Siegmund

IMO 3S was a serious underbid by East, with a 5-loser hand and a working HK. Whether East should just blast 4S, or bid 4C to force West to pick a game, looks like a close decision. Apparently I'm in a minority, if the early poll results are to be believed. But I can see myself bidding 3S with a lot of much weaker hands that don't want to sell out, and had North passed. Guess you wish you had more people like me in your field, so your 3S -1 would beat my 4S-2 :)

IMO, the simple one-word answer is "no, it doesn't." One reason you use NMF is to see if you have a 5-3 fit in your first major or a 4-4 fit in the other; the other big reason you use NMF is when you hold a hand the wrong strength for a jump to the 3-level. (Playing Root-Pavlicek style, you NMF with many inv hands and the immediate jumps are GF; most non-XYZ 2/1ers do the opposite, NMF with many GF hands and the immediate jumps are inv.) Now... bearing that in mind... NMF followed by a 3C/3D rebid may not promise a fifth spade, but NMF followed by a heart bid does -- and, in the case of your auction, if you have 1m-1S-1NT-2NT available as a natural raise, then 1C-1S-1NT-2D-2H-2NT must logically promise an invitation with exactly five spades, while 2S can promise six.

I require two of the top three for my fit-jumps (and -non-jumps), so that leaves it as a coin toss between a light 4H and a heavy 4S. If you have less strict requirements for 4D, by all means bid that.

My point was that if declarer has an ace-opposite-queen position in clubs, and I lead the CJ to force declarer to take an immediate view in the clubs... declarer is going to notice that my partner failed to double clubs (which he might have done, had he held the CK behind the club cuebidder), and is going to correctly place the CK with me a lot more than 50% of the time.

I'm setting the contract in 4H before anything else bad happens. On a bad day I'll be in a 5-2 fit (when partner is 2-4-5-2 or 1-4-5-3 with all his points in red suits) but on those days 3NT or 4S isn't exactly going to be a walk in the park either. I expect hearts to be the right spot much more often than not.

LTC is not perfect, and you wouldn't expect such a simple method to be perfect. Its biggest value IMO is that it turns your attention to counting tricks rather than counting points. When a point-count method predicts the wrong number of tricks, all you can do is either shrug your shoulders, or turn to ever-more-complicated refinements that still don't work. When a trick-counting method predicts the wrong number of tricks, you can look at the hand afterward, ask yourself which card did I count as a winner, but fail to win a trick with? or which card did I count as a loser, but won a trick with anyway? and see why. This leads to common-sense adjustments like counting Kxx and Qxx as more than two losers when the person on your left has opened the bidding. I will also suggest you concentrate more on Klinger's "losers minus cover cards" formulation, where one partner counts losers and the other partner counts winners, than on the 24-my losers-your losers formulation. I am in a minority on this forum, for liking LTC at all in the first place, and for disliking the formulaic adjusted-LTC approach. As previously noted, "adjusted LTC" is essentially a 3-2-1 point count method, and ceases to be about counting actual tricks at all. Re the 2nd question - LTC is, on the surface, just a hand evaluation tool, that sharpens up your judgment about e.g. limit vs game-going raises, rather than something that automatically changes your system. But you certainly can -- and, if you like LTC, should -- re-orient parts of your system around LTC if you and your partner both are using it. An obvious example is your choice of game try after 1M-2M: if it goes 1H-2H-3C, partner has sent you a clear message: "count your king and queen of hearts and clubs as full cover cards. Do NOT count your queen of spades as a cover card. Decide between 3H and 4H accordingly. If you counter-try with 3D, that must mean 'I have something in diamonds that I'm not sure whether to count as a cover card'."

2S is fine by me. 2D feels like a (gross) overbid, with a 4333 10-count AND a shaky DK AND partner is an overcaller not an opener. I've been known to raise just to 2S after 1S openings with my worst 4333 10-counts. I like to use XX to show a doubleton honor in spades and a desire to compete - sort of halfway between support and rosenkranz - but know that requiring the honor is uncommon.

