Slam-zone auctions need to be different

[bluenikki]

I have played a fair amount of bridge. I have played quite a lot of high level bridge. I have read about a far greater number of high level bridge than I’ve played.

 

The frequency of slam zone hands where the issue is to avoid a weak 4-4 fit and, instead, to play in a different suit is extremely low.

 

Yes, they do happen. Yes, even the best pairs in the world can struggle on those hands.

 

Yes, every good player is aware of the issue

 

But your solution is deeply flawed, imo.

 

I haven't seen any proposed solution by all those good players. Have you?

 

I have no thought that my solutions are any good. They're just off the top of my head. (But I still believe that responder's splinter raise of opener's SECOND suit is a waste.)

[bluenikki]

The frequency of slam zone hands where the issue is to avoid a weak 4-4 fit and, instead, to play in a different suit is extremely low.

 

By the way, do you have any proof of that?

 

After all, pairs of hands with 30 hcp and 10 control points combined are rare.

 

WITHIN THAT UNIVERSE I bet at least 10% have fits in two suits, in one of which slam is poor and slam is good in the other.

[mikeh]

The reason that these problem layouts still occur periodically in CTC and similar features, and the reason that great pairs still get these ‘wrong’ is that system design focuses on more common issues. It’s not that the issue isn’t important: it’s that there are other issues of comparable importance and higher frequency.

 

It’s pretty simple: unless one is playing a relay method there isn’t enough bidding space, on many slamming hands, in which to sort out everything.

 

Consider a slam decision in which, through some gadget, you know that you have a 4=4 trump suit, and you have A862 and know that partner has neither the king nor the queen.

 

If you have no other losers, should you avoid the slam?

 

The answer is….you don’t know.

 

If partner has 10xxx, you have no play. If he has Jxxx you have very little play

 

If he has J10xx you have more play but you wouldn’t want to be there

 

But if he has J1097 then, absent clues from the bidding, you rate to have only one trump loser (assuming adequate transportation)

 

 

AJ9x opposite xxxx…no thanks. Opposite 10xxx, pretty good….opposite 1087x…very good

 

 

And so on

 

In other words, just knowing of no top honour opposite may not help and could even lead to missing a good slam. Thus there’s no easy answer and sometimes the ‘weak fit’ actually is pretty good.

 

On another note…yes, good players are aware of this and good players look at their trump suit when deciding (this is a recurrent theme of mine) whether they ‘like’ their hand within the context of the bidding to date. So many times a good pair will dodge the problem. But some hands are just too tough. That’s bridge

 

As for relay, which can be tremendously accurate, it has other issues. I played a complex relay method for about 5 years. We had some incredible results.

 

But it is very memory intensive (my then and now current partner and I are about 70 now, and when we resumed our partnership we both said that we doubted we could remember the methods, even though we both have our 175 pages of highly compressed notes). It can also be disrupted sometimes by competition…it definitely works best when the opponents pass throughout.

 

If I were 30 and decided to form a serious partnership with a very intelligent partner, I’d go with some form of relay. But that’s for another lifetime😀

[DavidKok]

I must not have expressed myself well enough.

No, the problem is the opposite. We understand you perfectly well, you just dismiss the responses. The issues you bring up are not vital enough to redesign a bidding system around, or even a slam try system. I do happen to have ways to change strain at high level, but the idea that our methods must prepare for weak suit slam issues as early as the 3-level is a poor one. Keep in mind partner doesn't know your suit is weak, but they do know (after control bidding and keycards) that they've just told you the contents of their hand. Every bid you reserve for 'I might not want to play in this strain' loses some other meaning - one that might be important when your suit is not full of holes.

 

I also think your RKC modification is a poor idea. At the 5-level the notion of captaincy is very relevant. Going back to cooperative bidding after asker-responder bidding is frequently a poor idea, especially for setting a suit at the 6-level. Requesting partner's input doesn't even solve most of these problems, instead it merely pushes them around. Why would partner have a good idea of the better strain, after they've just told your their distribution, controls and key cards? What more do you expect them to do?

 

If you want to discuss possible continuations over an RKC response I'd be happy to share what I play, though I think in general players of all levels focus far too much on their key card tools ("No you don't understand we play minorwood so we are experts") so most likely it is not worth going into detail.

