Why I don't like Precision
I play Precision myself, and, like most other people who play it, I'm well aware of its strengths and its weaknesses. The strengths are the 1H and 1S opening bids, and constructive auctions after 1C. The weaknesses are competitive auctions after 1C and 1D, and constructive auctions after a 2C opening. I hope this is all very uncontroversial! As such, it would be easy to say, "I don't like Precision because the 1C and 1D bids are vulnerable to pre-emption." But that would be to overlook the fact that all systems have their strengths and weaknesses, and without considering both of these it's not possible to come to any conclusions about whether the system is a good one.
So I hope to do something different - my argument is that at the heart of the system there is a slight design flaw, which results in the system not being as good as it ought to be.
I want to look at the choice of opening bid with various hands. It will help to divide opening hands into five categories. One category is "balanced"; unbalanced hands are divided into "spades", "hearts", "diamonds" and "clubs" hands, depending on the longest suit (or more precisely, depending on which suit would be opened playing a natural system - so 5=2=5=1 hands are "spades" hands rather than "diamonds"). Let's ignore 4441 hands for the time being. Now, in the version of Precision that I play (which is fairly standard), the opening bids are defined as follows:
balanced: 11-13HCP open 1D; 14-16HCP open 1NT; 17+ HCP open 1C.
spades: (10)11-15HCP open 1S; 16+ HCP open 1C.
hearts: (10)11-15HCP open 1H; 16+ HCP open 1C.
diamonds: 11-15HCP open 1D; 16+ HCP open 1C.
clubs: 11-15HCP open 2C [or 1D]; 16+ HCP open 1C.
The thing to notice here is that the strength required to open 1C is almost independent of the distribution of the hand. This is what I perceive to be a problem with the system. Observe that the five different types of hand described above essentially correspond to the five different limited opening bids 1NT, 1S, 1H, 1D and 2C. A priori, there is no reason why the upper limits for these five bids should all be equal. But let's first consider the reasons why making the upper limit the same for all types of hand might be a good thing. As I see it, there are only really two reasons:
1. Simplicity. That is, it makes the system easier to remember, and it makes the description of the 1C bid nice and short when you alert. Needless to say, in terms of pure bidding theory, this doesn't come into it at all.
2. When 1C is opened, it helps responder to judge the likely strength of opener's hand. For example, responder has a fairly good idea of what strength he needs in order to force to game. This certainly is very important - it's very easy to make the system unplayable by tinkering with it so that this advantage disappears. For example, suppose you were to decide that you hated the Precision 2C opener so much that you would open those hands 1C (in addition to the 16+ HCP hands). Leaving aside for a moment the fact that it's virtually impossible to come up with a sensible way of bidding after such a 1C opening, you would have terrible problems in competitive auctions. The main reason is that a 1C opener would nearly always have at least 16+ HCP, but it would be extremely dangerous for responder to bank on that because of the weaker possibility. [More generally, it helps if the most frequent hand type possible for a bid is also the weakest. The 1C opening in Polish Club is particularly good in this respect; the 1C opening in weak-NT-short-club is bad.]
There is a third possible reason - coincidence. Perhaps it really is true that the right limit to put on the 1NT, 1S, 1H, 1D and 2C bids is approximately 15HCP in each case. Let's investigate this by considering each of the five hand types separately. There are two factors to consider.
1. How useful is it for the limited opening to be limited?
balanced hands - It is essential that the stength required for opening 1C with a balanced hand is relatively low. If it was made higher, then either you would have to play a wide-range 1NT opening, or you would have to open a nebulous 1D on lots of hands. This would be highly undesirable.
"spades" and "hearts" hands - Limited 1S and 1H opening bids are very useful indeed. Indeed you could say that these bids are the reason you play a strong club in the first place. Even so, you would have to rate a limit of the order of 15-16HCP as "useful", rather than "essential" as in the case of balanced hands. (You'd find it difficult to argue that a Standard American 1S or 1H opening bid is unplayable.)
"diamonds" hands - These definitely get the wooden spoon. It is certainly useful to have a small range for 1D, but much less so than for 1S and 1H, the reasons being:
- responder often needs to check on major-suit fits before knowing what the final contract should be, which is not a problem when the opening bid is 1S or 1H;
- the shape is less well defined (another reason why it is difficult for responder to set the final contract quickly);
- there is more space available after 1D than after 1S or 1H.
"clubs" hands - It's so difficult to bid constructively after a Precision 2C opening that it's absolutely essential for 2C to have a narrow range - even more so than in the case of balanced hands.
2. How easy is it to bid the hand after opening a strong 1C?
balanced hands - These are fairly easy to bid, particualrly if playing some sort of relay system. You do get some problems if the opponents pre-empt, of course, but sometimes you have the option of passing, which is obviously more attractive with a balanced hand than with an unbalanced hand.
"spades" hands - These are easy to bid: you usually bid spades at the lowest available level.
"hearts" hands - These are not as easy to bid as "spades" hands, because you lose a level of bidding if someone bids spades.
"diamonds" and "clubs" hands - These are relatively hard to bid after 1C, particularly if partner makes the negative response. "Diamonds" is slightly worse than "clubs" because you have less space after your diamond rebid.
In summary,
Is a very limited opening useful?
clubs - very useful
balanced
spades
hearts
diamonds - not very useful
Are you likely to do well if you open 1C?
spades - relatively well
balanced
hearts
clubs
diamonds - relatively poorly
If these two factors were mostly working in opposite directions, then playing the 1C requirement as roughly the same for all five hand types would make a lot of sense. But immediately we can see that one of the five sticks out - diamonds. You wouldn't want to rush to conclusions, but there is a clear indication here that it might be a good idea to make the upper limit for a 1D opener higher than for 1NT, 1S, 1H and 2C.
So suppose we change our 1C and 1D opening bids to take this into account. Would we now be in trouble because responder is unable to judge the strength of a 1C opener? Clearly not - taking out minimum hands with diamonds makes hardly any difference to the expected strength of 1C. So although we found earlier that there was a good reason to make the strength required for 1C the same for all hand types, we're keeping that advantage here.
In practice, however, requiring 18 or 19HCP to open 1C with diamonds is rather pointless. All the sequences after 1C would be unchanged, except that responder could rely on a few extra points when opener turned up with diamonds. Sometimes you would gain by opening 1D with up to 18HCP, and sometimes you would lose. (I think you would gain more than you would lose, but that's rather difficult to prove.) In order to make a real differece to the system, we'd have to go further and take enough hands out of 1C that the system after 1C could be improved.
Here we enter the realms of personal preference. One idea is to require a 1D for all "diamonds" hands short of a game force. Certainly the system would no longer be Precision - maybe you could call it "strong club with unlimited diamond". Bidding after this 1D opening would not be too difficult - certainly better than in natural systems because you have a 2NT rebid available to help with some of the strong hands. The real advantage is that you've freed up opener's 2D rebid after a 1C opening, which could be used for, say, strong 4441 hands.
Personally, I like to look a bit closer at each of the five lilmited opening bids. My feelings are that the requirement for opening 1C ought to look something like this:
balanced - 15HCP
clubs - 15HCP
spades - 16HCP
hearts - 18HCP
diamonds - almost game
[Note in particular that the low limit for balanced hands means that you don't need to open 1D with any balanced types.]
However this is in a perfect world where you don't have to worry about constructing a system that works over 1C! In practice life is easiest if you increase the requirement for "spades" and "hearts" hands to something more like Polish Club:
balanced - 15HCP
clubs - 15HCP
spades - 18-19HCP
hearts - 18-19HCP
diamonds - GF
And finally we've reached my pet system
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