BBO Discussion Forums: Just a simple question to those with more experience... - BBO Discussion Forums

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They are not.
You gain on 5-3-3-2's hands if you can bid 2C with them but if you bid 2C with them you lose with hand with clubs (or Gazilli hands). There is a trade-off there.

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One day I pulled all the hands from vugraph where Meckwell/Lauria-Versace/Bocchi-Duboin and few others passed 1NT there. I went through all of them. I also played a lot of hands online and I was paying attention to this issue since forever. I am very confident about my judgement on this one because I did more research on it than probably anybody else. Just because 1NT tends to be a good contract at MP's in many situations doesn't mean it tends be a good contract after say 1S - 1NT. It isn'. By bidding on with 5-3-3-2's you get much better contracts.
I don't have as strong view when it comes to 1H - 1NT. I think passing here might well be better with 5-3-3-2's and 4-5-2-2's.

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2S on 5-2 is usually better than 1NT at matchpoints. There is also huge gain from 8-9 trumps heart contracts which you miss often if you pass with 5-3-3-2 after 1S opening, being able to play 2/3m if responder have 6+of them is another huge bonus.

bluecalm, on 2012-October-10, 12:35, said:

I can't parse this.

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In general, the lower opener's suit is, the more likely responder's 1NT will be a balanced hand, since there's more chance that he'll be able to bid his suit naturally instead. After a 1♠ opening, responder has to bid 1NT with all non-fit hands that are too weak for a 2/1 (whatever your 2/1 range is), and many of them will be unbalanced.

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Say you have only 5-3-3-2's and 5-x-y-4+ in range.
If you pass 5-3-3-2's and bid 2C with 5-x-y-4+ then opener can pass or raise clubs with 4-5 of them which is good for your side.
If you bid 2C on 5-3-3-2's then opener must bid differently opposite your range and hands with true clubs suffer from that.
So while 5-3-3-2's gain by you bidding 2C with them, hands with true clubs lose. There is a trade-off which you need to assess.

You can make similar reasoning if you play Gazilli or something similar. Possibility of opener being 5-3-3-2's influence responder's bidding so strong/club hands suffer.

bluecalm, on 2012-October-10, 13:16, said:

Opener? Don't you mean responder?

Yes, sorry. Doing too many things right now. The idea is clear though I think.

one of my partners (an old lady), decided I teach her 2/1, so I did, it took her about 1 year to understand it, during that year we got awful results, really awful.

Now she kind of understands it, I think our results are a bit better that they would be playing natural, but it takes several years to compensate for the learning process.

1NT is the safe harbour for misfitting hands.
Using F1NT removes this safe harbour when the responder has a misfitting hand.

Imo, almost any legal system will do at MP's - even 1936 Culbertson or the 10-13 HCP one NT opener. You just have to know it and play it as well as you can. The small advantage of 2/1 comes at IMPs where it sometimes gains you an extra round of bidding for purposes of slam investigation.

Girlfriend bridge is a specialized subject all in itself. Being a 2/1 mentor might work out well, at least for a while, if she goes for it. My advice is to stay flexible and go with the flow.

P.S. If your objective is to win as many club MP games as possible, my hero, then playing essentially the system everyone else in the club plays is probably the least effective. Even the dullards will know when to balance and when to compete.

mikl_plkcc, on 2012-October-23, 06:27, said:

I am surprised that so many posters believe that (semi-) forcing NT is a good convention.

Vampyr, on 2012-October-23, 12:20, said:

They don't - they think it is a good treatment, and that the forcing no trump is a bad convention.

Vampyr, on 2012-October-23, 12:20, said:

I come from an Acol background and felt this way for a long time. But I wanted the advantages of GF 2/1 responses so I looked into the 1NT problem in quite a lot of detail, more with a view to minimizing the damage or satisfying myself that it was so bad it wasn't worth playing. I generated about 600 hands with a 1NT response to 1 of a major playing 2/1, and compared the outcome with what would happen playing a standard 1NT response.

Surprisngly, the traditional '6-9' 1NT response actually did worse even with no GF responding hands included. This is with a 'semi-forcing' 1NT. I have never tried forcing NT and am not tempted because it just seems that the gains cannot outweigh the losses. Hands where you respond 1NT with a hand in the 5-9 range, and it's the best spot, and opponents let you play there, and you could not have played there if 1NT was semi-forcing, are just not as common as people think.

If opener is not 5332 or (precisely) 4522 they will seldom pass 1NT anyway. If they have one of those shapes and anywhere from 11 to a below average 13, they will pass a semi-forcing 1NT. With an above average 14, they will open 1NT. So the loss of ability to play 1NT is restricted to a small percentage of hands. And you get to play 1NT with 11-13 opposite 10-11 where standard players can't. Actually, I'm not even sure semi-forcing NT ends up playing fewer hands in 1NT to be honest.

