[Kaitlyn S]

Hi - these problems should be very easy for experienced players but a beginner needs to think about the right things in an auction. If you are a beginner and get them wrong, don't feel too bad as long as you understand the rationale for the answers. I'll provide the answers later but I'll put a hint as a spoiler. Try to solve the problem without the spoiler. Also, let me know if you would be interested in seeing more of these from time to time.

Assume you are playing Standard American (a natural system with 15-17 1NT openings), IMPS, and nobody is vulnerable.

Unlike the last problem set which drew controversy, these problems should draw universal agreement from the advanced community and be more accessible to beginning players.

1.

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Spoiler

We like to have a six-card suit to rebid our suit. Is there another call that describes our strength and distribution?

2.

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Spoiler

What are our favorite games? What bid would best help us find our fit if we had one?

3.

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Spoiler

Even if a 2D rebid only showed five, that would show five of our cards. Is there a way to show nine of our cards?

4.

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Spoiler

Do you have enough to force to game?

5.

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Spoiler

Do you have a call that describes your strength and distribution?

6.

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Spoiler

Do you really want to emphasize this club suit?

[ahydra]

The last hand is there twice, did you maybe mean to put some other hand there?

ahydra

[bravejason]

1. 1 no trump. Balanced and a standard strength opening hand.
2. 1 spade. Unbalanced and a standard strength hand, so show second suit at cheapest level.
3. 2 clubs. Same rationale as #2.
4. 3 clubs. With four quick tricks and just four losers, I want to gamble on game despite the singleton in partner's suit.
5. 2 no trump. With those diamonds, I probably would have opened with 2NT.
6. 2 no trump.

[Cleving]

how do we know the correct answers?

[Kaitlyn S]

Answers:

1.

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Hint: We like to have a six-card suit to rebid our suit. Is there another call that describes our strength and distribution?
Answer: We have a balanced hand too weak to open 1NT. Because we show a balanced hand, we give partner permission to 4H with any six hearts, and even to rebid 2H even with only five hearts if he thinks it will play better than 1NT. This isn't important for this problem but will because a good reason not to bid notrump on the problems in which you have a singleton heart.
Did you choose 2D because you are afraid of your lack of a club stopper? Fear not, they're likely not taking that many club tricks against 1NT, and if partner raises to 3NT, it is extremely likely that he holds a high club or enough length in clubs to make the club suit not a problem.

2.

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Hint:What are our favorite games? What bid would best help us find our fit if we had one?
Answer: If you bid 1NT (see the answer to 1), partner will bid 4H on H-Kxxxxx and an opening hand; this isn't where you want to play. Our favorite games are the major suits when we have an 8-card fit. If you don't bid 1S, partner will think you do not have 4 spades, so bid your spades despite the fact that they are ugly.

3.

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Hint:Even if a 2D rebid only showed five, that would show five of our cards. Is there a way to show nine of our cards?
Answer: Again, you don't want 1NT since you encourage partner to bid hearts with any six hearts, and diamonds shows a 6-card suit and says nothing else about your distribution. Look what partner knows if you bid 2C, the recommended bid. You have four clubs, but since you bid diamonds before clubs, you must have at least four of them also. You didn't raise hearts or bid spades so you aren't 1-4-4-4 or 4-1-4-4, and you didn't rebid 1NT so you aren't 2-3-4-4 or 3-2-4-4. This means that one of the minors (likely diamonds since you bid them first, but some experts will bid 1D with 4 diamonds and 5 clubs so they will have a rebid) is a 5-card suit! By one simple rebid, you have shown 9 cards in the minors.

4.

