Siegmund

Even if partner has a 5CM you aren't going to be taking any ruffs in the short hand - partner will be 5332. Put me down for a tossup between 4N and 6N, and would not have considered Stayman even if the honors had been a bit more lopsided.

I would have opened 5C at equal in third, and don't think it's all that close. Generally speaking partners will expect 2 defensive tricks if you opened, 1 or less if you preempted, and plan accordingly with their doubles. It depends some whether your style is to preempt or to open 1 when you have 1½ defensive tricks. Partner knows you arent eager to defend hearts, but you havent yet pulled a double so at this point he is expecting a 7-card club suit and 2 tricks from you... you're going to provide one more club and one less defensive trick so IMO it's a reasonably clear pull to 4C, given the prior misbids.

At least in the case of 7-card suits, it's what I was taught was standard when I started playing. It's in, for instance, the old Eddie Kantar "Big Red" and his defensive-tips books, among other old standbys on defense. I've never heard anyone outside of a bridge laws forum suggest it was illegal or unusual. There are a variety of other special meanings for unusual cards from long suits in e.g. the Journalist Leads book. As it is explained in those books to beginners, a high card is supposed to be the highest you can afford, and low card is supposed to be the lowest you can afford, to minimize confusion when a 4, say, has to be high from 4-2 but low from 8-6-4. Holding a known long suit is a different animal since you can unambiguously identify more than two sizes of card without risk of confusion. It IS a bit odd when you stare directly at the ACBL carding regulation. But the ACBL allows, for instance, the use of a trump echo to suggest an unusual defence, rather than to request a specific suit - so all I can conclude is that the one-sentence "signals" rule is intended only to apply to "normal" signaling situations, with considerable freedom with long suits, trump signals, alarm clock leads (and leads in general, for that matter, where "anything goes" is allowed if properly disclosed) and so on. Shame they don't spell it out.

The fact that partner wishes to subside at 2H opposite an 11-15 hand with a 5-card heart suit is some pretty darn compelling UI that he has a weaker-than-usual natural forcing 2H response to your weak two -- you'd normally play him for more than an opening bid and a long heart suit. It looks like very blatant taking advantage of UI from hearing partner's incorrect alert from where I sit.

I have to disagree with this advice: The question to ask yourself is "can I describe my hand better by opening it, or by passing and then responding after partner opens?" A lot of people have a serious shortage of invitational non-fit bids after partner opens -- no natural 2m bids, either forced to jump to 2NT with 11s opposite possibly-light 3rd seat openings, or no natural 2NT bid either. There are a LOT of 11-point hands where I would rather see the auction go 1m-1M-1NT than pass-1M-2NT (or whatever.) The details depend on your choice of system toys. If you play Drury and have 3-card support for the majors, or if you don't play Drury and don't have 3-card support for a major, or your hand is so weak you're willing to respond a nonforcing notrump to partner's opening, then yes, pass it.

The combination of it being IMPs and the opponents being in a minor (and us possibly helping push them to a grand) are probably good reasons to have them not apply. And my partner, at least, would agree with the general principle that unsupported preempts don't put us in negative-slam-double auctions. But the auction alone does say 6S will cost at most 1400, which makes this darn close to an auction where the auction alone says we have a save. (My partner and I had a similar accident once, where I knew a save existed and he didn't. And yes, we kept them on the card anyway, after refining our agreements about them a bit further.)

An....enlightening thread. Running out to a 2-card club suit then SOS redoubling in direct seat, and having partner understand it, sounds to me like a really clever way to get busted (at least) twice on the same board, for a concealed partnership agreement (perhaps more than one of them) and a psychic control. I can see where it would have merit in a world where psychics were common and psychic controls were legal.

Disciplined, no, I have 8 tricks on offense and 0 on defense, where I will more often have 7 and 1. But it's a reasonable decision to open, and having done it, I think you're committed to sticking to it, unless you have negative slam doubles on your card.

If I heard 1H-then-2C-then-XX from p I'd be envisioning something along the lines of xx J9xxx A AQTxx or Kxx Jxxxx - KQJxx. A point or two more or less is possible; a sixth club is possible. Lots of hands where you'd expect to beat 1NTx if partner led a club but an opening heart lead will not set anything up for us and we're light enough that we don't expect 1NTx to die of natural causes. Some of these hands might run from 2Dx or 2Sx while others might sit. To be sure, a lot of the time 3rd hand has still made at least one bad bid... but how can he NOT have a heart-club two-suiter... so how CAN he have a willingness to hear his partner run to whichever pointed suit he likes better? Do some of you who open a lot of ratty 8s and 9s in 3rd seat have an agreement that opener always pulls this double even when he is 5332? (If you do, are you alerting your 2C rebids?)

