[humilities]

I am teaching my three Int/Adv partners to play expert-standard-ish 2/1 with a few (but not many) gadgets. I try to focus on learning to bid and play rather than learning system, but occasionally the need for system creeps in ... take this hand from regional swiss:

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3NT was an embarrassing contract. We need a way to get to 4H, and I think we need a system solution to do it.

I'm putting it out there to the Forum community for recommendations - what is your 2/1 solution to this problem? Is this solvable at the Int/Adv level (keeping in mind that memory strain is a very real consideration)? BART perhaps? I'd really like to avoid any 2NT-relay systems as my guys are very comfortable with 2NT showing 18-19 balanced and playing xfers over that ... however I'm willing to listen to anything.

Thanks in advance

[Vampyr]

It is kind of a coincidence that a few minutes ago I posted something to the effect that I know people who play 2/1 GF but not 1♦-2♣ or 1♠-2♥. I don't know if you want to get involved with something like this though.

Another possibility is to treat 2x KQxxx as GF, though of course this is very specific to this hand, as is the fact that North's honours are not really working full-time and he should perhaps content himself with a 2♠ rebid. Of course you'd want to be playing that 3♥ after that is invitational rather than terminal.

I think that playing 2/1GF is great when you have a GF hand; other times you get a headache.

[monikrazy]

2H seems like a better bid than 1NT, and is very reasonable given the shapeliness of responder's hand.

[mikeh]

I have played 2/1 gf for many, many years with and against some pretty good players. I know of no common (or indeed any uncommon) 'solution' that allows us to get to 4♥ over the 3♠ rebid, and the 3♠ rebid seems completely normal in a 2/1 approach, altho it is (imo) minimum for the call. The club K is if dubious value, and so rebidding 2♠ wouldn't be horrible.

Of course, rebidding 2♠ would likely lead to playing 2♠ so it isn't exactly a path to 4♥.

I think this is simply a case of recognizing that no matter what method you play, your method will lead to sub-par results on a number of hands. System design, or even choice of basic method, is all about compromises and choosing methods that are playable by the partners (dependent on experience, talent, memorization, and style preferences as well as on technical merit) while recognizing that every method has flaws.

As for the actual result, the lesson I think S should take from this hand is that not only can we not always find perfection but that on this hand type he should bid 4♠, not 3N.

Even if he had a stopper or semi-stopper or some length in all side suits, my advice is to generally raise the major rather than bid 3N, unless one has a doubleton or an honour in partner's major.

If partner has a strong suit, 6+ in length, there is a good chance that he is weak/short in a suit, and the opps will lead the suit now or later....and opposite a stiff even AKQxxx won't usually run, while opposite xx, AKQxxx or AKJxxx offers reasonable play for 6 tricks.

xx KQxx Q109x KJ10 is 3N, since we may have top losers in a 10 trick contract and are likely to have 9 winners in 3N.

[mikeh]

monikrazy, on 2014-January-15, 13:17, said:

2H seems like a better bid than 1NT, and is very reasonable given the shapeliness of responder's hand.

Playing 2/1 GF, 2♥ is, with respect, a terrible call.

We have less than an opening hand. We have what appears likely to be a misfit. Forcing to game is justified only by 'knowing' that partner happens to hold Axx in hearts. You are doing a disservice to IA players by making this suggestion.

[wyman]

I don't know whether this is helpful to the OP, but:

We would probably die out in 2S. I would rebid 2S as N, but I sympathize with the 3S call.
I am never getting to 4H on any auction.

[ArtK78]

Hands like this one are one reason that I play 1♠ - 2♥ as not forcing to game in an otherwise 2/1 GF system. It is forcing one round.

[chasetb]

MikeH nailed it in his advise, this is a case that over 99% of players won't have a great answer, and my answer isn't really suitable to Int/Adv players.

Against stronger opps, I would have rebid 2♠; against weaker ones I would have jumped to 3♠. The only thing I can recommend, and I tell you again I expect only expert players to get it, is this. Over 1♠ - 1NT; 3♠:
4♣ = 2-suited hand with 5+ Clubs and 5+ Hearts OR a general Slam try for Spades, 1-2 card support. By opener, I would use 4♦ as generally a max hand, but unsure of what to do. 4♥ would be Hearts, but weaker than 4♦. 4♠ says 'I dislike both of your suits, I want to play in Spades'. 5♣ would be Clubs, but weakish.