Put me down for 1D-1S-2C, the forcing raise of your choice, and probably no way to bail out short of 6C. Neither glory nor shame in a 50% slam...

What do I expect? Points roughly 13-12-8 around the table. Most likely distribution for partner 2-3-4-4 or 2-3-5-3 with xx spades.On a good day he'll be 1-4-4-4 or 1-3-5-4. 2H is plenty. I expect to lose 2 spades and 2 clubs right off the bat. Could easily be a third club loser. No guarantees of bringing in the red suits without loss or a avoiding a spade overruff. I can understand 3H if it's purely obstructive, though you may well push them into a making game by doing it. Can't imagine how anybody thinks 4H has much chance of coming in. Re new suits at the 2-level (1S-X-2C) being nonforcing and limited to ~10HCP at most: It's still by far the most common thing for opponents and pickup partners to have marked on their cards at my local club or at live tournaments. And still what's taught to the B/Is, at least in my corner of the world. I would be very surprised to see any other meaning than that attached to 2C without a special agreement.

Put me down for a spade. Not so much because of any lead directing implications, but just because of the first 4 bids of the auction sounding like a good time to cut down on ruffs if they found their way to a 29-point slam. The CJ seems pretty desperate to me, more likely to be a "heads he wins, tails he breaks even" kind of guess at trick 1 rather than one that could actually cost him his contract if he misguesses. Edited to add: re the implications of East not making a lead-directing double... I think the point isnt that East would ever double holding just a queen -- but that he WOULD likely double holding KQ (or KJ or even Kx) behind the club cuebidder, so if declarer has a T1 guess in clubs he's going to get it right.

I played pretty much straight-out-of-the-box Kantar. 4C asking for a side king, 4D bid your suit, 4H P/C, 4S to play, 4NT asking for a side queen. I have no strong feeling whether CABs might be better. I DO think it's a bit strange to use 4C as 'transfer to your suit' rather than just bidding 4M as responder. (Unless 4C has serious slam implications. But even if it DOES, why not just use 4C to start the slam exploration, rather than waiting until after 3N-4C-4D-4H to convey some information that will help you decide on the slam?) For that matter, I reluctantly admit that, as much as I liked Kantar 3NT on paper, it didnt seem to actually translate into gains at the table very often.

I wish I could, but I can't. Subminimum, a second spade, no fourth heart, no aces... too many minuses for me, even favorable at matchpoints.

I am quite puzzled to see so many people disallowing 4S. I showed some kind of spade raise. Partner failed to cuebid 4C. For slam to be solid I need partner to have SAKQ and a singleton or queen of clubs; for slam to even be 50-50 I need most of this. I might go so far as to say that anybody who bids 4NT or 5m is taking a very strange position that it's possible for us not to have a sure club loser here. [Edited to add: I see Cascade added the possibility that partner doesn't know how to cuebid at all. That might be a reason to believe "anything is possible" now. Of course, if 3H cannot elicit any useful information at all from partner, I might as well have just responded 4NT to 1S...] As for partner's non-alert... well.. fit-jumps and splinters were both conventions under the pre-2007 laws; I can't think of any jurisdiction where one is alertable and the other is not. The only UI I have is that partner is a sloppy alerter.

it's 19 but its 4333 and it's quacky with lots of high cards behind it. It may still be worth 15 or 16 points, but I have a hard time seeing very many hands where partner is making 4H. I let it go.

I was going to suggest 1H (1s) x (2s) 3c p 3d, playing good/bad so that 3c shows better than a minimum opener from south. Having opener reopen with a double as justin suggests works fine too. "Get away with" a "creative" negative double? It was the textbook way to show a long suit too weak to bid naturally at the 2-level immediately, at least if you learned negative doubles in the pre-Internet age... if that's what south understands 3D to show, he should have no trouble avoiding 3NT or 5D.