[michel444]

I think you think you're making a point, but it is completely unclear to me. So far you have presented hands and partial auctions without any bidding problems, and claim that somehow we are doing it wrong by making the obvious moves. Could you spell out why the obvious moves are wrong, where the issues lie or why we should even think there is a problem? Are you simply pointing out that standard bidding sometimes gets to poor contracts?

every system have his problem

"natural system " will find most of game and stop in right part score

when distribution is abnormal 5-5 6-6 7-4 the "Natural system"

and most artificial system have a problem to describe the hand

Slam are rare but i think that only 50% are bid and made

sometime I bid a slam and it fall

sometime I don't bid and make it

cant remember the biding

but remember the play

my RHO is playing 6NT I HAVE 3 hcp (-1)

6 CARDS♦ Q J xxx x

i led the Q of ♦ dummmy have K x declarer is thinking 5 minute

and decide to play the K my partner have the Ace

cash the ace and return a diamond 6NT -5

I am not braging about this hand I was a novice

the contract can be made from the other side

Michel

[nullve]

I think you think you're making a point, but it is completely unclear to me.

No, the problem is the opposite. We understand you perfectly well, you just dismiss the responses.

Ok

[mycroft]

Sure, there's a way to unagree. A common one is 5NT "pick-a-slam" (when it's not King-ask or...) Whether you've "agreed" on a suit or not, it allows partner to decide if another option might work better.

 

Alternatively, you can just make the "don't care" slam bid. It doesn't happen often, but there certainly have been hands where I've agreed one suit so that I could keycard in it with no intention of playing there, because the K (and/or the Q) of that suit is critical and I'm looking at the KQ in the suit I'm going to play in. Of course, at least once partner didn't get the joke... Note that "don't care" slam bids work much better when it's clear you had a "pick-a-slam" auction available, so that partner can work out her opinion isn't being asked for.

 

But there will always be slams that lose to the fourth trump. One of the joys of bridge is that there's not enough room in the "fifteen words" to find out everything, sometimes you have to play the odds. As MikeH is saying - the situations you are presenting here are perfectly valid; they're just much less frequent than the ones you'd have to "chance with" if you redesigned your system to handle your situations well. When it comes time to "play the odds", we go with the ones that come up once a month, rather than once a year, and shrug when we hit the "gap hands" (and hope we have company).

[michel444]

Yes, but I wrote "agree" not "raise." In the slam zone, raising must not mean agreeing.

all thsi debat is funny like a bunch of lawyer who play with words

and more and less i understand what is the point of every1

the 3 hand are very ineresting and have somthing in common but i think was best to put them separatly

so like a good politician i will say nothing with many word

Michel

[Gilithin]

As Mike has mentioned, the better solution to this sort of issue is by using relays systems. Just about every relay system would have no difficulty with #1 at all. The majority of relay systems will also handle #3, although some will reverse relay, which makes it more tricky than normal to evaluate, Also, this actually looks like an Interesting Hand in its own right on the play side. #2 is difficult to judge as there will be a wide range of openings (Pass, 1♣, 1♦ and 1NT are all possible in mainstream methods) and because parsing jacks is difficult to do reliably. Parity methods do help there and increase the number of hands where that works out. As such, if you are worried about this type of hand I would point you towards IMPrecision, which is particular strong in this class of slam hands. The main point to take away from this though, is that taking out one of the provably best innovations in slam bidding of the last 100 years and replacing it with a mechanism that has value on only a small number of hands is losing bridge. Instead look for a solution that handles the issue without creating a huge negative. Relay methods in general, and IMPrecision and others from that family in particular, are your best bet.

