1NT openings

[ahydra]

If you agree to open 1NT on any balanced or 4441 hand (with a fixed range say 12-14), is this legal under the current (or new, as of 1st August) Orange Book 11F3?

 

Paragraph (d) says

 

a balanced or semi-balanced hand, or 7222 hand with a 7-card minor, or 4441 or

5431 or 6331 hand

 

but does that mean I have to open any 7m222, 5431 or 6331 12-14 hands with 1NT as well? Or can I get away with saying "we agreed a distributional restriction" (see the next bit in the Orange Book) whereby we discarded any unwanted shapes?

 

If the latter, perhaps the wording should be changed to something like:

 

[in terms of distribution], a 1NT opening can be played to show any or all of:

- a semi-balanced hand

- a 7m222 hand

- a 4441 hand

etc

 

but the agreed meaning must also include all balanced hands.

 

to make it clearer? (Or something similar, the wording is hard to get right... for example "can be played to show a balanced hand and a 6331 hand" seems odd because you can't have a balanced hand AND a 6331 at the same time, even though everybody knows that's not what is meant!)

 

Thanks,

 

ahydra

[mjj29]

If you agree to open 1NT on any balanced or 4441 hand (with a fixed range say 12-14), is this legal under the current (or new, as of 1st August) Orange Book 11F3?

If the latter, perhaps the wording should be changed to something like:

 

[in terms of distribution], a 1NT opening can be played to show any or all of:

- a semi-balanced hand

- a 7m222 hand

- a 4441 hand

etc

 

but the agreed meaning must also include all balanced hands.

It is legal, and your rephrasing doesn't work either, since I don't think you have to include all balanced hands in it. There are certainly people who won't open 1NT 5332 with a 5 card major, for example. OB10D1 says:

Is is generally permitted to vary the details of a permitted agreement by making it more restrictive

Indeed, the alerting regulations say:

A natural 1NT opening that has some agreed distributional constraints such as having no four card major, or allowing a six card minor.

and, indeed, 11F3

Players are free to agree more

restrictive distributional constraints (eg no four card major).

.

 

You would seem to be playing

a balanced or semi-balanced hand, or 7222 hand with a 7-card minor, or 4441 or 5431 or 6331 hand

with the additional distributional constraint thaat it's not a 7 card minor, semi-balanced, 5431 or 6331

[helene_t]

Yeah your interpretation is correct.

 

Maybe more generally you could say that if it is allowed to define a call as some set of hands then it is also allowed to define the call as some subset of that set.

 

Not quite true though, you can play a pass in first seat at 0-11 but you can't play it as 8-11.

[CamHenry]

1: this is a permitted agreement, as it's a strict subset of the range of permitted agreements.

2: It's legitimate, I believe, to announce it as "12-14, may be 4-4-4-1": this is not one of the announcements listed in the OB, but given you can say "12-14, may contain a singleton", it's perfectly legit to be more specific.

[campboy]

The latest L&EC minutes cover the more specific announcement, saying

It was also confirmed that the prescribed announcements in the Orange Book may be added to by players if doing so aids full disclosure in a concise fashion.

[Finch]

The latest L&EC minutes cover the more specific announcement, saying

It was also confirmed that the prescribed announcements in the Orange Book may be added to by players if doing so aids full disclosure in a concise fashion.

Oops, do they really? I thought that is what was in the draft and the final version was going to say that announcements could be varied etc etc at the TD's discretion (because we didn't want everyone making up their own announcements and saying things like "18-21 Banzai points" instead).

 

I'll check.

[blackshoe]

In the ACBL, players are not supposed to embellish the required announcements. They do it anyway. :D :D

[dburn]

In the ACBL, players are not supposed to embellish the required announcements. They do it anyway. :blink:  :(

I am pleased to hear it. As I have remarked many times, the purpose of an alert (or an announcement) is not to conform to some set of regulations, but to tell the opponents what you are playing in case they don't know and can't guess.

 

If, for example, you agree that a 1NT opening may contain a singleton but only if that singleton is a top honour, or only if that singleton is a club, then you should say so and no amount of regulation should prevent you from saying so. And if the good citizens of the United States have taken to saying so in defiance of some ludicrous piece of pettifoggery, then more power to their elbows and less power to those legislators unable to discern between their elbows and other parts of their anatomy.