I hate the term 'semi-forcing' though. Apart from being aesthetically bad, it creates the impression that the person using it has no grasp on basic logic, let alone bridge. Maybe the forums can come up with something better.

nigel_k, on 2012-October-23, 13:00, said:

How about "unnatural NT"?

Playing F1NT and 2/1 has always seemed like an advantage to me. The advantage may not be as great today as forty years ago when no one except a few of us played it.

As mentioned, the big improvement is the accuracy provided by the 2/1 auctions because you don't have to waste bidding space discriminating between game going and invitational hands.

The F1NT has some puts and takes but overall I think is a gain --

-- playing 2 Major on a 5-2 fit is often better than playing 1 NT,

-- playing in responder's long suit at the 2 level when it can be bid,

-- occasionally finding a better fit in opener's 3 card second suit, and,

-- a good way to show an invitational 3 card raise if you don't any special Major raise scheme.

Against this, you lose --

-- the ability to play 1 NT when it is right, and,

-- the ability to get to a good spot in some F1NT auctions.

F1NT nay sayers like to emphasize the latter two points, but they have always been somewhat sham arguments. The number of times 1 NT is superior just isn't that often. The hands that the F1NT has problems with are often just as much a problem for those playing a standard non forcing NT.

Because the F1NT covers a much wider range of hands, there is a bit more complexity to F1NT auctions. So, I'd recommend keeping the bidding over 1 NT as simple as possible for a person learning to play it.

The only addition I think that is useful at first is adding Flannery to handle the 11-15 4S 5H hands. It helps to keep the bidding over 1 NT simpler to start.

Vampyr, on 2012-October-23, 12:20, said:

Maybe they are all just stupid?

For someone willing to make their own judgement I pulled the hands when it went 1M - p - 1N - p p p played by top Italians and Meckwell from my vugraph database. There were 53 such hands, you can download them in .lin format here:
https://dl.dropbox.c...ed.linpart0.lin
https://dl.dropbox.c...ed.linpart1.lin

Again I am just arguing for a point that 5M-3-3-2 hands benefit from bidding on. Semi-forcing has advantage of making 2 rebid better defined and it may well be worthy trade-off, especially at IMPs.

rmnka447, on 2012-October-23, 14:08, said:

Ouch!

bluecalm, on 2012-October-23, 14:33, said:

It really depends on how you continue after 1♠-1NT-2♣ sequences (for example). If your style is to assume that opener has a balanced hand, so you bid two of a red suit freely on five, you never raise clubs without five, etc. then you will tend to do well when opener does, in fact, have a balanced hand. But you will run into some trouble when opener has real clubs (possibly playing 2-red on a 5-1 fit, or correcting from an eight or nine card club fit into a seven card spade fit). Alternatively, you can continue as if opener has shown 4+ clubs, in which case your results when opener has real clubs will be fine, but you will get a lot of bad results when opener has some balanced hand (playing 4-3 club fits at the three-level, or missing out on 5-3 heart fits to play instead in a 4-3 club fit or a 5-2 spade fit).

My general view (and most experts I've spoken to on the matter agree) is that the forcing 1NT itself is not a particularly good method, but that you get a lot of gains from the game-forcing 2/1 sequences which could easily compensate (especially at IMPs where slam bidding is more important and finding the best partial is less so). A lot of good players have migrated to semi-forcing notrump (or even what's really a non-forcing wide-range notrump, which you can reach by dropping the 1NT opening range to 14-16).

I'm also sceptical of double-dummy comparisons of 1NT vs. your two-level contract, because these comparisons often assume that you can find your best two level contract (not always trivial), that opponents are passing (actually they are more likely to bid when you have a real fit somewhere than when you don't), and of course double-dummy play and defense (highly inaccurate for partials; 1NT is a particular tough contract to defend against an unknown declarer hand).

nigel_k, on 2012-October-23, 13:00, said:

Give up this quixotic quest. Bridge is full of convention names that don't mean what they say -- e.g. one of the bids in "2 way New Minor Forcing" isn't usually "new". We all understand these as names, not literal descriptions, so no confusion arises.

That's fine once the usage is well established and everybody understands it. But if you are talking with intelligent, capable bridge players who have never heard the term 'semi-forcing' until you use it, and you observe the expression on their face as it moves from bemused to pitying, you will really wish there was some other name for it.

If someone hasn't heard the term before, you explain it to them. Then they know.