[Lovera]

I also think that the indication of the quality of the suit (here of ♥) in weak or strong can lead to other subsequent bidding complications.However, I would like to point out the S.S.T and L.S.T convention by G. Rosenkranz which could be useful for any ideas: "On the simple raise of the noble opening suit, which indicates a 10-12 H hand by the responder, the bidding of the opener of a second suit (or of 2NT if the opening suit is ♥) is a S.S.T indicating a single or a void in the bid suit (5-4-3-1,6-3-3-1,5-5-3-0,5-4-4-0) (1 ♥-2♥, 2NT: single to ♠ or 1 ♠ -2 ♠, 3 ♣ single to ♣. Instead on simple raise by bidding the first "step" (1 ♥-2♥, 2 ♠ or 1 ♠ -2 ♠, 2NT) it is a L.S.T. who asks responder to make a " relay "on which opener bids his second suit (5-5-2-1,5-4-2-2,6-4-2-1,6-5-2-0). If opener rebids the opening suit indicates length in the suit immediately higher in rank".

(S.S.T.=Short Suit Tries,L.S.T.=Long Suit Tries)(on Nino Ghelli Le convenzioni nel bridge casa editrice MURSIA 1973 pagg.146-147)

[Gilithin]

To summarise Lovera's post, there is a method called Two-Way Game Tries, which allows a pair to use both Short Suit Game Tries and Help Suit Game Tries at the same time rather than having to choose. The original method for this (as posted) is to use SSGTs direct and HSGTs via a relay. My personal preference is to reverse these but it does not make a massive difference at the end of the day. It is a sensible method but I am not entirely sure what the relevance is to the hands in the OP.

[Lovera]

To summarise Lovera's post, there is a method called Two-Way Game Tries, which allows a pair to use both Short Suit Game Tries and Help Suit Game Tries at the same time rather than having to choose. The original method for this (as posted) is to use SSGTs direct and HSGTs via a relay. My personal preference is to reverse these but it does not make a massive difference at the end of the day. It is a sensible method but I am not entirely sure what the relevance is to the hands in the OP.

 

Relevance lies in the idea of ​​a possible development. For example, it seems to be the other way around. There it is the opener who applies it (after responder's simple raise) here it is the responder proposing the suit (while opener supports with jump). If you compare the distributions indicated by me you have SST when the third suit has 3/4 cards (in the first two we have at least the 5-4) instead it is LST when the third suit has 2 cards.

[Lovera]

Another type of approach to this problem concerning the choice of the best suit that was not initially highlighted can be that of having real hands where then the final bid has opted for the other suit to verify the bidding and any useful solutions adopted for the purpose (in the case of hand # 3 for the preference of ♣ over ♥).

 

 

[Lovera]

Don't you think it is useful not to drop the problem raised by bluenikki regarding the possibility of passing on to the partner the information of the (weak) quality of the suit then supported by finding a possible convention (if known) / solution (even partial) ?

 

 

[Lovera]

Well, let's say then that on the third hand 3 ♠ would not do well given the weak suit of ♥. The choice on quality would be an agreement of the pair (I think AKxx would be a good suit while J10xx or A / K / Qxx would be a weak fit). Therefore an idea could be to associate the suit quality (here of ♥) to the cue-bids indicating interest in reaching slam.

 

 

[bluenikki]

No, the problem is the opposite. We understand you perfectly well, you just dismiss the responses. The issues you bring up are not vital enough to redesign a bidding system around, or even a slam try system. I do happen to have ways to change strain at high level, but the idea that our methods must prepare for weak suit slam issues as early as the 3-level is a poor one. Keep in mind partner doesn't know your suit is weak, but they do know (after control bidding and keycards) that they've just told you the contents of their hand. Every bid you reserve for 'I might not want to play in this strain' loses some other meaning - one that might be important when your suit is not full of holes.

 

I also think your RKC modification is a poor idea. At the 5-level the notion of captaincy is very relevant. Going back to cooperative bidding after asker-responder bidding is frequently a poor idea, especially for setting a suit at the 6-level. Requesting partner's input doesn't even solve most of these problems, instead it merely pushes them around. Why would partner have a good idea of the better strain, after they've just told your their distribution, controls and key cards? What more do you expect them to do?

 

If you want to discuss possible continuations over an RKC response I'd be happy to share what I play, though I think in general players of all levels focus far too much on their key card tools ("No you don't understand we play minorwood so we are experts") so most likely it is not worth going into detail.

Actually, you do not understand me.

 

I do not mean that slam auctions must be made different from other slam auctions. I mean that slam auctions must be different from game auctions.