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Hint: Do you have enough to force to game?
Answer: You have 18 counting length, not quite enough to force to game opposite a balanced 6-count. Partner will know that your range is 13-18 (or 12-18) and will try to keep the bidding open (perhaps by taking a preference back to 2D) with enough for game. Occasionally you will miss a game when partner has no real alternative than pass, but jumping to 3C is game forcing and while you don't have nearly enuogh to force to 5 of a minor, you expect to bid 3NT yourself the next round. There are three problems with this:
(a) You are unlikely to make 3NT opposite a random 6 or 7 point hand - your diamonds aren't that robust and where are your nine tricks coming from?
(b) Sometimes your partner is going to insist on 4H. Your hand is not only going to be disappointing in trump support but also in strength.
© The jump shift may make partner go wrong in slam decisions. For example, if partner has:
S-AJx H-KQxx D-10xx C-Axx, it will be nearly impossible to stay out of a no-play slam after showing the values for a jump shift. If you only bid 2C on your hand, partner will bid 3NT. Since he might do that with 15 or 16, you, being a maximum for your bidding with slam possible, can invite slam with a quantitative 4NT which partner will pass. If there's any chance that partner will think 4NT is Blackwood, this won't work.
Those who bid 3C get some credit for not bidding 2NT which again gives partner permission to play 4H with six lousy hearts. You could easily have four trump losers!

5.

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Hint: Do you have a call that describes your strength and distribution?
Answer: You have a balanced hand and too much to open 1NT but not enough to open 2NT. A jump to 2NT shows this hand perfectly. Yes, you have nice diamonds, but if partner is interested in a diamond slam, he can bid 3D, forcing (if you play no special conventions over your 2NT rebid, any bid by responder after 2NT is game-forcing.)

6.

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Hint: Do you really want to emphasize this club suit?
Answer: Technically, you do not have a balanced hand, but 2NT is very descriptive. You have 2-card support for your partner's hearts which might be the information he needs. You have spades stopped twice and enough clubs that the opponent's are unlikely to harm you with club leads.

The problem with rebidding any number of clubs is that partner will think your hand is much more oriented for play in a minor suit than it really is, and avoid notrump when it's okay. For example, partner holds:
S-xx H-AQ10x D-xxxx C-Kxx
If you rebid 3C and partner bids 3D, you can now bid 3NT but partner will know you have a spade stopper but might think it will be knocked out at trick 1 and you might have a problem taking the first nine tricks, whereas your diamond length and club filler make 5D look like a much better prospect.
Partner might be pretty surprised to lose 3 club tricks and a diamond trick in 5D after this auction. 3NT should have no problems with two spade stoppers; even if you don't find the DQ, you lose a diamond to take 1S, 4H, 4D, and perhaps a second spade on the lead.

[Kaitlyn S]

Cleving, on 2016-September-28, 10:27, said:

how do we know the correct answers?

Good question. Normally I post these problems one day and then post my answers the next. You'll see how it works in "Bidding Problems for Novices" parts 1 through 4, and now in this thread.

Normally I expect universal expert agreement with the answers (I don't try to be too controversial) but as you can see in Part 4, that doesn't always happen. However, the answers should give some insight about how to think about the problem presented.

[NickRW]

I think you're doing a great job Kaitlyn

Areas less well covered in many basic texts, but vital for beginners to progress, are such things as:

1. When to overcall, double. What does double then bid a suit of your own mean. What does overcall then double mean.

2. Does responding to opener change at all when RHO overcalled or doubled.

3. How do you advance partner's overcall.

I realise these are slightly more advanced (and sometimes controversial) topics than you've covered so far - but also areas where beginners grope in the dark as soon as they hit even the most friendly, non-advanced duplicate scene.

Nick

[Kaitlyn S]

I apologize to the novices for turning some of these discussions into teaching policy discussions. The subject is of great interest to me but if you're picking up tidbits, feel free to ignore this post.

NickRW, on 2016-September-29, 04:45, said:

I think you're doing a great job Kaitlyn

Thank you!

