[sdoty]

Two part question:

1. How do you play (or prefer to play) 2NT by an unpassed hand on the auction:
1x - p - p - 2NT?

2. What meaning, if any, do you think is standard? (standard = what you think the majority currently plays / the meaning you'd assume without discussion)

Thanks in advance for voting.

Susan

[kenberg]

So far (with 2 votes) it's unaminous.

After voting, I looked it up in Lawrence "The Complete Book on Balancing". He says it's 19-20 balanced. "This is simple, efficient, and it works", page 21. Of course you can't assume your partner of the moment has read Lawrence, but he makes no mention of this being an out of the mainstream idea. If partner trotted out 2NT, I would assume he had a big hand.

[Gerben42]

I'm also unanimous in that (people know "Are you being served?" ?)

In balancing position no 2-suiters are shown: 2NT is natural. Balancing NT ladder:

1NT directly 12 - 15 (depends a bit on what they bid)
X then NT 16 - 18
2NT directly: 19 - 21

(answers both 1 and 2)

Also 1X p p 2X is not Michael's but "strong cuebid".

[whereagles]

Most authors take this sort of 1x-p-p-2NT balancing bid as some strong balanced hand. Now, exactly how many hcp depends. I've seen all ranges from 16-18 to 19-21

[Walddk]

19-21 balanced. I have the impression that this is pretty standard.

Roland

[hatchett]

I think 19-21 is very standard. 16-18 balanced double and bid NT at the lowest level.

[awm]

Among good players I would expect something like 19-21 to be standard without discussion.

Opposite a random player on BBO I'd have no idea.

[han]

Yeah, what Adam said. Talking about the majority doesn't make a lot of sense.

[mcphee]

19-21 Balanced, a hand that would have opened 2NT.

[luis]

Agree, my "standard" is very similar to the others.

1NT reopening 10-14
X followed by 1NT 15-17
2NT reopening 18-20

"The good thing about standards is that you can choose among many" :-)

Luis

[Free]

I play exactly like Luis, with following additions:
Dbl followed by jump NT is 21-23
3NT 24+

[inquiry]

This SHOULD be strong hand balanced. I think 21-23 is fine, so is 20-22, etc.

I think the average BBO player probably doesn't play it this way. One way to check is with bridgebrowser. To search this,

1) Set bidding opening 1C to 1S
2) Set seat relative (so dealer is opener)
3) Set 2nd and 3rd seat to pass
4) Set 4th seat to 2NT
5) Mark bidding as auxiallary term
6) Set bid analysis as auxiallary term
7) go to shape/bidding term
8) give dealer 10+ hcp
9) give dealer partner 0 to 7 hcp
10) press search

(steps 7-10 make this search faster).

If you have the free version of homebase, you will not find any matching hands (we haven't played enough). If like sdoty and me, you have the full version, you can choose dataset after dataset to search. My guess is the majority (perhaps the large majority) will be "unusual" in part because the strong hand is too rare to show up very often and the two suiters (weak or strong) will be more frequent.

A similar question might be is cue-bid on 1x-p-p-2x michaels, strong takeout, or to showing suit x.

If anyone is really intersted this search can be done. The problem is finding a lot of unusuals will not help determine what the majority thinks simply because those hands are much more common.

[pclayton]

I had always played a 2N call as one bracket higher than a double followed by 1N. If you are playing a jump to 2N as 20-22 or so, how would you bid the 18-19 hand?

For me, a jump to 2N shows 18-19, but I seem to be in a minority here.

[joker_gib]

luis, on Mar 19 2006, 05:47 PM, said:

Agree, my "standard" is very similar to the others.

1NT reopening 10-14
X followed by 1NT 15-17
2NT reopening 18-20

"The good thing about standards is that you can choose among many" :-)

Luis

I have the same standard !

Alain

[inquiry]

Ok, I ran a small BridgeBrowser test on the following auction using data from hands played on the Bridge Base Online. For this test, the auction was dealer opening one of a suit followed by two passes and a bid of 2NT. I limited the search to 676360 auctions where dealer opened the bidding (that is, if dealer passed or opened 1NT or higher then the hand was not considered one of the nearly 700,000 auctions examined). There were 810 2NT bids on this auction

1x-Pass-Pass-2NT

The HCP range was:
6HCP = 1 hand
7HCP = 5 hands
8HCP = 14 hands
9hco = 17 hands
10hcp = 42 hands
11hcp = 50 hands
12hcp = 59 hands
13 hcp = 45 hands
14 hcp = 34 hands
15 hcp = 63 hands
16 hcp = 61 hnads
17 hcp = 81 hands
18 hcp = 57 hands
19 hcp = 76 hands
20 hcp = 128 hands
21 hcp = 45 hands
22 hcp = 17 hands
23 hcp = 11 hands
24 hcp = 4 hands

58% of the hands had less than 18 hcp for the 2NT bid, and 75% had less than 20 hcp.