4♦ = 5+ Diamonds and 5+ (Hearts or Clubs), or 2-3 Spade support and 0-1♦ and slam interest. Any suit is natural, and 4NT showing a good hand with Hearts (as 4♥ directly is passable by a weak hand). Over 4NT, -5♣ is weak with the minors, -5♦ is weak with the red suits, and -5♥ is a maximum with the red suits.

[Cyberyeti]

Old fashioned Acol has some similar issues in some sequences, and solves it by bidding a 3 card minor as a natural suit, here 3♦ should get you to 5♦ if it doesn't get you to 4♥, but I don't think the N hand is quite good enough in this case for the bid.

[kenrexford]

I am often in the minority in bidding theory, but the auction 1S...3S is a dreadful auction for the obvious reason. As a result, I never bid that with a heart fragment. Instead, I re bid 2C and hope that the auction stays alive.

If partner re bids hearts I can raise safely. If he re bids anything else, I repeat spades at the three level. Most of my friends know this and have discussed this, but I don't care if they have not. I will pay up maybe in a rare 2C but end up the same or better the rest of the time. Partner may be surprised if I end up dummy in hearts or watching the play himself, but the opponents also are surprised which can help and the surprise is often just a curiosity.

[monikrazy]

mikeh, on 2014-January-15, 13:54, said:

Playing 2/1 GF, 2♥ is, with respect, a terrible call.

We have less than an opening hand. We have what appears likely to be a misfit. Forcing to game is justified only by 'knowing' that partner happens to hold Axx in hearts. You are doing a disservice to IA players by making this suggestion.

2H may or may not be a good call, but the reason I'm suggesting it has nothing to do with the opener's fit.

K&R rates responder's hand 13.25 and worth an open on its own merit. Yes, playing 2/1 GF pairs may end up in some questionable 3N contracts but it seems worth it for the chance to properly describe the shape. We may also be able to stop in 4D if 3N is not feasible.

Forcing NT makes discovering the right game very difficult with our shape hand. Responder is placed in a bad spot if opener bids 2C and a (less) bad spot if opener bids 2S. Even 3S as the example showed. Again, if forcing NT is the mechanism we are supposed to invite game with and still struggles this much with a very good, near max hand to invite, on balance it appears we do much better just treating it like a GF hand. Bridge is a game that encourages bidding game after all.





Edit: Not only that... even if the expert/advanced consensus is that 2H is not the right bid, suggesting it shouldn't be a disservice. It should be welcomed as an opportunity to explain why other bids are better. I think the tone of your post is tremendously offensive for what is supposed to be a constructive forum and friendly to intermediate/advanced players.

[ggwhiz]

I was once told by a (now) GLM that if you really can't decide between 2 bids, 2 or 3♠ here, the answer is always door #3.

2♦ is probably mp suicide but at imps reminds me of a master solver panelist I can't recall who often said "If I can just get past this round". At least it's not a memory/system strain just weird hand evaluation in the context of partner (almost) never passing with 2 cards in spades.

Getting to hearts would take some fancy footwork here for sure but is remotely possible depending on partnership agreements on continuations. Some play 2♥ as constructive or over a raise to 3♦, 3♥ to pattern out etc.

[mikeh]

monikrazy, on 2014-January-15, 14:39, said:

2H may or may not be a good call, but the reason I'm suggesting it has nothing to do with the opener's fit.

K&R rates responder's hand 13.25 and worth an open on its own merit. Yes, playing 2/1 GF pairs may end up in some questionable 3N contracts but it seems worth it for the chance to properly describe the shape. We also may be able to stop in 4D if 3N is not feasible.

Forcing NT makes discovering the right game very difficult with our shape hand. Responder is placed in a bad spot if opener bids 2C and a (less) bad spot if opener bids 2S. Even 3S as the example showed. Again, if forcing NT is the mechanism we are supposed to invite game with and still struggles this much with a very good, near max hand to invite, on balance it appears we do much better just treating it like a GF hand. Bridge is a game that encourages bidding game after all.

An evaluation method that looks only at our hand is not a tool any intelligent player relies upon once the auction has started.

I personally wouldn't consider this to be an opening hand, altho were I to be 5-5 majors, I might well do so. Having seen partner's 1♠ call, it is trivial to see that my stiff spade has gone from being a potential asset to being a bit of a liability....and if you choose to emphasize your long suits, then the news that partner has long spades reduces the chances of a red suit fit so you can downgrade a bit for that reason.

If your argument is that overbidding is acceptable because we can't find a 5-3 heart fit should partner respond 2♣ to our 1N, may I suggest that there are very playable solutions to that problem. I would accept that BART, for example, is too much to expect of an I player but surely not of an advanced player.