NickRW, on 2016-September-29, 04:45, said:

Areas less well covered in many basic texts, but vital for beginners to progress, are such things as:

1. When to overcall, double. What does double then bid a suit of your own mean. What does overcall then double mean.

2. Does responding to opener change at all when RHO overcalled or doubled.

3. How do you advance partner's overcall.

I realise these are slightly more advanced (and sometimes controversial) topics than you've covered so far - but also areas where beginners grope in the dark as soon as they hit even the most friendly, non-advanced duplicate scene.

Nick

You are absolutely right. When I first started this, I intended these to the people who have found BBO but have never read a bridge book or taken a lesson and really don't know that much about bidding. (See my problem set 1.) The responses I got told me that I was setting the bar too low. While I am not convinced that I did, if people want what I originally intended, they need to post and tell me that. At this point I have come to the conclusion, correctly or not, that the people who are just shooting in the dark in the bidding aren't that likely to come to these forums, and my target audience should be players that "kind of" know the basic rules but need some brush up - or might have read a beginning book 40 years ago in college, have a pretty firm grasp on opening bids and responses, but are coming back to the game after a 40-year layoff.

Avoiding controversy is delicate. Even if I can assume that the readers are all in the USA (which I can't and I fully realize that people play differently elsewhere), the following are all true:

(a) There is a push to teach beginners 2 over 1 game forcing. Some top teachers have bought into this. The rest of us are firmly resisting this change, because we can imagine the confusion when our students go out to play with their friends.

(b) Competitive methods are changing. In Audrey Grant's Bridge Basics II, she teaches preemptive jump raises. (Try that with your friends that play only social bridge!) It appears that there is an attempt to get the aspiring student ready for the rough and tumble world of high-class duplicate bridge while throwing the players who want to play socially with their "bridge playing" friends under the bus. I do not mean to be harsh, clearly her method works fine if the beginners only play with other people who have used her material. I am in no way criticizing Audrey Grant as a teacher - she is one of the greatest. If I were to talk about competitive bidding, I would make the assumption that the person learned less duplicate-oriented methods and in a way, I'd be confusing people that started with Bridge Basics II or any of the other duplicate-oriented materials, as they had been taught one thing and now I'm telling them something different.

© Much of the world plays new suit forcing advances (advance = "reponding" to partner's overcall or double, sorry novices - I intend to use that word a lot!) and others play those non-forcing. Many players differentiate between new-suit advances at the 1-level and 2-level, and others differentiate based on whether the overcall was at the 1-level or 2-level. I think this is why the material is covered so seldom - when you give advice, you are only talking to the half of the people that have the agreement that you are assuming.

I could take a poll of the novices that read these threads and if there is an overwhelming majority opinion on whether new suit advances are forcing, I would be happy to give the problems based on the majority opinion. But then I have to wonder if I am qualified - most of my bridge was played over 10 years ago and I may be out of touch with the current reality.

I have absolutely no problem talking about doubling and bidding your own suit though, even though I have a strong opinion about it which may not be mainstream. When I was playing a lot, an abomination called "Equal Level Conversion" started infiltrating our duplicate community and while I would hope it would quickly die out, I am afraid that it may have taken hold and become mainstream while I was away from the game. I would hear players say "It's okay to double a major with a minimum hand with short clubs, as long as you have long diamonds." This worked out fantastically when partner opened 1H, the "ELC advocate" doubled, and I bid 4H. The poor advancer assumed that partner had a normal takeout double and bid 5C, and the conversion happened at the 5 level. Note that it was us that it worked out fantastically for because we were lucky enough to be playing against it. Never mind the multitude of times that it goes 1H Dbl 2H and advancer can't make his normal competitive 3C bid because he's afraid that doubler has diamonds. But can I really talk about that in a novice forum, when I know there is a very good chance that many of these people's partners insist on playing ELC? (Oh no, this is a novice forum and I just talked about it! Hopefully the novices stopped reading this post a while ago )

However, I can try one of these topics and hopefully won't catch too much flak from the expert community (of course if I'm saying something that's just wrong, I do want to know about it and correct it.) It will be interesting.

