Help
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
