strange natural system

[michel444]

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EHAA Opening Bids

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1C 13+ 4+ ♣ / /

1D 13+ 4+ ♦ / /

1H 13+ 4+ ♥ / /

1S 13+ 4+ [spades ] / /

1N 10-12 balanced / /

 

2C 6-12 5+ ♣ / /

2D 6-12 5+ ♦ / /

2H 6-12 5+ ♥ / /

2S 6-12 5+ ♠ / /

2N 20-22 balanced / /

 

this was from a book colection of biding system

have anybody tryed this

Michel

[PrecisionL]

Yes, I have played it several times - a simple system with new partners.

 

I prefer to have the opening 2-bids to be a little bit better = 6-cds & 2 honors. :)

[mycroft]

I play this frequently. You can see a little more at Wikipaedia and Landau's FAQ, but the Book is still the Gold Standard that explains the theory.

 

I do think it is a system that does not handle changes well if they go against the system philosophy. If you go with PrecisionL's "tighten up the weak 2s to 'standard' levels", you lose the aggression that makes the system so difficult to play against. You also replace the safety of "yeah, median suit quality is QT852, but it can and has been AKQ9543 and a trick. You feel lucky?" with the safety of standard weak 2s. You also have to figure out what to do with the hands that I'm opening and you're not, which means the response structure to passed hand openings needs to change; frankly, the opening strategy in third and fourth hand needs to change. But in your favour, your pass is much less information-dense than mine, in the many times that we end up defending.

 

It is high-variance, quite heavily science-resistant, and playing it regularly for 3 years improved my judgement significantly - because all my system crutches were taken away. But mostly, it is a lot of fun.

 

Is it good? No. Does it annoy the crap out of "normal" bridge players? Yes - and that's not a plus, especially these days of 50% turnout. Does it average one-to-two "is this legal" director calls a session? Yes.

 

On the other hand, there are very much times that all that is to your advantage. I was playing this once against 18000 MPs of high-class experienced partnership. After explaining our pre-Alert (which has gone away!), one asked "why would you want to reduce bridge to a crapshoot?" I looked at him and said "okay, let's not play these two boards, but flip a coin for each, and the winner scores 1100. You happy to take that?" And the questioner, as they say, was enlightened.

[gwnn]

I play it a lot in ACBL speedballs although I play 1♥ and 1♠ as 5+. I honestly don't think that the system is unsound when you are NV. When you are V, it's hard to believe that 10-12 or 10-13 is the best range for a 1NT opening.

[mikeh]

EHAA enjoyed some brief popularity a few decades ago, but I suspect fell into disuse for two main reasons. While it can be disruptive, good players learned how to compete against it fairly well, and the ‘adventure’ aspect of the method makes it horrendous in long team matches against good opponents

 

At mps, the frequency of gain/loss is paramount while at imps the size of gain/loss is more important. The 2 bid structure is so loose that it makes accurate bidding thereafter pretty difficult and the lack of a strong opening can make slam bidding problematic

 

 

But at mps, in most fields, one is often (in fact, usually) playing against pairs who will be confused by your methods and give you good boards as a result.

 

That’s not how I like to win but there’s no denying it can be effective, if you don’t mind annoying people whose main interest is playing an enjoyable game.

 

However, if you’re a serious player, the odds are that you will be playing more meaningful games at imps than at mps, and who needs to play entirely different methods depending on whether you’re playing one or the other?

[helene_t]

Like Csaba I like the system although I strongly prefer the major suits to show 5, and also I prefer to open 1♣ with 3343 etc so thet 1♦ becomes unbalanced, although that is less important.

 

I wouldn't make any other changes to it other than incorporating some standard stuff for contested auctions such as most doubles being t/o, maybe also 2NT being generally scrambling or lebensohl. It is obviously a fairly crude system but the advantage is that you don't have to spend too much mental energy on memorizing conventions, and you also get a lot of very short auctions like 2m-(p)-3N. What I have often found playing long MP events using more complex systems is that I run out of energy at some point and can't count to 13 anymore towards the end of session. EHAA is friendly towards old tired brains.