[akwoo]

This is not really a post for novices, but rather about (teaching or) playing with novices (but probably novices (at least ones who aspire to be pretty good) should read this).

I'm not sure whether this really belongs here or in the Part 4 thread, but...

The hard part about competitive bidding is that the mistakes one makes are quite invisible but come up fairly frequently. If you don't know when to compete or don't have sufficiently aggressive agreements, you seem to yourselves to be doing everything right and end the session at 45%, and you say "we must have had bad luck, partner". On occasion the cards play differently and you end up at 55% and say "see we were right not to be competing as much as those 'experts' ". Except, if you really counted, you end up at 45% much more than at 55%. This is unlike non-competitive auctions where you get in a bad contract for no reason at all and get obvious 0MPs (or -12IMPs) for your errors. It's much easier to notice the 0% board once a session than a pattern of 30% boards. In part this is because it's easy to tell the 0% boards that are your fault from the ones that aren't, but it's hard to tell the 30% boards that are your fault from the ones that aren't.

Another factor is the level of bridge you see. I live in a sparsely populated region where the team of local experts manages 125+ VPs (out of 140) at a third of our sectional Swisses (and win almost all the rest by less astounding margins). This should really be impossible, but they're the only ones who know how to push everyone else (myself included) around. So if you don't live in a city, you can get quite far (i.e. second) without being good at competitive bidding.

Whenever I play with advancing novices and intermediates, I try to push two things into our partnership agreements:

1) All raises in competition are pre-emptive and show less than 9 points. When you have at least 10 points, you raise by bidding their suit. (There are places where this is nonsense (e.g. after 1C-(P)-1H-(2D)), and we can modify this agreement for those places if you want to remember what they are.)

2) All doubles that can reasonably be for takeout are. If you want explicit rules, the following doubles are for penalty, and everything else is meant to be taken out:

a) Your partner has shown a weak, single-suited hand (usually by a preemptive bid)
b) You had a previous opportunity to double the same suit for takeout but passed instead. (Exception: If you double in balancing seat at the 2 level, this is still for takeout.)
c) Either one of us has previously doubled for penalty.
d) We have previously agreed on a fit.
e) (optionally) One of us has made a notrump bid that promises a balanced hand.
f) (caveat) If partner doubles opponent's notrump bid, it is frequently right to pass it for penalties even if it is nominally for takeout. The same is true for high level doubles.

These are not optimal, and you really do want some more explicit promises for some of the 'takeout' doubles, but they are reasonably simple.

Partner might not pre-empt enough, but I will, and I will take the opportunity to point out all the instances when -50 or -100 is (or would have been) our optimal score. And when partner bid one too many, I will point out one of the other instances when their bidding one more helped us.

(PS - I don't like ELC either, but if you're playing ELC and the auction has gone (1H)-X-(4H), you shouldn't bid 5C unless you have diamond tolerance. You need to be aware of the deeper implications of your agreements! I suppose this just means ELC isn't for novices.)

[NickRW]

Kaitlyn S, on 2016-September-29, 10:52, said:

...Avoiding controversy is delicate. Even if I can assume that the readers are all in the USA (which I can't and I fully realize that people play differently elsewhere), the following are all true:...

I feel your pain.

The only things I can say that might be of help are:

If you're assuming the people reading should be taught Standard American style, don't worry too much about the Brits etc. with weak NT and 4 card majors. Although there are differences, Acol and SA are fundamentally more similar than SA and 2/1 (IMO).

I get the problems thrown up ELC and non forcing changes of suit by an unpassed advancer and so on. But it is precisely because these things are difficult that teachers tend to gloss over them or leave them out entirely. A beginner has to learn somehow and being told they just made a ludicrous overcall by a local "expert" is worse than picking up a sound, basic grounding (even if the methods are not "flavour of the month")

In short I am trying to be encouraging and also to suggest a policy "to hell with the consequences" in controversial matters.