[aguahombre]

Another thread established that in a pure SAYC game, inverted minors are not used. So what would be expert standard to describe some huge club support and GF+ values? Is bidding a 3-card suit and following with new suits until GF is established before supporting the clubs the only answer?

AT TX AXX AKTXXX was the actual hand several people held at the club. Those who had inverted minors in their toolkit were better off, obviously. My LHO chose 3C!! and when opener didn't pass the invite, bid 6NT

6N scored better than 3C. But the question is about the dilema of club raises: 2=weak 3=invite. 4?

[paulg]

Expert standard would be to make a bid up. Responding 1♦ on a three-card suit would be fine on this hand.

You would have thought that this should be general bridge knowledge (GBK) in SAYC-land, and the same in Acol-land where the same issue exists with the standard system. But it's not generally discussed, as far as I can tell, and not GBK as it always feels like cheating when I do this against less experienced players at the club. Give the opponents the hand and they'd understand the problem but would not know what to do except tank.

I wonder if the big problem with club bridge is that traditionally, before computer-dealt hands, these hands were much rarer and the problem was usually fixed by bidding the appropriate number of notrumps, normally three.

[aguahombre]

paulg, on 2011-February-09, 15:03, said:

Expert standard would be to make a bid up. Responding 1♦ on a three-card suit would be fine on this hand.

1D gets thru the first round. Now what? 3C is still not GF, so more torture? An up-the-line 1S rebid by opener would probably be the most annoying. Still no clue as to opener's strength or shape and it doesn't look as if anything will be solved after FSF, other than we are committed to game+. I suspect expert standard would be to just settle for game in NT as soon as possible and hope they can't run the hearts.

[nigel_k]

You could also jump shift then support clubs.

[awm]

Not having a forcing minor suit raise is one of the biggest weaknesses of SAYC (in fact it's one of the main things that distinguishes Elianna and my methods from SAYC).

However, an important note is that in SAYC, 1m-2NT is forcing to game. A semi-balanced GF raise like the one given could start with 2NT. You don't always have a great auction in this sequence, but frequently if partner is balanced (and bids 3NT) you want to be there anyway... and if partner does something else you can evaluate fit.

Otherwise you can of course "make up a suit" or you can splinter (I think splinter bids are technically not part of SAYC but are listed as an option in the document).

[blackshoe]

The word "splinter" does not occur in the SAYC document. The document says that the only options available have to do with carding agreements, but there are a couple of places where a bid is described "may be conventional" with no other discussion, which certainly sounds to me like it involves (or may involve) a choice.