[blackshoe]

When, in the ACBL, one opens 1♣ which, while otherwise natural and non-forcing, could be on a club suit as short as two cards, regulation requires the announcement "could be short". If 1♣ is forcing, then the regulation requires an alert. So I don't see how "could be short, non-forcing" adds anything useful to the announcement. Worse, I've seen players who intend to pass adding this embellishment, while leaving it out when they intend to bid. So I think, Mr. Burn, you ought not to be so free with your praise for such players.

[bluejak]

There are always problems with players who make up their own regulations even with the purest of motives. The presumption that a player [who might easily be affected by the particular circle he plays in] knows more than the legislators is a common one, but not necessarily correct.

 

I, too, am surprised by this minute. Did we really decide that?

[dburn]

When, in the ACBL, one opens 1♣ which, while otherwise natural and non-forcing, could be on a club suit as short as two cards, regulation requires the announcement "could be short". If 1♣ is forcing, then the regulation requires an alert. So I don't see how "could be short, non-forcing" adds anything useful to the announcement. Worse, I've seen players who intend to pass adding this embellishment, while leaving it out when they intend to bid. So I think, Mr. Burn, you ought not to be so free with your praise for such players.

I say (and said) nothing regarding players who announce opening bids of 1♣ in accordance with ACBL regulations - my remarks were concerned only with opening bids of 1NT.

 

If players seek an advantage by varying their announcements according to their intentions facing an opening bid of 1♣ - why, those players may be villains of the deepest dye, and it may be wise to shoot them dead on sight even if (as may transpire later) they aren't.

 

I guess the trouble I have with all of this is the same as the trouble Jeff Rubens has with all of this. The Laws, and the Conditions of Contest, and everything else, are so constituted that in almost any marginal situation, whatever you do will offend someone else's sense of fair play.

 

Apart from saying that they should not be so constituted, there is little one can do. Burn's 25th Law - "A call once made cannot be changed. Law 26..." - has even less chance of being implemented than Burn's Law 47 - "if you've played a card, you've played it, and no invocations whether or not they involve excrement can alter the fact".

 

Still, if Ed is worried about people who behave in one fashion when intending to pass partner out in 1♣ and in another fashion when not so intending, he may have a case - or at any rate, a grievance. Maybe the hardest problem we face in teaching people how to play tournament bridge rather than bridge is this UI business. And maybe we can't solve it.

[blackshoe]

My apologies. I had understood we were talking about announcing regulations generally, not specifically and only those for a 1NT opening. Guess I lost track of the thread.

[mycroft]

When, in the ACBL, one opens 1♣ which, while otherwise natural and non-forcing, could be on a club suit as short as two cards, regulation requires the announcement "could be short". If 1♣ is forcing, then the regulation requires an alert. So I don't see how "could be short, non-forcing" adds anything useful to the announcement. Worse, I've seen players who intend to pass adding this embellishment, while leaving it out when they intend to bid. So I think, Mr. Burn, you ought not to be so free with your praise for such players.

I don't mind embellishments (although that extra game of UI passing is fun, I've never seen that one); I don't see anyone objecting to my embellishment of my 1D announcement: "Could be as short as 2" or my compatriots' similar "Could be as short as 0". If a pair played that "2D transfer except" system (which I don't know very well), I wouldn't feel uncomfortable with "almost always transfer"as an announcement.

 

What I don't like is embellishments of the announcement *system* - "negative", "waiting", "flannery" being the three that come to mind immediately.

[aguahombre]

Maybe on topic, maybe a Hijack ---but I will ask, anyways(s).

 

We have been playing together for 25 years, and have---over that time---opened a 4-4-4-1 hand in range 1NT a few times (enough that we agree it is barely possible); but we also agree to never allow for that to have happened, at any stage of our auction.

Do we really have a disclosable agreement at all which should be mentioned unless a specific question demands it?

 

Oops, we are in ACBL and the thread is about Orange Book. So sorry, but still wondering about the answer for EBU, WBF, ACBL, or whatever.