and you have a three-card diamond holding that you are worried about. You have good reason to think that partner will be short in diamonds, which is just the news that you need!
The jump to show a solid suit is a standard part of Acol (and other systems too I think), but I must admit that I missed it when I played the set hands. There can be a definite advantage in unambiguously setting trumps which will compensate for taking up an additional round of bidding. Interestingly, you haven’t saved any bidding space John, because the jump to 4D gets you to the same level! Maybe, if you are going to rebid only 2S, responder should simply raise to 3S to agree trmps and give space for opener to initiate cue-bidding.
P.S. We have met a few times I think John! Hi 🙂
Looking again, I think that Bernard’s answer is more likely than mine! They probably use Texas transfers here.
I have no idea how you would show a diamond suit in the robot system, with both 3D and 4D as transfers. Do they have to jump to the 5 level? Or maybe 3S is used as a relay to show a diamond suit? A lot more complicated than Acol!
I think that your robot partner has chosen to cue bid rather than bid the slam directly. I think that the cue bid is reasonable – the problem with 6D is that it is possible that 7D might be missed (I am not sure if the robots play the 2D response as a negative or a waiting bid?).
Reuben – the opening post only mentioned one doubleton (balanced 4432 shape). A single raise is probably reasonable (easier to judge if we could see the actual hand).
I think that Brian Powell’s response is about right.
Is there a way to claim om Bridgemaster? Even when I get it right and have the remainder, it forces you to play all 13 cards. Or have I missed something?
I don’t think you can have a simple rule of thumb that will always work because there are multiple factors and judgement is needed:
– The weaker you are, the more inclined you should be to take it out.
– The rest of the shape is important. 6322 is semi-balanced – I might even open 1NT on occasions with this shape and I am unlikely to take out 1NT. With 6331, I am more likely to take it out and a 6421 shape hand doesn’t look like it wants to play in NT – whatever the strength. With 7-card suits you will usually not want to play in NT.
– The quality of the suit is also important: you should probably sit 1NT if most of your strength is outside of the suit.
– Will your high cards be useful in a NT contract? Might it be possible to set up your suit if played in NTs? These might suggest sitting 1NT.Pass looks rather obvious.
It is IMPs so we don’t need to stretch to contest the part-score. We have tolerance for partner’s suit, but no guarantee of an 8-card fit. If we protect with a double, partner likely has a few clubs, but not enough to penalise the opponents (we have two, North should have six and South will likely have at least two). Partner might have a four-card major as well as a diamond suit, but this if far from guaranteed.
In addition our hand looks defensively oriented with five of our six points in our short suits!
I judge that you have the values for game. Gwen’s suggestion of 1NT-2H-2S-4H would work except that I play a transfer followed by a jump to the four-level as a splinter bid – setting spades as trumps and showing a heart shortage (singleton or void). This is sometimes called an auto-splinter.
Instead, I respond 2H (transfer to spades), then over the 2S rebid I show my hearts with a 3H bid. If partner bids 3NT (which must be a hand with two spades and three hearts), I bid 4H to show the fifth heart.
