Ely Culbertson bidding system

[dachs96]

Can someone give me a good brief description of the bidding system Ely CUlbertson devised? I've heard it called the honor count system but I thought it differed from 4321. For example, a friend I was playing with, who is 83 and learned the Ely system, said she remembered something about opening w/ 4 points, which seems to me pretty low if it's standard 4321. Did it mean honor count in trump? Or something else.

 

I've looked around the NEt and can't find much - I can always go to the library and find a pre-Goren book but it would be nice if someone here can answer it for me. Thanks.

[mikeh]

Ely Culbertson's system was based on honour tricks: an A is one, an AK is two, and so on, with half tricks possible. Your 83 year old friend was no doubt remembering that one would open with 4 quick (or honour) tricks... indeed, one would open with 2 1/2, as I recall (from reading, not from being there :unsure: ).

 

Culbertson rejected the 4321 point count for suit bidding, and his creation, the Bridge World, fought a long, losing battle against that method's growing popularity in the 1940's into the 50's, before finally giving up.

 

Many used bookstores will have editions of Culbertson's Blue Book: the first edition of which founded his fortune. I have a number of Culbertson books, as well as other contemporary books, all of which used honour count as the foundation for the methods, in the early 30's. Later, there was intense competition between a number of count methods, but the simplicity of 4321 carried the day.

 

In my view, the Culbertson method is unplayable today, independent of the fact that you would have enormous difficulty filling out a convention card that is based on the assumption that you use the 4321 count. Bear in mind that Culbertson was writing at a time when NO-ONE knew how to bid: contract bridge was invented in 1928... and took a couple of years (or more) to fully supplant auction bridge, which was a fundamentally different game in terms of bidding and scoring. If you bid 1♠ and made all the tricks, you scored a grand slam in auction.

 

It is not surprising, therefore, that the ideas underlying Culbertson were revolutionary at the time and incredibly cumbersome to a modern viewer.

 

As for telling you about the exact method, I can't.. other than to say that the only reason for learning it would be to marvel that any one could get good results from it B) Of course, back then, it was customary (even amongst experts) to use body language, tone of voice and timing to clarify one's intended meaning: I am not sure that it was universal but it was certainly common, and few thought of it as unethical, until Kaplan's crusade in the 1950's.

[SoTired]

I have an autographed copy of Culbertson's Gold Book

 

The previous post was correct. Ely's system was based on honor-trick count. A cumbersome system involving fractions and inaccuracies.

 

However, he invented many of the bidding principles we use today. Among them was his "approach forcing" principle that a new suit by responder was forcing one round. This prevented all the jumping around that everyone was using.

 

He also wrote that a jump to game (ie. 1H 4H) was a weak preemptive bid with 5-card support.

 

He also invented the Grand Slam Force (a little different than currently used). He called it Josephine after his wife. I believe it is still called Josephine in some European countries.

 

As a matter of fact, Goren's system (later called SAYC) was basically Culbertson's system translated to point-count.