EricK

A harder question is: What auction, in any system, does not get to 6NT? At some point, West will show he has a balanced hand of about 19 HCP, and East, if on form, will manage to correctly add 16 to that. Luckily, he can afford to be within one or two of the correct answer and still get the decision right - which can only add to the odds of reaching 6NT. Alternatively, East will show he has a balanced hand of about 16 points, and it is West who has to whip out his abacus (or remove his shoes and socks, and do the counting the old-fashioned way).

The best way to fight back against players who are rude about the mistakes you make is to make fewer mistakes. That's what I keep telling my partner, anyway. But he refuses to co-operate.

The "convention" might have agreements even if the partnership in question do not appear to. I am sure there are plenty of pairs who play eg Michaels cue bids, or Unusual NT and don't have a clue what to do in competition. But that doesn't mean the convention itself is not (potentially) useful.

It may be easier on the memory to play X as both majors and all 2 level bids as natural. i.e the double is take out, with emphasis on any unbid majors, just as in many other sequences; and 2♣ shows ♣ just as in most other sequences.

I would have thought that X shows strong balanced unsuitable for 3N; 3NT shows strong balanced hand suitable for 3NT; 4♣ shows the unbalanced ♣ hand, and 4♥ shows the ♥ hand.

I think it partly depends on how weak your 2/1 bid can be. If it is GF, you can definitely afford to open 1M and have the room to sort it out later (although you will need to agree in advance exactly how your are going to show this hand). If can be weaker, then it is not so easy, and I would be tempted to open 1NT unless my hand screamed otherwise.

Do you have to bid on with so-called game values even if your partner is the sort of player who often butchers the play?

I'm not sure I follow what you are saying. I plan to eventually play A, Q and then small ♣ and, if the J has not yet appeared, either finesse or play for the drop according to the count. What other entries do I need?

My feeling is quite the opposite. I love pre-empting at the 4 level if they might have the majors. It seems like someone has to double on a not quite shape suitable hand, and they end up having to guess which major to play - and at what level.

I'm not good enough to say what the best play is, but I would have played ♦ first (in case JT is doubleton); followed by ♥ as I have no choice how to play that suit; and finally I would have played ♣ by which time the count ought to tell me whether to finesse or play for the drop of J♣.

He might think he has a reason to make a penalty double too!

Has West got any reason to make a stripe-tailed ape double?

Whether or not East opens is a matter of style/agreements rather than sanity. Obviously you will get completely different auctions in each case. Similarly, South has a marginal opening bid. I think after a start of 1♦ (1♥), a sane West will look at his hand and decide 1NT is a better description than X. North might now venture a negative X, East will run to 2♣, South will bid 2♠, and there it will rest. To summarise: 1♦ 1♥ 1NT X 2♣ 2♠ All Pass

Although the contract at the table was 5♣, the OP is asking how best to try to make 6♣.

I thought the traditional test for a 2♣ opening was "more quick tricks than losers" i.e if you only have 4 quick tricks then you would need fewer than 4 losers, but a hand with more than 4 losers might still be a 2♣ opening if it had even more quick tricks.

Even if you choose to not open a hand like this, you still often have a chance to come into the auction on the second round. If the bidding starts on your left with (1♣) P (1x or 2♣ or 3♣), then you can make a take out double to show the other suits. This even has the advantage of partner knowing the limit of your hand (although it has the disadvantage of you starting your auction at a higher level).

I think he's asking whether you think the chances of a monochromatic hand are 1.

To my mind, if a hand is strong enough for a jump rebid of 3♦, then it ought to be strong enough for a reverse into 2♥. i.e. it doesn't make sense to have to pass over a good major suit to rebid your minor at the 3 level. So the choice must be between 2♦ and 2♥. This looks way to strong for 2♦ with the good controls, the extra length in ♦, the K of partner's suit and the reasonable intermediates. So 2♥ it is.

But it's not really that simple. Counting up to thirteen is the easy part, isn't it? It's retaining and using that information which is hard. It's one thing to look at, say, an eight card end position written down on paper and see that if you cash 5 tricks West will be forced to discard down to A; Kx and be ripe for a throw in. It's another to be able to do that with a couple of the hands purely imagined, and not written down. It is yet harder to do it if you have had to construct those unseen hands from clues in the bidding and play (only some of which will have involved counting up to 13!). And of course all the time it is important to be sure you will know if West has discarded down to Ax; K in which case case your winning play is to drop the K. And even that is not enough. On many hands you will need to work this out much earlier in the play, and rely on various hypotheticals (I can only make it if West has such and such, in which case, If I play the cards in this order, then by trick 8 ...).

To get a monochromatic hand, the first card you pick up can be anything. The second must be the same colour as the first - which is a probability of 25/51. The third must be the same colour again - probability = 24/50. And so on down to the 13th with probabilty 14/40. Multiply all of them together and cancel down common factors, and you get a probability of 19/580,027 for any random bridge hand. If you played 24 hands a day, every day, you would expect to be dealt a monochromatic hand every 3 1/2 years.

If in 1, 'natural' means balanced, no ♥ fit and 10-11 points (or something like that), then I don't see how 4NT as natural can help much. I have already shown my hand, so on what am I meant to base my next decision? So I think this ought to be BW, with ♥ agreed. In 2, this should be natural IMO. No suit is anything like agreed, and opener needs to be able to show extras here, lest the bidding stop in 3NT when responder fears opener is minimum. In 3, if partner had a strong balanced hand I suspect he would have bid NT at the last turn. We have bid a suit he has suggested that he has, so this looks like BW to me. For 4, I can't envision a hand which would pass 2♠, and yet is confident that 4NT is a better contract than 4♥. So I don't think this could be natural. I suppose he could be trying to show the minors (in something like a 2056 hand, too weak to bid first time around. But most likely he has a few ♥ (maybe HH or Hxx), enough length in ♠ to envision shortage in our hand, and some strength in the minors i.e. a strongish hand without a convenient bid on the previous round. I would probably take this as Blackwood - but would be hoping that my response also happens to be in my longer minor :) And in 5, partner is more likely to have a balanced-ish hand with a good ♥ suit and the ♣ stopped, than a hand with ♦which is confident that slam just depends on the number of keycards I hold. So I would take this as natural.

I GF with this hand. That's not to say I will be 100% confident of making the game I land in.

An invitation which gives no information to partner except strength is the worst kind of invitation. Game so often depends on the location of the HCP rather than just their number. This is why 1NT 2NT is one of the most useless invitations. But it's not quite the same after a start of 1M 2M. Not only have we located an 8+ major fit, but there is still a lot of room to investigate game and the degree to which the hands fit outside the major. We have 5 different bids which could be used as game tries of various sorts, which should allow us enough extra accuracy in bidding good games and avoiding bad ones to offset the information given to the defense. The situation is different after 1NT because we have far less room to investigate things and so far fewer sequences which can be used as game tries. Hence even if passing/bashing might be good opposite 1NT, it might be a net loser after 1M/2M (at least against pairs who are prepared to use the extra room wisely).

What is 1♠ 2♥? If it is GF with 5+♥ (any strength), then they just might be able to make it work, by means of a 2-way ♥ bid on the next round (♥ or relay asking for more info) - but I'm still not keen on it. If all hands in the relevant ranges go through 2♣/2♦, then I doubt the system works at all well. Of course, without seeing the full system, I might be missing some really clever stuff they've got in there to sort things out below 3NT.

I would shoot east because of his 1♠ bid. Because of the 6NT bid, I wouldn't call an ambulance afterwards.