Cthulhu D

Lots of people play that it suggests 3H and an invite is gonna go through 2NT. I think this is more reasonable. It does mean that if you'd like to play 4H but only 2S you are kinda screwed, but what can you do.

Lots of people play that it suggests 3H and an invite is gonna go through 2NT. I think this is more reasonable. It does mean that if you'd like to play 4H but only 2S you are kinda screwed, but what can you do.

Is 6H even that good? I can see the lines to 12 tricks, but you seem in danger of a bad break or even a trump lead.

I think I'd go 1D-1S-2H, but it's hard to see bidding past 4H. I guess if south decides that he's got 'extras' after the reverse and bids 3H rather than a picture bid 4H? Given that all souths values are in the majors 4H seems likely. It's a lot easier if south opens, then playing Ekrens it goes 2H-2NT-3D (showing max 5/5 majors), and North has a ton better idea what is going on, and at a lower level too.

It's worth noting that there are generally three goals with system design here: 1) Find all 4-4 fits 2) Find all 5-3 fits 3) Don't play in 4-3 fits or 5-2 fits. and various approaches to bidding cater to dealing with them. You've discovered the weakness of the responding with 4 but never raising on 3 - you miss a bunch of 5-3 fits. Of course there are solutions: http://web.mit.edu/mitdlbc/www/articles/Major_Suit_Fits.pdf has a good review. NMF is one of the simplest ways of meeting all three criteria on invitational or better hands.

It's called Montreal Relay. Ken Rexford was an advocate. It has big pluses and minuses - It makes it much easier to find 5-3 fits and ensures you never play in 4-3 fits, but it can make it hard to show 4-4 fits in competitive auctions. If you google 'Montreal Relay' there is a ton of discussion. If you really hate it, suggest playing transfer walsh where 3 card support accepts the transfer (F1) and 2 card or less supports bids as though you had bid the suit you are transfering into. This has the same effects (always play in 5-3 or 4-4 fits, never in 4-3 or 5-2). Discuss continuations over 1C-1S! (showing diamonds) as that auction sucks. Call it a day. Incidentally, your third seat pre-emption strategy is probably not as hot as you might like. It may be better to overcall 1M with 3 card suits.

Unfortunately BFACT only allows them for selection trials where the event being selected for also allows yellow systems. All the ACT clubs bow to the will of BFACT. There is a non zero possibility we've met if you've played in Canberra at any point haha. Yeah, this is pretty playable from tinkering about a bit - Being able to play the 3C and 3D rebids as two under transfers is very workable because you can unwind your fit. We respond on 1C to air anyway so playing that as forcing is not a huge loss. We kinda like tucking strong with diamonds in there as well, particularly if you aggressively open 2NT or 2D->2NT with a semi balanced hand particularly with clubs. We've got a qualifying tournament on the 19th (for which partner is flying back from an international trip that morning, so I expect we will do AWFULLY) and will give it a go after that. We've also tried the whereagles any 1C = clubs or 22+ unbalanced or 24+ any shape and it's not horrible though our continuations are currently 'wing it' - very weak responses are the tricky ones not a rock crusher.

http://www.rpbridge.net/rpim.htm Not quite what you want, but very cool all the same.

I think without discussion it is forcing just as a general meta rule and because it is a lot easier, and I play it as constructive but not forcing with spade tolerance. This comes with two big caveats: I play with very weak overcalls, and I don't play 1NT natural here which allows for a lot more auctions.

I'd open to avoid the problem yeah. I think this is a clear opener given the unbalanced shape and 6th diamond. Particularly playing a short club system where 1D is unbalanced you can avoid a world of pain opening here. A non jump bid? I'd play it as diamonds.

I've got 2H as hearts + minor but partner is never going to get the joke. I'd start with X then try 4NT. The question is do I advance 5C to 5D

I'm not making myself clear. The functionality in the search tool where if you put a set of search terms in quotation marks it searches for that exact phrase is not excluded from the prevent searches with less than 4 characters in them, when it should be because it has a lot more than four characters. For example: "1NT one suited and forcing" should be a perfectly valid search as it is *one string* in the same way that "Magic Diamond" is. All I want is to be able to search for phrases properly. That will solve the issue and not require white lists or anything else.

