bluecalm

I would bid 3D round before. I guess it was not possible in OP's system. I happily bid 4D now expecting partner to be 2-2-(4-5) with extras most of the time. I don't think we make 5 opposite that often enough although we will miss some games due underbid in previous round.

For someone willing to make their own judgement I pulled the hands when it went 1M - p - 1N - p p p played by top Italians and Meckwell from my vugraph database. There were 53 such hands, you can download them in .lin format here: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/86311885/1NTpassed.linpart0.lin https://dl.dropbox.com/u/86311885/1NTpassed.linpart1.lin Again I am just arguing for a point that 5M-3-3-2 hands benefit from bidding on. Semi-forcing has advantage of making 2 rebid better defined and it may well be worthy trade-off, especially at IMPs.

I don't want to ignore any hands. I am just asking if you bid 4H regarless of trump quality/diamond cue/overall hand quality. I understand that the answer is yes :) What is subsequent bidding btw ? Let's say it goes 4H is RKCB on clubs now ? or maybe for 6keycards ? What is 4S ?

Ok, so to make sure I am getting this right you would bid 4H in "american" style with: Jxx AQJxx Qx AQx and: Jxx AQJxx Kx AJx And in "Italian/Polish" style with: Jxx AQJx Qxx AQx and: Jxx AQJx Kxx AJx Am I getting this right ? I wanna make sure so I can deal some hands and see how this idea works out. My main question is if you always bid 4H now with 5 hearts if you don't want to bid 3NT or are there some hands with 5 hearts which bid 4C/4D instead.

But I assume that if you play 4H natural here you also use it with cue available and with max/min hand. If not then you only gain if you have max and no diamond cue and 5 hearts. If yes you lose on all the hands you are bidding your hearts instead of investigating ♣ slam.

He may have very good hand with hearts without spades, too strong for 1H overcall.

The simplest and good agreement is that after 4D bid 4H/4S are cuebids = good hand for diamonds and 4NT is natural = bad hand for diamonds. After 4H/4S bids you may want to play RKCB or some variation of it which allows you to stop in 5m opposite 2 keycards (or just play that 5NT is to play after minor suit RKCB).

I think this is very good agreement and should apply here so 4D/4H = cuebid and good hand opposite ♠ shortness. This comes from someone who don't do 1NT with 5M-3-3-2 though. If I played that 5-3-3-2 15-17 opens 1NT then I would definitely want to have some system to find about our heart fit below 4H in this sequence. Not having such system I still prefer a cue here. It will be very difficult to make any kind of informed decision here if 4H is just hearts. Not because we miss 4H bid but because we skip D cuebid with 5hearts.

My view on this which is definitely not standard is that 4♣ should be a weak hand (old suit = weakness). We don't have that so we should bid some 3rd suit forcing after 3♣ and 4♣ later. It will be very difficult now because we are in 4-11 range so partner would like to make many "just in case" cues. We need to find something about our range and the place for that is after 3♣ bid. Something like: 1♠ - 1NT 3♣ - ? 3♦ = artificial, good hand (~8-11) 3♥ = long hearts 3♠ = minimum preference 3NT = something in red suits 4♣ weakish hand with ♣ support 4♦ = very good hand for clubs, cuebid.

My problem with this is that it's difficult to construct a generic rule which would allow us to recognize such situations without agreeing on all of them separately. Can you propose a rule which qualifies this 4S as power bid and also work for other similar situations ? Let's say this sequence: 1C - dbl - pass - 1H 2S - 4H - 4S - ? Is 4H a "power bid" here and thus pass now forcing ?

I would bid 5S round before. Getting another chance I bid 5s now regardless of what dbl means. I think our first pass is non-forcing we can have 0 an they could be trapping. I live by the rule that if we didn't force ourselves to game below game then pass is NF barring specific agreements. Now partner has to double with many powerhouses regardless of his actual H holding and 5S is often making. I really consider it a no-brainer. We have huge extras which we didn't show before.