Only a game try for me, thank you. I like 7 loser hands as much as the next guy but this is one time when I really care which suit my partner's non-heart values are in: 3D or 3H from partner and I stop, anything else I go. No chance of a "superior spade contract" being found IMO - opener might be 4-4, but even if he is, the 2S try doesn't promise 4 nor does accepting the try. (I suppose you could play 1d-1h-2h-2s-3s as accepting with 4-4 majors if you really wanted; but I play it as a concentration in case responder's 2S was the start of a game-or-slam query rather than a partscore-or-game one.)

Put me down for an immediate 4H. Jump shifts in passout seat are strong (if they arent leaping michaels, etc etc) and partner ought to expect 9 tricks for me. If he has an ace-king and another stray feature of interest, partner is welcome to raise or trot out Old Ebony.

With my regular partner, X is penalty-oriented, and 2NT is Good/Bad even after partner responds 1NT. With anybody except a forum regular I would have assumed this particular double was still penalty, too. OP's post did make it sound like he played it for takeout and was asking only about strength - and if so, I think any non-subminimum with a desire to compete is fair game.

This is a question that really only arises in a somewhat nonstandard system, so, for the moment, don't worry about how the auction began, just how you would place the contract. Matchpoints. You know your partner has a balanced 15-18 type hand with exactly three spades. ♠ T8xx ♥ Jx ♦ x ♣ Q98xxx You have a choice between setting the contract in 2♠, declared by the strong hand, or 3♣ declared by you. Which do you pick? How much would you have to change the strength of your hand or the quality of your suits to change your answer? Edited in light of the (unsurprising) first two answers: would 4-2-2-5 or 4-3-1-5 be just as obviously spade-preference hands, or would you still rather be in the likely 8-card minor fit?

There was a cogent argument in Preempts from A to Z that if you preempted in a minor, you were expected to almost always leave in partner's notrump correction, but that if you preempted in a major it was quite normal to wind up in 4M instead. (Mostly meaning that partner should be raising you to 4M and very very rarely bidding 3NT - but I wouldn't think it unreasonable to have a rule of thumb like "with an ace or king outside your suit, leave 3NT, without one go back to 4M".

Game-forces by passed hands are rare. Using FSF(inv), or its equivalent, to fish for 5-3 fits in responder's first suit, or try to induce opener to bid notrump with a stopper in the unbid suit, remains common by a passed hand, though the frequency with which you need to bail out cheaply with 11 opposite 11 goes up (and I do use FSF on 10 as a passed hand much more often than as an unpassed hand.) FSF-game isn't overly useful, no. (But I prefer FSF-round by an unpassed hand anyway.)

Youll find several more reviews of this book, with both positive and negative opinions of it, toward the end of the old "book reviews" pinned thread. (It was around the time that we had a longish discussion of the merits of the book in-thread that the new subforum was proposed.)

There certainly exist (a few) hands that are not worth a game force in reply to 1D but are after a 1S rebid - hands where opener was 4-4 or 4-5 in the majors with a maximum, and gained some distributional values once the spade fit was discovered. Let's say Qxxx Axxxx KJx x, as a ferinstance. Probably not enough of them to justify giving up both 2C and 2D by a passed hand. Frankly I don't like giving up both 2C and 2D by an UNpassed hand: I'd much rather play garden variety NMF/FSF. I think XYZ has way more invitational sequences than are needed, at the expense of game-forcing sequences. Playing the 1-1-1-3s as forcing by UPH as in XYZ, and putting all the invitations into NMF/FSF, suits me fine, and keeping 2 of opener's minor as weak.

It is pretty ugly, but at MP I'd at least seriously consider doing it anyway. It's not like this auction is going to get any safer... On the other hand, partner is reasonably likely to lead a spade anyway against their eventual heart contract, and we don't really want to invite him to be a hero and sacrifice over 4H.

I'd much rather open it, and have an easy 2C rebid if I need it, than respond with it, and despair of ever showing my second suit. Make it 1-3-4-5 instead of 1-3-5-4 and you could talk me into passing much more easily.