Beginners suffer from notrumpophibia

[helene_t]

Disclaimer: If you want to discuss the general (de)merits of teaching Precision in a standard bidding country, start your own thread please.

 

Traditional Dutch teaching methods start with "every 4-card is biddable". Hence there is no reason ever to bid notrump - you always have a 4-card. Next, students learn the situations (one by one) in which you promise a 5-card: Overcalls, 2♥ response to 1♠ etc. Eventually they switch to 5cM and all there is left of the "every 4-card is biddable" is the 1-level responses, second suit and responses to Stayman. Suppose you also teach them Montreal (rare) and Puppet (less rare) .....

 

One consequence of this is that it seems that notrump bidding is optional - you always have an alternative. They learned that a 1NT response denies a 4-card that could be bid at the 1-level, and by analogy will bid (in a standard system with a strong artificial 2♣)

2♣-2♥*

2♠* as fourcards up-the-line.

 

I decided to try the other route. "Your first suit is always 5-card". In Wei Precision (1♦ natural) this is almost true (I have tried standard 5cM as well, this post applies to both).

 

To my surprise it doesn't work. I persist in preaching "your first suit is a 5-card", and they keep introducing 4-cards, as in

1♣*-1♠

2♥**

*strong

**should be a 5-card, but ....

or

(1♦)-X-(pass)-1♠

(pass)-2♣**

 

Somehow beginners seem to have a natural (regardless of teaching methods) aversion against bidding notrumps. I wonder if it has to do with a bias in the way specific bids receive the blame for bad results:

- You open/rebid 1NT and play there while 2M would have been better - blame the 1NT bid.

- You bid 1N-3N with a suit wide open - blame both notrump bids (nobody notices that if you had discovered the leak you would have reached 5m which would not have been better).

- You fail to bid notrump and play in a 4-3 fit - blame the 3-card raise.

- You fail to open 1NT and cannot describe your point range - blame p's decision.

- You fail to open 1NT and opps get a free ride - congrats to opps for their good bidding.

- You fail to open 1NT (or to raise 1NT directly to 3NT) and opps get an informed lead/defense against your 3N - congrats to opps for their good defense.

 

Another thing is that if only 5-cards are biddable you need other alternatives than notrump: cuebids and dbls. And they are difficult to learn because their meaning depend on the auction as well as on the meaning of opps' bidding.

 

Any thoughts? Anyone who has experience, good or bad, with teaching criteria for notrump bidding?

[paulg]

I only have limited experience with beginners but I've found that the BIL members who attend my sessions abhor playing 1NT.

 

And I don't blame them. I hate it too. If there is one contract that shows the difference between an expert and a good player, then it is a grotty 1NT.

 

I will say that they happily open 1NT, they just don't want to hear three passes next!

 

Paul

[Rossoneri]

Surprisingly I don't see that happening so much with my juniors....or maybe I haven't been seeing them enough.

 

Although they do seem very surprised when I tell them I like declaring 1NT.

[paulg]

In my experience juniors are scared of nothing and rarely have an auction that finishes as low as 1NT.

[KungFuChkn]

As someone who runs almost exclusively in B/I circles, I think the trump cards are a big 'crutch' to players at my level. With them, we know we can ruff tricks and control at least one suit. In NT, my low cards are 'always' low...

 

For me personally, I like NT and love 1NT. It's a challenging contact and it revs me up. NT cardplay just seems to make more sense to me, for some reason. In contrast to the attitude above, I can make my low cards high by establishing them. And the chance to pull that off is cool.

[badderzboy]

I have the same experience as Helene, the beginners at the lessons all hate the auction 1NT ppp .

 

It is also my favourite contract at MPs in the bridge clubs I play in as I feel I have a good chance of getting a good MP score as my play is above average in the club.

 

My ex-bridge teacher is a great believer that to judge someones ability look at how well they fare over time in 1NT lol

 

Steve

[jillybean]

I dreaded 1nt contracts when I first started playing, didn’t you? Establishing suits was not a skill I was born with. :)

[awm]

A lot of times I think it's just an issue with seeing/thinking about the hand, rather than trying to avoid some contract.

