Re: A Henry + Steven experiment; comments welcome

On Sep 25, 7:40 pm, henrysun...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
Last week, Steven and I had an auction that went basically like this:

Steven OPP Henry OPP
1D 1S 2H 2S
P 3S 4C P
4H All pass

Steven opened on a foot of a hand, we ended up in a 5-2 heart fit
instead of a 5-3 club fit, and I scored up -250 on an admittedly
sloppily played hand.

In discussing this hand later, I was struck by how difficult it is to
show 2-suiters in competition when the major suit is 5+ long. A hand
like

xxx
KJxx
xx
KJxx

is of course no problem - one simply makes a negative double. In the
modern style, even stronger hands such as

xx
AQxx
xx
AKxxx

are suitable for a negative double followed by a qbid, or a second
double, or some other strong action.

But hands like the one I held

A
JTxxx
xx
AKxxx

are harder to bid because if you choose to make a negative double you
will have trouble showing the 5th heart and the extra values, but if
you choose to bid 2H freely, you may be bidding at the 4-level on a
misfitting or semi-misfitting hand.

Our solution, at least on a trial basis, is to play that jump shifts
are weak and that the jump to 2NT is "unusual" showing at least 5-5 in
the two unbid suits and at least GI strength (understanding that the
momentum of the auction or the competition by the opponents will often
push us to game anyway). That way, opener has a pretty good idea of
responder hand type (one suited vs two suited, weak vs stronger) and
therefore should be in a very good position to judge the degree of fit
between the two hands.

The down side of this is the loss of the natural 2NT response (but as
Robson-Segal have shown, that loss is more illusory than real, so much
so that they use it to show a 4+ card limit raise or better) and some
loss of distributional clarity on either the free bid in a minor or
the negative double. For now, we are using a negative double on GF
balanced hands like

xxx
Kxx
AQx
AJxx

and will follow with a Qbid to show this hand type or, if holding
support for opener's minor such as

xxx
Kxx
AQxx
AJx

on the actual auction, we will qbid showing limit+ raise for opener.

We haven't had a chance to roll this new convention out (I suppose we
can call it unusual by responder), but constructive comments in
advance are welcome.

So what are you supposed to do with a hand like: S AJx H xxx D
Kxx C QJxx?

Eric Leong

.

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