[DavidKok]

Throughout 2024 I noticed several posts on the BBO fora asking what to do on certain auctions with balanced hands, or what to do after partner showed a balanced hand. This is a topic dear to my heart. In November of that year I started writing sets of notes to structure my thoughts, with the intent of writing either a terribly long single post or a series of shorter ones to share my thoughts. Ideally, these posts could also function as a reference for people looking to evaluate their own balanced hand bidding.

During the Christmas break that year I started writing in earnest. I had several pages of notes written up, a table of contents ready, some summaries and key points prepared... and then I got involved in a very unpleasant argument on this forum. It involved name-calling and insults, and made me feel terrible about myself for several weeks. I decided that I was wasting too much of my time on a forum where people didn’t really care for my contribution. The whole planned series only contained my own thoughts and opinions anyway – who am I to think there might be interest in that? After that unpleasant interaction I managed to stay away from the BBO fora for a month or two, and though I gradually returned after I have been trying to keep my contributions to a minimum ever since. It is also my experience that short posts and one-liners are much more welcomed here than long discussions – most of my longer posts got nitpicked apart, while the snide brief responses are received either positively or neutrally.

At the same time, I remained passionate about the topic of balanced hand bidding. Additionally, questions about bidding structures with and opposite balanced hands kept popping up. I also miss my writing style of longer comments and thoughts. Putting this all together, I’m considering trying to write up my notes from back then into a longer series of shorter posts. By necessity these posts won’t be full discussions on balanced hand bidding, but I do think I can contribute some ideas that are rarely discussed. If people are interested in this and it promotes good discussion that would be amazing. If it doesn’t, I can just abandon it partway through, not having wasted much more time than I already sunk into this in December 2024.

There have been a lot of discussions on balanced hands and bidding theory over the years. Some example discussions include “weak versus strong NT” discussions, XYZ versus Checkback and other variants, modern tendencies to open 1NT as frequently as possible, and much more. I regularly ran into some of the same arguments in these discussions, but in my opinion the discussions are always incomplete. Understandable. It is an enormous topic. In case you’re wondering: this writing is not going to be all-inclusive either – there will always be a next argument, or further nuance to explore. Nevertheless, I think I have some ideas to add on the topic, and wanted to put a lot of my thoughts to paper. I think bidding with balanced hands is underrated and only partially understood, and this is my attempt at presenting insights I’ve been collecting for several years now.

Including the introduction, here’s the table of contents. Depending on how things go this may be subject to change:

• Introduction.
  
• Frequencies.
  
• Competitive bidding & balanced hands.
  
• Strong versus Weak versus Kamikaze NT.
  
• Hand evaluation part 1: balanced, semibalanced or unbalanced.
  
• Hand evaluation part 2: hand type first.
  
• System over 1NT opening.
  
• System over 2NT opening (or 2C/Birthright auctions).
  
• System over 1NT rebid, and when (not) to pass.
  
• System over 2NT rebid.
  
• NT ladder after the opponents open.
  
• Conclusions

[mikeh]

As perhaps somebody referenced in your statement about poor interactions, all I can say is that I think we both fell victim to the tendency to read others’ posts in ways not intended by the poster. Internet discussions tend to go sideways both more often and far faster than do in person interactions, where tone of voice, facial expression, body language etc make up a huge amount of the information exchange and, in particular, allow us to understand the other person’s intentions far more accurately than when we simply read words posted online.

In any event, I encourage you to follow through. Maybe you’ve thought of this already, but once you’ve finished you may have at least the outline and beginning of an actual book!

[DavidKok]

I was not thinking of our discussions - some other posters who were active at the time were very aggressive. I'm sorry if you read that in my post, or if you felt that way about my comments in the past.

This could easily be a book if I fleshed out the chapters more, but I am not currently planning on writing a book. Nevertheless I intend to keep the scope of this series broad, but the individual posts (much) shorter than chapters in a book would be. This would be a good start to a book, but I doubt I have the time to write one anytime soon.

There are also several topics that I decided to remove from my list because it would be 1) too long and 2) I do not have many original insights to contribute here. Some examples include 5M332 hands, defending against their 1NT and dealing with interference over our 1NT. Conversely, some others I might wish to write (much, much) more than I will in this series - notably the competitive bidding, hand evaluation and a pet topic of invitational sequences after a NT bid - but I want to try to maintain a steady pace instead.

[mw64ahw]

I'll look forward to it.