[el mister]

Learning Acol I was taught in lessons that jump shift by responder shows a (very) strong hand. Given that this hand will be relatively rare in response - is it worth retaining the bid?

I like the idea of it, as it is very clear - just wish I could get to play it occasionally What are some good alternatives for the bid?

[P_Marlowe]

Hi,

the first question is, how do you play strong jump shifts?
My guess is, that you dont play Soloway Jump Shifts, the frequency of
Soloway Jump Shifts is ok, and you are still playing strong jump shifts.

Have a look at: http://home.comcast....kwbridge/js.htm

The page belongs to Karen Walkers Home page, a home page worth looking
at, because you will find lots of good advice for various topics.

A other option would be to play weak jump shifts, you find a short description
on Gerbens Homepage
http://www.geocities...e/weakjump.html

Please be aware, that a consequence of this is that 3M in the seq.

1D - 1M
2D - 3M

becomes now gameforcing, ("Game Force on the 3-level"), a thing which can
be easily overlooked.

A different version of weak jump shifts can be found at
http://bridge.wikia...._shift_response
but if you complain about the frequency of strong jump shifts,
than the frequency of those weak jump shifts is not higher.

And there is also a version out there, which combines both
Goldman jump shifts (?!) via Transfer Responses, but I am not
100% sure about the name and was not able to find a source.

There are other options (Reverse Flannery, combined with Mini Splinters),
but my suggestion would be, that you first try the above.

With kind regards
Marlowe

PS: all in all I liked to play Soloway jump shifts, but my partner asked
me to switch, oh well .-)

[the hog]

el mister, on Jun 26 2009, 04:34 PM, said:

Learning Acol I was taught in lessons that jump shift by responder shows a (very) strong hand. Given that this hand will be relatively rare in response - is it worth retaining the bid?

I like the idea of it, as it is very clear - just wish I could get to play it occasionally What are some good alternatives for the bid?

I prefer a very good 6 card suit and about 14-16 points. eg
1D 2S
AQJxxx Ax xx KJx or similar
Gets the hand off your chest in one go.

[gwnn]

I think 1♣-p-2♦ should be a SJS

[helene_t]

Playing Acol, SJS can be useful because of the lack of forcing bids if you start with a simple shift. For example
1♠-2♦
2♠-3♦
is nonforcing, to create a force you need to bid a fake suit or bid 4♦.

On the other hand, since Acol players often repeat 5-card suits nonforcing, e.g.
1♣-1♠
2♣
it is useful to have 2♠ here as a pure contract improvement, but it is also useful to have 2♠ as a constructive bid. So here it is useful to play an immediate 2♠ response as weak, then 1♠ followed by 2♠ becomes constructive, and 1♠ followed by 3♠ becomes forcing.

[xx1943]

The rule in modern systems is: Bid slow with strong hands. So in this systems almost all jumps are played weak or with some special well defined meaning (splinter etc ...).
The philosophy in ACOL is to jump to show strength so you should play sJS if you play ACOL.
No system is perfect. The vakue of the "rite" system is overestimated imho. You and your partner should know the meaning of your bids. Make agreements to minimize misunderstandings. The art is bidding is to find the best bid in the system you actual agreed on with partner.
In this sense I say: Try to improve your bidding judgment is much more important than the question, which system do you play. I personally prefer to play a system as simple as possible, because I like to use my little grey cells for bidding judgement and play and defense and not to remember difficult conventions.

Btw. I try to play 2/1 and wjs 1minor - 1major showing a 6-carder too weak to answer 1 major. (Such a nasty hand holding Jxxxxx,xxx,xxx,x and partner opens 1♣. Playing sjs you must pass and hope for the best.

But be aware both methods may occasionally lead to bad or good or lucky results. It is the same with weak NT, weak 2-openings, multi, flannery ..................
All these tools have their merits and their flaws.

Agree with your partner, what you like most, but agree, agree, agree.

Al

[kfay]

I've got nothing against SJSs

[barmar]

I play Soloway SJS with my favorite partner. They don't come up often, but when they do they're very useful. They're fairly narrowly defined within 3 categories, and your second bid indicates the type and may also add additional information. This makes up somewhat for the space that's wasted by them. But it adds a little bit of complexity, you have to remember the followups and trust partner to remember what they mean, so I think it's best used in a regular partnership.

Most of my other partners like WJS, so I play it with them (I tend to be accomodating -- if I know a convention and don't totally hate it (Bergen raises, Flannery) I'll play it). Its main feature is that you can play in a very weak hand's long suit without worrying about partner blasting to game with any big hand.

[el mister]

Thanks for the replies - plenty of food for thought. I'd been playing the sjs as something like 16+ and excellent suit quality, so they seemed quite rare.

[EricK]

SJS at the 2 level are good bids. They make slam bidding so much easier. Just witness the number of hands posted on the forums which caused problems at the table, but are trivial if responder is allowed to jump to show strength.

Although there is an argument that SJS waste bidding space, I think this only applies to SJS at the 3 level. When the SJS is made at the 2 level, it often saves space in the long term because every bid thereafter is more meaningful. If these hands start with a response at the one level, not only is respnder often forced to make meaningless bids just to keep the bidding open, but opener also makes irrelevant bids because he doesn't yet know what repsonder's intentions are.

An example of the latter comes in a sequence like 1♣ 1♥ 1♠. Opener could have a hand like ♠Jxxx ♥Kx ♦Qx ♣ AQJxx or one like ♠KQJx ♥xx ♦xx ♣AQJxx because opener doesn't know if responder might be interested in the spade suit.

But if the bidding starts 1♣ 2♥, then opener knows that responder doesn't care about Jxxx so will bid something else (2NT), but might very well want to know about KQJx, so his spade rebid on the latter hand becomes meaningful.

[zasanya]

I prefer to play a strong jump shift after trying out the following methods. Our basic system was acol opening 4 card Majors and 12-14 NT.You could try them on 1M if you play 5 card majors.

1)Weak Jump Shift .With one of my P still I play this,and with precision p we play it on 1♦.The results are ok
2)Mini splinter 4 card support and 4-4-4-1 shape and 8-10 hcp .Given up because of low frequency
3)Fit Jump 4 card support with a 5 card weakish side suit ,Didnt work well.

As one poster has remarked above SJS it makes slam bidding very easy.

[NickRW]

el mister, on Jun 27 2009, 10:35 AM, said:

Thanks for the replies - plenty of food for thought. I'd been playing the sjs as something like 16+ and excellent suit quality, so they seemed quite rare.

Yeah, they are rare. However, given the relative weakness of an Acol 2/1 response (compared to SAYC or, even more so, 2/1), you would really need to work hard on your sequences after a 2/1 without a strong jump shift. I'm not saying it couldn't be done (I've not devoted a great deal of thought to it), but certainly SJS helps.

You can, of course, do something like playing a semi forcing 1NT response and beef up your 2/1s somewhat - but then you're not really playing Acol anymore. Such systems are OK - I've recently swapped, at least temporarily, with one partner to 5 card spades, hearts are 5 or 4/4 majors (i.e what they call Swiss Acol style I think), 14-16 NT, semi forcing NT and 2/1 is at least forcing to 2NT. I won't say that this is perfect either - but, though I haven't done so yet - we could possibly revisit whether we want to keep SJS under this set up - but "Modern" English Acol it isn't.

Nick

P.S. (Edit) whatever you use them for, given that they are space consuming bids, they need to be relatively specific. Therefore they are never going to be common