 

Beginners often look at their hand, see a bunch of spades, and think "oh I should bid spades."

 

They never seem to look at their hand and "see a bunch of notrumps." :)

 

The issue is that bidding notrump is more of a negative inference -- you bid notrump because you don't have something (a five card suit, a singleton, etc) more than because you do.

 

Most people get over this eventually.

[han]

Yeah that's it, agree with Adam.

[hotShot]

I let my beginners play 4 boards of "dealer plays 1NT without bidding" every now and than.

I tell them that this is an exercise about signaling, because the signals are the only source of information they have.

As a side effect, they stop to fear 1NT contracts.

[helene_t]

I think Adam is right. If it was only an aversion against 1NT contracts, the problem would apply to non-forcing 1NT bids only. Btw, you don't see "a bunch of t/o doubles" or "a bunch of unassuming cuebids" in your hand either :)

 

The problem with the negative inference is that we treat 5332 as balanced and 4441 as unbalanced. So either you have to teach the concept of "balanced" (it is quite complex to justify that concept in general. Why would partner want to know that I'm balanced?), or you have to start with treating 5332 as unbalanced and 4441 as balanced and then later teach the merits of telling p that your hand is balanced.

 

Or you just say that they have to bid notrump asap with at most one doubleton simply because the f...ng textbook says so. But I really dislike teaching that way.

[mycroft]

The problem I've seen with I/N players who don't want to play notrump is that when it goes wrong, it goes really wrong, and that's massively disheartening.

 

In a trump contract, you can pull trump and usually have one or two remaining to act as a backstop. They don't realize that, they just know that they get back in. In NT, once you lose your controls, that 6-card suit just runs. And they have to make 3 or 4 pitches per hand - and that's one of the most difficult things in the "decent player" repertoire, so if they get it wrong, that opens up another suit to run, and more pitches, and suddenly you're looking at 3NT-4 or more. And even if it's the same zero as 4S-1, it doesn't feel the same.

 

Combine this with the other natural I/N habit of seeing tricks only, and not where the rest of the potentials are coming from, and this just gets worse. One of these players will be in 1NT, see 5 tops, and take them, and wonder where the other two tricks are coming from. Of course, once they give up the lead, they've also given up all the control over the hand, so they never do get them. At least in a trump contract, that last trump is a backstop - they think of it as a sixth trick that has "appeared", but don't realize it's the fact that it's their control to make the seventh and eighth (which they then do), rather than the trick itself, that is important.

 

I don't know what to do about curing notrumpphobia besides non-judgmentally letting them get experience, but I do try to explain that high cards in short suits aren't *tricks*, they're *controls* that they use to hold the opponents off while they set up their tricks. It helps - not enough, but it helps.

 

Michael.

[awm]

What's the hardest contract to play? You often hear "1NT" at least from the B/I crowd.

 

But ask the same people, what's the hardest contract to defend? You often hear.... "1NT."

 

Reminding them of the other side of the equation (i.e. their opponents hate defending 1NT just as much as they hate playing it) does wonders for their attitude. :blink:

 

Heck, people hate defending 1NT so much that they even play DONT to try and boot their opponents out of it.... :P

[mycroft]

Heh - I'd *much* rather play 1NT than 1D AP.

 

But the I/Ns chicken out and let others play 1 of a suit too much, so they don't understand why this auction is so scary.

 

Michael.

[Rossoneri]

Haha. Paul, I am not even 20 yet so I am still a junior myself. What I meant was my school juniors.

 

Case in point: There was one pair of my juniors playing also at our local bridge club last evening. One of them ended up declaring 1NT against me, and butchered the contract after my poor lead had gifted 1NT+3 to them....She eventually ended up 1NT-4 and was quite upset...the 3 of us had to console her quite a bit at the end of the board.