bluecalm

p 1S 2H What hands bid 2H here and what hands bid 1N ? What do you do with: AQJxxx xx x AQJx. How do we find about our 6-2 spades, 6-2 hearts and/or diamond stopper (or lack of) ? I suppose 2S is not forcing here which makes matters a bit more complicated than they usually are (maybe not with the problem hand but with something like: KJxxxx xx AKx Axx

So what's the link between Nobel Prize and bridge ? Any ? :(

Is it the same Al Roth - bridge book author ? I can't find anything about bridge on his wikipedia page.

Matter of agreements but after 1D partner shouldn't have 4card major, nor 4 diamnods so he has 6+clubs. This means playing it as forcing doesn't lose much in partscore department but maybe very useful in game department. Basically I want to say I agree with everything Mikeh said.

Meh. If I wanted to show clubs I would show clubs instead of bal hand somewhere around 1st round of bidding. Imo cue-bid (or some sort of good H raise) is much more useful here.

Partner is unlimited and has 4 clubs. 4-4 heart fit will often provide 12th or 13th trick (club ruff) so we gotta show hearts.

He limited his hand to super minimum (in 14+ range) by bidding 4H. We also bid cues when we are missing controls and/or are unsure about our combined assets being enough for a slam. I would pass I think partner shouldn't bid 4H with any hand which makes slam good opposite what we have. 4S is an option if 4H has wider range than I think it should have. RKC is judgement blunder imo. Not only we are not strong enough to force slam (which we should be if we use RKC) but we are also missing club control and partner very likely doesn't have it either for his negative 4H bid. If he does have it along with decent hand (Kx KQxx Jx KQxxx) RKC won't solve our problems anyway.

Yes. It's common and bad. At 5 level or in specific situations sure but those "are you ruffing this pd ?" situations are very common and this agreement cripples you.

It doesn't look scary to me, should I be worried ? :) The hand was tad too weak for vulnerable 2C opposite unpassed partner imo. We obviously won't be 5-5 here as we would have either bid 2NT (if that show minors and we had suitable hand) or 1D round before. Really ? What kind of hand passes 1C and bids 2NT now ? It is surely more useful for 6-4.

Don't play count here it's source of many disasters. One exception could be if declarer showed 5-4+ hand then count makes sense.

Pass. They can even make on a bad day and I have quite offensive hand.

I don't see why partner should pass a double without a solid trump stack. I also don't understand playing a double as "just a trap pass". Imo if we have t/o hand to a suit they bid we double and if we have both of those suits we either pass or bid 2/3N. Double as "just a trap pass, do something" seems like silly convention to me.

I bid 3H now. If partner passed I would have doubled: t/o to hearts.

I like it. Some time ago I was thinking about writing some scripts to make it automatic but then I got distracted by the idea of building "single dummy estimator" which I presumed would be much faster and thus allow for full search instead of generating sample of hands. Your approach is probably good enough to give many interesting results but there is this stuff about NT contracts making relatively more often than suit contracts comparing to dd results so and I don't know how to correct this bias. Maybe building some kind of first lead algorithm would help with that (dd results after 1st lead is made are much better estimation of what happens single dummy than the ones before 1st lead).

Yeah, same reason to play Gazilli in constructive bidding as 2D strong here. I guess you could try Gazilli here with 2D natural as well although I really don't think that's better solution it would probably work reasonably well though.. If it starts at 15 (great 14 maybe like Ax AKQJx xxx xxx example you gave) then the only real cost is that now you play 3C partial instead of 2C one.

I think that's the one. I don't think you can find any magical information on that. You just need to choose who to believe or make your own judgement. Mine is that overcalling with a suit is almost always better and to even consider a double I would need something along the lines of AQJx 8xxxx Axx x. My understanding is that most world class players also play this style although I remember there were some hands Fantoni-Nunes doubled on last time I researched this. You were unlucky on this hand or maybe partner should've passed 2C. I don't know. Usually when it goes double-double and you have what you did have you will be ok :)

Matter of agreements I guess. I like penalty as we found major suit fit. I think more interesting are situations where unlimited hand doubles, especially in no support double context, say: 1C - p - 1S - dbl 2S - 3D - dbl = ?

I don't know anybody who would understand 4NT->5D as weakier let alone pick-up (but very good) partner. Thanks for setting me straight on this one. I passed and it was 800 vs 1370 on other table as partner had: AKJx x QJxx AKJx

It would for sure go long way to convince me (and others) to your idea if you give some example hands. I can't remember one hand I needed to know if partner has K of trumps among his key cards while I rememeber many when I needed to make grand slam try in a suit or offer choice of slam (or wish I had that available).

[hv=pc=n&w=s975h87dakt872c97&d=n&v=e&b=9&a=p1c1hp4hdp]133|200[/hv] IMPs. Everybody at the table is much better than me. My action ? Is it clear ? What about other vulns ?

There was a thread about it in other subforum lately. There are two camps and there are a lot of good players in both of them.

So now we are bidding 5NT/6X just to say if one of our keycards is K of trumps (info which is about never needed imo). We are losing other stuff though comparing to standard rkcb where the last answer is 5S. This stuff is: a)showing voids with even/uneven number of keycards b)various asks from RKCB bidder side (grand slam invite for xx/Qx in a suit, choice of slams) If I am getting it right it looks terrible to me.

1H and dbl. Bid your longest suit and then double if you have extras and support for unbid suits.

My intuition is that RKCB is good convention and it rarely causes problems if rest of the system is well designed. That's why I am reluctant to analyze your idea, the potential gain is just too small even if it's the best possible solution.

Just a strong hand. You need a bid for: xx AKJxx Axx Axx or: Qxx AKxxx xx AKxx or: x KQJxx Axx AQxx I think it should be 15-17 in principle. With our hand we are just below GF opposite that so I would bid 2NT which should deny 5 spades, 2 hearts and 6 card minor. I wouldn't expect it to be universal understanding though.