If BART or other gadgets were unavailable, I'd still be bidding over 2♣. 2N springs to mind, since any decent player, even non expert, knows to bid 3♥ on the way to 3N. Please don't argue that 2N would be an overbid.....you've just finished advocating an immediate game force! No invitational sequence can be described as overbidding by someone who sees the responding hand as game forcing.

More to the point: advising people to make gross overbids to avoid the 5-3 heart problem is just bad advice on a number of levels.

Not only will it lead to silly, hopeless games (that can sometimes be doubled) when partner has his usual misfitting minimum opener, but it can lead to silly high-level contracts when partner thinks you have your values. Should partner now or later begin to play you to be making gameforces with misfitting 10 counts, then you'll avoid those overbids, but now you start missing good contracts when you really do hold a gameforce hand.

IOW, the wider the range of an initial action, the less precise subsequent actions become and the more difficulty the partnership will have. There are times when accepting this sort of cost is better than the alternative, but this is not one of those cases imo.

Once again, I can't help but think that those who advocate a 2/1 gf response of 2♥ may be influenced by knowing what we will find in dummy.....I am not suggesting this is a conscious bias, nor am I purporting to state that this is actually playing a role in your thinking, but I have learned that in BBF, a significant number of posters, none of whom appear to be in real life world class, always advocate calls that happen to work on the problem as posted. If all such posters really were that good, I'd expect to have seen their names in print somewhere.

[monikrazy]

Quote

If BART or other gadgets were unavailable, I'd still be bidding over 2♣. 2N springs to mind, since any decent player, even non expert, knows to bid 3♥ on the way to 3N. Please don't argue that 2N would be an overbid.....you've just finished advocating an immediate game force! No invitational sequence can be described as overbidding by someone who sees the responding hand as game forcing.

I would be curious about how others would bid over 2C and 2S after a forcing NT auction since potential problems here are what led me to recommend 2♥ to begin with. My initial reaction is I would prefer a 2H rebid to 2N since I think a freely bid 2N should guarantee a doubleton in partner's bid suit, but have sympathy for making it with a singleton honor (even T).

[billw55]

Hands like this make me wonder how good 2/1 really is. The upside is relaxed slam exploration, but on hands where we are only bidding game or partscore, there are some distortions (like 1NT forcing). Just from memory, I think I have seen more examples of 2/1 causing problems than I have hands where it pays off. Do those bid-slam-slowly hands really happen often enough to make it worth it?

[GreenMan]

I think the 3♠ bid is the problem on this hand. A stiff King is either a King or a stiff, not both, and neither treatment makes this hand worth a jump rebid IMO, especially given the wide range of the 1NT response. If partner could be anywhere from 5 to a bad 13 with a variety of shapes, we want to take up less space if we can.

[humilities]

Thanks for the input all, glad to hear it's not such an easy problem, I don't feel as dumb missing such an easy game. At the other table the opps had no problem getting to 4H so I thought there might be an easy fix that I was just missing. (then again the opps at the other table were not exactly I/A)

Is there a BART sequence that gets us there?

[kenrexford]

More on why 2C as Opener's re bid makes sense. If you have the slightest tweak that 2D by Opener shows 4, then 2C only promises 2 and is about as semi-forcing as is a semi-forcing 1NT. Passable on rare occasions (stiff or fewer spade with no alternative and thus a bit more length in clubs). 2C allows more re bid options for Responder and is thus less likely to be passed than 2D. On this hand stiff king is as good as two small if it is passed. The auction ends up being fantastic if responder bids again, so make the bid most likely to result in more bidding. The slightest tweak mentioned above helps this cause.

I mean, a huge number of problems in bidding are solved if 2C is always suspect. Might as well make all 2C calls suspect.

For me:

2C response to a major is real or fit
2C re bid after 1NT is 2+ and semi-forcing
2C response to a minor opening is game force artificial with no 5 - card major
2C response to 1NT is stayman
2C re bid after 1D opening and 1S response is 3+
2C re bid by Responder is check back light
Even 1C. ..2C is only 5+

The only time 2C is ever real is after 1H-1S-2C and 1D-1Nt/1H-2C.
The only real

[humilities]

OP here ... one more thing ... I just found my notes from that match (it was a few weeks ago) and turns out my memory was faulty - if you are curious here is the actual hand - seems to be the same problem but perhaps another sequence lends itself...

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edit: corrected North hand thanks Cyberyeti

[Cyberyeti]

Except that you have 9 off the top in 3N if the hearts behave or you get a spade miracle so 3N is not horrible on the new version, also the N hand is now worth 3♠.