I understand that, but in the case of much longer strings such as "Opening balanced 11 counts" the string has 26 characters in it and thus will not crush the database. That has some key limitations you'll notice: A) You'll notice due to how google presents results if you ran the same search on both - such as unbalanced diamond opening systems - you actually get fairly different results. For example: jgillispie's thread about Magic diamond systems (right in the wheelhouse) doesn't show up for the first 6 pages of google results for me. I stopped checking. B) Please explain how I limit the results to a particular sub forum using google like I can with the forum software? It doesn't work C) Please explain how I find all posts by Frances Hinden on the topic of opening balanced 11 counts? Again, not a feature that is offered Seriously I know site:XXXX works but it's not nearly as useful as having the native search tool properly configured. The inability to search for phrases is totally hamstringing the native search for literally no reason.

Well yeah, Milton has limitations and your decision making needs to be more insightful - but it's not bad at evaluating the trick taking power of balanced hands so I feel like for the purposes of discussion it's not a terrible yard stick. I'm not totally convinced that it's good non-vul and less good vul - but I haven't checked. Based on OKBridge analysis that the danger contracts are 3H, 3S and 2NT, my theory would be that it enables less invitational bids because partner is less likely to have an invite opposite a 11-13 than opposite a 11(+)-14 or 11(+)-14(-). I'd probably need to spend some time with Dealer.exe to check, but I'm pretty sure that is the case )I'm focused on 1C - Balanced 11 here, it's very possible that 1S with a 5-3-3-2 hand is just bad). It might all be given back with more frequent invites opposite the 14-16 range as well. I don't think the penalty concern is that probable at the table but I have no idea how to check that. I'm trading on personal experience there.

I want to be able to search for a phrase like "opening balanced 11 counts" I cannot because the tool won't let me search when there is a word that has less than 4 letters. This is fine as a normal restriction because of the database impact, but when I am searching for a complete *phrase* that is completely ridiculous - I'm effectively searching for one much longer string. It prohibits so many useful searches "Opening hearts and clubs" "When should you open 1NT with an unbalanced hand" Please let the entire string be considered for the 4 characters or less constraint, not just each sub string.

Yeah it seems clear to add a balanced strong option and hands that would bid 2C-2D (waiting) - 3m to multi at a minimum because all that you have lost is that partner couldn't show a strong hand or a super negative That also solves some of Wereeagles problem because I only need I one bid to show the Strong spades hand and everything else is free. You are totally stuffed still if you pick up a balanced 24 count and constructive slam bidding is generally worse, so will have to see if the preempt is worth it.

I think we might give it a whirl NV. We can use 2C for strong or weak with something again 3rd in so what's the worst that can happen?

This is why I reviewed the samples for 11 HCP balanced vs Pass only, but this has a seriously deleterious impact on sample size. I feel like it is a winner, but I would love a better study. It's worth noting that he did exclude the psyches and unbalanced hands from the 1NT opener, but not on the suit openers which is a shame. I feel that it is a winner, but it has huge secondary system impacts and if it's *not* a winner I would change my agreements extensively, so I would love to know one way or another. There is a more general tactical thing here as well - It seems like that generally opening is better than not opening, but again, not enough evidence to prove that statement. I play a variety of things to maximise the % of hands my regular partnership opens, and I would be fascinated to know if they are winners.

Alas strong hands in pass is illegal in this jurisdiction - I'm in Australia and functionally limited to Green, Blue and Red sticker 1 level and unfettered brown sticker 2 level stuff. I guess my hidden agenda was 'squeeze this in without a radical system overhaul' and that might not be possible. I'm currently playing 2/1 with a very semi forcing 1NT and a short club so openings are thus: 1C: Clubs and the other two NT ranges with Xfer responses 1D: Unbalanced diamond with Xfer rebids by opener 1H: 5+ 1S: 5+ 1NT: 11-13 1st/2nd NV, 15-17 4th in at all vuls, 14-16 otherwise. I'm not sure it matters, but historically we have played at the 2 level: I guess I'm hearing that doing this requires fatally compromising the core tenets of the system, which is non ideal for something we only want to play NV. Polish C would work, but it would require us to jettison the unbalanced diamond and that would make me deeply sad, though I think the bid is clearly under utilized.

