zasanya, on Apr 13 2008, 04:37 AM, said:
I would be most grateful if you elaborate on why you consider N/S bidding weird.We play Roman Jumps so my P could not have bid 2♥ as others might.My double shows good support for ♥.His pass suggested Minimum hand.Their ♠ fit suggested ♠ shortage in Partners hand and strongly indicated 6 carder ♥ as with 5/4 he could have used RJ at this vul.Hence my 4♥.
Since you asked so nicely...
Most of the bids you and your partner made seemed weird to me largely because your original post did not contain an explanation of what your bids meant.
- 1H to me is mildly weird because to me South has a textbook weak jump overcall. No doubt there are plenty of strong players who would prefer 1H even if 2H is not artificial. Probably some would prefer 3H as well. Now that I know you could not bid 2H even if you wanted to, I no longer think 2H is in any way weird. That being said, I believe that the vast majority of the world's bridge players would consider Roman Jump Overcalls to be a "weird convention".
- DBL to me seemed extremely weird. It seems much less weird now that I know that you and your partner use this DBL to show heart support. However, that in itself definitely falls into the category of a "weird convention" to me (because this is the first time I have heard of this convention and intuitively this does not seem like a smart convention to me). Not knowing more about your agreements it is impossible for me to pass judgment, but even if DBL showed "good support for hearts" why not 2D or 2NT (or 4H?) with your actual hand? I would have guessed that the nature of the DBL would be to suggest a more defensive hand with good heart support.
- Pass did not really seem weird when I first saw your post, but now that I know that DBL promised heart support, Pass does seem weird. Why not 3H to suggest a offense-oriented minimum hand? Again I do not know enough about your system to pass judgment, but I would have thought that pass would suggest not only a minimum hand but also a lack of interest in declaring.
- 4H was not weird to me at all, but maybe 4D would have been a better choice to establish a force? Not sure if you had such an agreement or, if you did, whether it would make sense with the North hand (mostly because I still do not understand the exact nature of the DBL versus cuebid).
- I think I would have DBLed 4S at the end with the North hand, but this is really a judgment call based at least partly on issues related to style.
Meanwhile the only bid in your opponents' auction I found weird was 1NT (versus negative DBL). That being said, there are various explanations that make this bid much less weird (West being a hand-hog or a weak player for example).
I actually thought that the bid you considered weird enough to merit an explanation point, 2S, was an
excellent bid.
So there you have it. To summarize, a lot of the weirdness I perceived in your auction was due to the fact that I do not understand some aspects of your system. Some of it was a function of difference in judgment or style.
Please note that I think the leap from "weird" to "bad" is just as wide as the leap from "weird" to "wired". I am certainly not suggesting that you bid poorly so I hope you won't take any offense from this post.
The main point of all of this is that it is impossible to draw conclusions about either the quality or the honesty of the opponents' bidding unless you know a lot about the opponents themselves as well as the system and style that they use.
Hope that helps. I did ask a bunch of questions in the above, but they were mostly to make you think about your own auction and to let you know what I was thinking. I would just as soon avoid any further discussion on this hand so please do not feel obligated to provide answers to these questions
Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com
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Board 1 of 8 Board Teammatch on BBO
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p-1NT!-p-4NT!!
p-5♥-p-6NT
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