If one considers balanced hands as 4333, 4432, 5332, and 6322 there was a total of 351 balanced hands out of the 810 (43%). The most common distribution for 2NT was 4432, with 172 hands. The second most common was 5521 with 159 hands. The hand patterns were:

4333 - 94 hands
4432 - 172 hands
4441 - 8 hands
5332 - 72 hands
5431 - 72 hands
5422 - 99 hands
5440 - 5 hands
5521 - 159 hands
5530 - 18 hands
6322 - 12 hands
6331 - 2 hands
6421 - 13 hands
6430 - 4 hands
6511 - 30 hands
6520 - 34 hands
6610 - 5 hands
7321 - 3 hands
7510 - 8 hands

If one takes the reputed balanced hands (4333, 4432, 5332, and 6322), so to examine the range most people play. I looked at the hcp with these balanced distributions. The hcp were

10 hcp - 2 hands (both 44 in the minors and alerted as unusual)
12 hpc - 4 hands (2 44 in the minors, one 44 in reds, one 5 card spade suit)
14 hcp - 6 hands (again 4-4 in minors and alerted twice)
15 hcp - 15 hands (none looked like meant as usual)
16 hcp - 16 hands (three alerted as unusual, one as 17=19 balanced)
17 hcp - 56 hands
18 hcp - 36 hands
19 hcp - 52 hands
20 hcp - 94 hands
21 hcp - 40 hands
22 hcp - 16 hands
23 hcp - 8 hands
24 hcp - 4 hands

From this you can see the number of balanced hands in the appropriate hcp range is less than might appear from the first hcp range table. For instance, there were 11 hands with 23 hcp. but only 8 of them were "balanced" and 128 hands with 20 hcp, but again, only 94 of them were balanced.

If we accept 18-24 balanced as an acceptable range fro someone (no one would play the full range) of the 810 hands that bid 2NT, only 250 out of 810 hands were in that range and shape (31%). And if you take 20-22 as the correct "standard" range, the the total would be only 150 hands (18.5%).

But then again, remember you are not seeing the dozens and dozens of people who did not BID 2NT with these inappropriate hands. So this doesn't mean the average player bids it wrong.. in fact, the average players maybe getting it right, they just lack the hand to make the right call.

[Gerben42]

This just tells you that the introduction of "complete book of balancing" is still true. People don't know what they are doing in this position. Is this a disadvantage of Fantunes? Not giving opps the possibility to mess up in balancing position?

[csarmi]

hm, strange; I would naturally assume it was a two-suiter. Nothing else would have occured to me. Certainly not strong balanced

I never put too much thinking into it, though.

[JohnnyH7]

There are too many balanced ranges to cover if 2N is not played as natural. In direct seat the weak NT hand type can just pass, but in balancing seat it bids 1N. An extra bid is needed to distinguish between all the ranges intelligently, and this is still hard to do specifically over a 1S opener.

[whereagles]

JohnnyH7, on Mar 20 2006, 05:04 PM, said:

There are too many balanced ranges to cover if 2N is not played as natural. In direct seat the weak NT hand type can just pass, but in balancing seat it bids 1N. An extra bid is needed to distinguish between all the ranges intelligently, and this is still hard to do specifically over a 1S opener.

Indeed. This is a correct analysis of the situation.

[kenberg]

A data list always suggests further investigations. Fortunately I have only the free version of Bbr, so I can only suggest this effort be undertaken by others. For example:

In the first list we see for hcp and number of 2NT bids:
hcp- #
15- 63
16- 61
17- 81

Bbr could check to see if by some fluke there actually were sharply more 17 point hands than 15 or 16 point hands in the bank. That is, forget what was bid just check on the hcps. If no such fluke occurred, the explanation has to be bidding judgment. I am guessing there is a sizable flock who think that 15 or 16 should be handled by X then NT, or perhaps just by 1NT, but 17 by a jump to 2NT.

A similar sharp increase in the number of 2NT bids occurs between 19 and 20 hcps. This would suggest another flock sees 19 as too little (or maybe 19 as a borderline hand that requires some judgment) but 20 as a clear 2NT call.

My point is that the significant jumps in number might be a fluke of the data or might show a real pattern, and that some further work could indicate which.

Forgetting data for a moment, it has long been my opinion that exactly what agreements you have is not crucial. The important thing is to have agreements and to know what they are. It could be a real service if BBO drew up a list of defaults for situations like this. I suppose it might be rather long. Players could agree to play things any way they choose, but there would be a BBO default list to resolve quarrels if no discussion has taken place. I for one would be happy to just agree "BBO default list", whatever it might be, and be done with it.