Sure, but in this case I think you are drawing conclusions from inappropriate data sets. Many boards in the 1NT vs Pass analysis are people opening 9 HCP hands or 10 HCP hands. Those are not interesting when the question is 'do we open balanced 11 counts' you must go into the underlying data - which significantly impacts the sample sizes, and makes the conclusion very questionable - to consider only the 11 HCP hands. Similarly for the 1C vs Pass analysis, again, we need to consider only balanced 11 counts because that is the question we are asking (is it right to open balanced 11 counts). There are a bunch of 9 and 10 counts and some unbalanced 11 in there, and they need to be tossed to answer the question. Just using Pavlicek's top level numbers for this will not work because the underlying datasets do not align with the question we are trying to answer. My limited analysis of the dataset is favourable for opening balanced 11 counts (but not 10 counts! Important!). I could be wrong. I would like a more comprehensive examination. I would also be interested to know the cost of opening a short 1C vs a better minor 1D and the benefit from an unbalanced 1D (which is very hard to answer). I would also love to see what the numbers on a 11-13 1NT looks like - it is very possible that is the 'optimal' (airquotes) NT range. I'm (relatively) confident in this analysis because it reflects my reflects my at the table experience, but I could very well be wrong.

You've obviously read it - it's the opening 1NT vs Pass and opening 1C vs Pass (here: http://www.rpbridge.net/rpme.htm). When I looked at the hand records provided it *seemed* (I have not performed a detailed statistic analysis, this was just my conclusion), that 10 HCP hands were causing the swing towards pass for NT (this was not a strong trend), and in the 1C sample a huge number of the variant hands that are causing a swing towards opening 1C over pass are people opening balanced 11 counts - this was a *very* significant trend. It's worth noting as well that he's very positive about a weak no trump - the weak no trump consistently does better than the strong NT. Just looking at for example the first 7 bids in the 1C vs Pass. 6 of them are opening a 1C in a short club system, and one is opening an unbalanced 10 count. The 6 balanced 11 counts all go plus, the unbalanced 10 count goes minus. I did a more robust review when I was examining my opening style, but nothing formal (I looked at just pass vs 11 count hands and added up the imps for them). The lack of a comprehensive study though was why I asked this question! I would be fascinated if anyone has more robust analysis. I could very well be wrong - but that is the lesson I took from the trends on those two bids.

So for various (bad) reasons partner and I want to try opening 2C (NV) as a fert or some sort of weak hand on the basis that it will generate hilarious swings, and we love nothing if not hilarity and also the terrible, terrible fear when the auction goes Weak Opening - (X) - P - (INCREDIBLE TANK). (Questionable) Merits of this aside, I have be charged with figuring out how to do this, and that means I need to do something with the strong hand types. Several options present themselves: A) I can 'grow' the ceiling of the 1M openings to 21/22 HCP B) I can squeeze in a balanced 23-24 option into a multi 2 level type opening. I can probably also tuck 6 card GF in the minors in here at low additional cost. C) Stuffing the other unbalanced strong openings into.. something. D) Being more aggressive/disciplined about opening 3NT with a major suit rock crusher; and/or E) Saying 'sod it' and just winging it when you pick up a 23 count because how often does that happen really? It's possible that I've missed something and would love to have this drawn to my attention, but I'm currently stuck with the monster unbalanced hands (C types). What to do? The options appear to be 1) Play the 1-level openings as forcing 2) Put the strong hands in 1C - obviously the polish club solution, but that feels like 1C becomes nightmarishly overloaded 3) Put the strong hands in 1D - A much less heavily utilised bid, with 1/4th of the frequency of our 1C opener. However you do lose a ton of space. Playing 1D as forcing without a super negative is probably relatively safe as you are likely to have some good shape if you don't have the rock crusher, and if you play transfer rebids by opening you can probably bail out at the same level people who opened 2C are, but does anyone have experience with this or any other way

This and PaulG's response make a lot of sense. Has anyone done a reliable study on the costs/merits of opening light? It seems clear that opening balanced 10 counts is losing bridge, and aggressive 1S openings are losers, but Richard Pavlicek's analysis lead me to conclude that opening any other 11 count was winning bridge. Pfft, weakness! ;) More seriously though, I considered this and thought that switching to T-Walsh shows SOME measure of geekery, and certainly adapting your 1NT range is a small cost that if you are willing to play T-Walsh would be a small marginal change, so I figured this was not the root cause.

Double Post

Yeah, having opened balance 11 counts since day 1, a bad 12 count is only worth an invite definitely. Aha! This is it - a number of the pairs playing 15-17 have transfer completion show 3 cards (edit, though not it appears the majority? who knows) Thank you for clarifying that mystery. This raises a new question though - I wonder what the practical merits of each is? The sample size is probably to small to make a pragmatic conclusion. The previous threads on this topic favour transfer acceptance = Weak NT.