Third hand. I almost understand the psych, though 5 is a little heavy for it - better to be light enough you are sure there is a game to be stolen from the opps. Ordinarily psycher exposes his stunt by passing whatever his partner bids even if it's forcing. Here the double put him in a bind... I can SORT of see why he's afraid to take his lumps in 1NTx. (He knows that's probably going to hurt, though as long as the result is 9 or 10 tricks, it won't hurt much.) I can't imagine why he redoubled 2Cx. After having ostensibly shown a minimum heart-club two-suiter, how can that redouble sound like anything other than "yes, I really do have better clubs than hearts... if they sit for it I'm going to make it opposite your 10-without-hearts, if they run you're welcome to double them in a misfit / raise me to 3C"? At some point psycher has to quit bidding, or his partner is going to imagine progressively more exciting and shapely hands.

Over 1NT I am a big believer in having a way to show specifically HHxxxx in a minor and nothing else, opener to bid 3NT with the fitting honour and otherwise stop in 3m. Over 2NT, I am not tempted by anything other than 3NT at pairs. Even at IMPs I can see quite a few hands where 10 tricks is the limit in either strain, to balance against the times we can't run the diamonds.

Double is pretty freakin scary at MPs too. No way to eliminate any of our spade losers in dummy since we'll be overruffed by responder, AND no particular guarantee anybody has a fit. I dont think I would feel much of a pang at letting this one go.

Perhaps we can upgrade our Qx enough to force to game, if partner plays soundish openers. The original question about 2S is a good one. I will add it to the list of reasons I have soured on XYZ. (I was briefly a fan, mostly as a means of tricking partners into playing 1-1-1-3 auctions as natural and forcing, accepting the cost of wasting a 2-level bid to avoid an argument.)

Supermax 1S, but still 6 losers, and while we expect red-suit finesses to work we need entries to take them. Axxx in spades may well be only one entry. Most 18s I would be willing to double. Here I am swayed by the Qx in clubs as well as the less than solid spades.

...but turning +50 into +100 isnt what gets you rich (well, sometimes your side makes exactly 90); turning +100 into +200 does, anytime you don't have a game-going hand; if I had to play penalty only half the time I'd play it when they are vulnerable (at matchpoints.) I personally prefer to play it penalty all the time. I know the folk on the forum who spend all day playing expert-level opps say that there aren't many penalties to be had; at the club level there are. IMO the "hand like yours" - strong enough to want to compete, short in their suit, AND has no bid - is a very rare one (the posted example, and its slightly weaker cousins) is a great deal *less* common than the penalty double hands (which can include a wide array of balanced 6-8 counts as well as a bunch of game-strength hands that have the opps' suit covered.) On the actual posted hand, with 8HCP and the -98 sequences, I probably would have stretched to bid 3S, rather than settled for pass.

They did lead a club (sorry for forgetting to mention that) and rainer's last line above does work. No unusual breaks - 7-1 clubs 3-1 spades 4-2 diamonds - but on the opening club lead, an awful lot of people had an instinctive reaction "must eliminate the club loser", and only realized after taking HK SK HA that, oops, now they need 3-3 diamonds or a miracle because the HK was a key entry to the dummy.

The 11-12 2NT bid is one of my least favorite bids in 2/1-as-played-by-most. I'm much happier putting the 11-pointers through an inverted raise (or treating 1D-2C as a kind of 'inverted minor nonraise' sequence) and having the jump be forcing. Comes in handy both for 4333 13-pointers as responder where you only want to be in the major game if opener has a fit and is very lopsided, and for the 18-19-pointers that bid 2NT then bid again.

I am surprised Culbertson was as aggressive as 2-3-and-4. (The "and 4" part is a duplicate-only thing party bridge folk usually can't stomach.) Provided you don't have any other serious flaws for a preempt (like having 2 defensive winners) I quite like the rule of 2, 3, and 4. Helps if your partner knows you are doing it, of course. As for AKQJxx xxx xx xx, there is some worry about the 2-defensive-tricks aspect. With KQJxxxx xxx x xx, I'd be quite disappointed in any partner who DIDNT open 4S favorable.

As it happens we did reach 7S. One of I think 3 pairs in a 26-table field to do so. Sadly, NOBODY in the room made 13 tricks, despite the fact that I don't think the winning line is all that odd or hard to find, and my partner felt quite bad about not spotting it in time.

Nice advertisement for playing 1S NF IMO.

Fun hand from a sectional this weekend. NS vul, East deals. [hv=pc=n&w=sat98hkdak8643caj&e=skq532haqt7d7ct65&d=e&v=n&b=2]266|200[/hv] Whether East opens 1S or passes, South will come in with 3C. After that you are left in peace.

2S the first time for me, though I am prepared to be wrong. I think I have to drop 3H though - among hands with which I'd make a free bid, this is worth a lot less in hearts than almost all of them.

Heh. My (former) club hadn't even had its unit game until last week. No chance of any of the qualifiers coming down. Strange to extend the unit qualifying period to the end of March, and move the district game to the first of April, in the same year. I quite like that D18 is going to play its district finals on BBO rather than requiring people to travel. Second week of May IIRC.

Just out of curiosity... the forum has refused 3 days in a row to let me download the attachment at the head of this thread - in both IE and Firefo - but the number of downloads keeps increasing. Is it just me? Is the document available anywhere else?

Passing over 2D looks fine to me. NV I would stretch to bid 3C myself, to push them up that extra level, but Frances has told us exactly what's wrong with doubling :)