In normal bridge it's easy double showing extras and no other convenient bid. Unfortunately in pick-up partnership it's risky because partner may think it's penalty or that you think it's penalty or that you think they think it's penalty. In those circumstances I would try 3NT.

You can also play multi-landy (defence you described as your actual system) but with X being 5-4. If there is one thing I want to have after 1NT it's 2C majors. Rest doesn't matter much imo and there are a lot of sensible options to try.

Thanks for the answers. We for now agreed on simple solution: 2H is either 6H or 2S-5H (5H-5M doesn't happen too often because we have opening for that). I like the ideas in this thread, especially transfers. If I ever have serious partnership I will surely think of agreeing on that.

I used bcalc a lot about a year ago and it's very fast and easy to use. I used it to calculate minimaxes on 150k hands vugraph database and it only took one night on an i7. It also has an API now (I wrote Python wrapper myself for it which worked by scrapping human readable output) so it should be very good choice for a project.

Most common situation is bal hand opposite 2suiter which often happens after 1N/2N/2C openings or in sequences like: 1C - 1S 1N - 3H You need to make agreements if it always applies in such situation or if you need 5-5 in general and 5-4 in specific cases (say only after 2NT opening).

Disregard everything I said. I thought Everyone was dummy :-)

I feel that establishing diamonds is not that important here. Just play 6RKCB and 6d afterwards as to play. Remember that 6M opposite 6m is +2imps. Those adds up and make hunting for a perfecto much less attractive. I feel that non-serious/serious mechanism + cuebids is the way go. Let's say we choose non-serious. I would go a bit more serious with it than usual and just bid 4S on most 11-13hands leaving 3NT for (13)14-15 and cuebids for serious slam tries even opposite 4 diamonds. I think that finding out about our range with some decent accuracy is more important than other stuff herre. I really want to avoid a situation when we are often making 5 level tries and ending up playing something silly just because we were afraid partner could have much more.

You can and maybe should but you didn't. You chose to show 1214 bal instead of 12 17 and 9 minor cards. That choice even if not the best seems reasonable. The problem is what to do now.

This is correct. We showed 12-14balanced. We couldn't rebid 2C though (as it would be 15+) Thanks for your answers I will post "results" later.

NVM.

[hv=pc=n&s=s84ha5dk852ckq732&d=e&v=b&b=10&a=p1c1hdp1n3hdp]133|200[/hv] 1♣ = polish club but it's the same as 2+ in this situation first dbl = 4 or 5 spades 2nd dbl = extras Good/star opps, imps. Your choice ?

This is the problem. This agreement is very weak, especially combined with 2D being 4+. Both 2D and especially 3D are high bids and should have more descriptive meaning. You are shooting yourself in the foot playing the way you described. You are at 3S level and the hands could still be anything in very wide range. You would need like 3 steps of non-serious/serious 3NT to untangle it (3NT serious ? 4C - not really ? 4D - maybe ? 4H - yup ! or something) not to mention other things like shortnesses in responder hands, controls in round suits and amount of diamonds (and spades) we have. That might be playable in precision (although I still doubt it) but in 2/1 it's a disaster.

I doubled 5♣ to show we have double fits and sacrifice is possible. Is it bad ? Now I obviously didn't consider 6♠ myself. I thought my options were pass or double. Pass having this disadvantage/advantage that partner will save with: say Kxxx - xxx KQxxxx which rates to be great for us if they really have ♣ void. It will be a disaster if they haven't though. Another thing is that it enables us 5S sacrifice vs 5H which rates to be great w/e they have but maybe I should've tried 5S myself ?

[hv=pc=n&e=sqjt972hk9d85caj6&d=w&v=b&b=4&a=p1h1s3s4c4d4spp5cd5d5s6h]133|200[/hv] Opponents are star pair who play a lot together on BBO. From what I gather they are very good. We don't have any agreements here as we are pick-up partnership. What do I do here ? Do you like my bidding so far ?