[straube]

mikegill, on Sep 26 2010, 08:22 AM, said:

We have been for a while now playing 3♣ as preemptive and the other bids as raises (dist LR or better, 3-4 card limit, 4-card mixed, weak). This sort of combines the two approaches. 3♣ is clearly the best suit to have a weak jump in since it makes 1M 1N 2x 3c clearly inv, and frequently you will be able to freely bid 3♦ as an invitation. I think the next best approach would be to play 3♣ and ♦ as preemptive and lose the weak raise.

Many good players seems to like invitational jump shifts but I've never understood the appeal. This seems cleaner to me - you get to do more describing on your invitational hands (like finding out if partner has a 6th card in his major when you're 2xx7) and jump on your weak hands to take up their space.

We used to use only the 3C bid to show GI clubs and kept 3D as a mixed raise and 2N as LR+ but we had a little trouble collapsing the LR+ and noticed that our 3C bid seldom came up (and had the danger of missing 6-2 spade fits).

Using 3C as a WJS makes more sense to me than as GI.

I ran 600 hands opposite a spade opener and found 5 hands that I thought would qualify as a WJS. I excluded hands that had a poor suit (imo) or a spade fit (obviously) or a heart holding. Of the 5 hands, 2 were clear winners for the method. One picked up a 6-2 club fit (vs a 5-1 spade fit) and the other picked up an 8-0 club fit. The three others were more doubtful because a 2S contract was arguably better.

[Zelandakh]

aguahombre, on Sep 24 2010, 03:42 AM, said:

What does an unpassed hand response to 1♠ of 3♣ show?

I play it as a GF raise without a splinter, like modified Jacoby. 2NT is a mini-splinter in any suit or an in-between splinter (~16-19 support pts). 3D is an invitational raise without splinter. 3H is a mixed raise. 3S and 4S are preemptive. 3NT is a void splinter, 4C/D/H are singleton splinters.

[mycroft]

My partnership plays it as "Bergen" - go on a Goren-standard opener, basically. That effectively splits the range in half. We play 3D as "go only if you would have opened 1C if you were promised 4-card support". I don't really like the mixed raise as in standard in a Precision framework - I'd rather miss the odd game and stick it to them with a 0-mixed direct 3M bid.

I'm not saying I like this method - it's one that partner is wedded to - but I don't find it much worse than any other.