BBO Discussion Forums: 4-5-2-2 Hands-- opener's rebid after INT forcing response - BBO Discussion Forums

What's the problem? Bid 2C unless your hearts are really, really good (then if you like, you can bid 2H).

You aren't going to go that far wrong. Partner won't raise unless he has five, and there are worse things than a 5-2 fit. The other not-necessarily-great thing partner can do is pass. But that means he has at most three spades, at most one heart, and at most five diamonds, so once every two years, you might play in a 2/4 fit. Big deal. No worse than playing on a 3/3 minor fit, which happens in 2/1 about once every six months.

Cheers,
Mike

johnu, on 2019-August-17, 12:48, said:

But pard *expects* that I might have only two clubs when I rebid 2C after 1H-1NT, so if I take the quoted regulation literally, that sounds to me like it *should* be alerted.

pescetom, on 2019-August-18, 07:44, said:

IMO, it's fine to pass the semi-forcing notrump when you have 11-13, but if you pass with 14-15, it's too easy to miss game when pard bid a semi-forcing notrump planning to invite in notrump or hearts (with three card support).

With 11-13, pass. With 14-15, bid the 2 card suit. With four clubs and a heart doubleton, pard does a little better leaving you in clubs, at least in terms of making 2C or 2H. (Pard knows that you could have 2 clubs or 3 clubs, but you'll often enough have 4+ clubs. N.b, this analysis ignores the potential penalty for not keeping the auction open when pard has a very good hand but not enough to jump shift. I'm guessing it won't make enough of a difference to favor the false preference, but it'll narrow the gap.)

The worst pard can have is something like a 6-9 point 3=1=5=4 opposite your 14-15 point 4=5=2=2, and if I've run my simulation properly (caution - I'm new at it!), that'll happen about 3 times per million deals. On these, he passes 2C, and you'll even make it about 1/3 of the time.

msjennifer, on 2019-August-18, 12:54, said:

Gazzilli actually makes the problem a little *worse* since you can't pass 2C on the death hands. One solution, with weak responding hands, is to rebid 2S to show 3=1-(5-4), allowing opener to play in the good 4-3 spade fit on these hands.

Playing with bots, I've had success opening this type of hand with 1NT, all the way down to 12 points (12-16). Going forward, I treat the hand as 4-4-x-x w/ 15 points. This has the disadvantage of occasionally missing 4H games, but the advantage that almost everyone is trained to lead major suits against NT contracts, in this case to their detriment.
If you're not willing to open 1NT with this hand, I recommend you abandon the idea that a 2H rebid is 6 cards -- also 1S-1NT-2S.
The semi-forcing (pass) approach works well, until your partner is planning to make a limit raise over your bid. In the limit raise case, bottom board is guaranteed.

Also, bidding 2C here is an alert convention. The "2/1 standard" is irrelevant to the alert rules.

RuflRabbit, on 2019-August-18, 19:23, said:

Agreed, I think that can be taken for granted.

TomSawyer4, on 2019-August-19, 04:47, said:

You can't play the same agreements as with 1NT forcing and then just pass, you have to rethink which hand types you put through 1NT and which you handle in other ways (for example, 2NT).

I do not care whether 1 NT is forcing or not, but with the present hand I pass, what game could we be missing, especially if p with 4+ ♥ must find another bid.

Maarten Baltussen

jdulmage, on 2019-August-18, 10:54, said:

I thought in Max Hardys books 2clubs is the bid you make or you pass, I have seen some play that 2diamonds gaurantees four

I think everyone has covered all the best suggestions at this point. PASS and 2♣ are your only bids here. There's pretty much no ♥ suit that I'd ever rebid here. Why isn't partner 2155? Not sure why we want to play 5-1 trump fits on some hands. If you want to play a 5-card majors, 2/1, and therefore the most overloaded bid in bridge the 2/1 Forcing NT (doesn't have to be forcing... but it's still overloaded as hell). Well... every system has it's tradeoffs and you've found one of the many in 2/1. You're forced to make ugly rebids sometimes that really don't describe your shape. It's the fatal flaw of 2/1, it sells out so heavily to 5-card majors that it's an extremely hard system to safely pattern out in.

You can play Flannery if you really want. As someone who doesn't play weak twos, 6 card preempts at the 3-level are just not a problem. You had just better understand the correct holdings and situations to preempt with/in.

Not only do I play that one rebids 2C with 4=5=2=2 but I play that one rebids 2C with 3=5=3=2! The 'bad' hand is 4=5=3=1, and there I may bid either 2C or 2D, 'lying' by one card. Partner alerts 2C as 'could be 2': systemically we play that it could be two so the ACBL alert rule, quoted above, means that we need to alert.

Now, in fairness, we also play BART over 2C (I use three different versions depending on who I am playing with). I strongly recommend BART for any serious player using 1N as a forcing or semi-forcing response to 1M.

The main downside of the forcing 1N is that one can no longer play in 1N. One can solve that by playing semi-forcing, but then one has to do something else with the limit raise hands that most 2/1 players deal with through 1N (classically in 2/1 one bid 1N then bid 3M with a 3 card limit raise).

The other, lesser, downside is that one will have trouble stopping in 2C when opener has real club length and responder has 4 but is unwilling to risk a 4-2 or 4-3 fit. However, in practice, the number of hands on which this happens, ad leads to a poor result, is extremely small. I speak from more than 25 years of experience with this method.

Bart is an exceptional bidding tool, although many who don't use it misunderstand its value, and so I would encourage advancing players to combine using Bart with rebidding 2C over the 1N, to show 2+ cards. The main use of Bart is to allow responder to differentiate between hands that are truly invitational and hands that cannot pass and yet have less than invitational values.

I used to play Flannery, and dislike it. Yes, it gets the hand across early, but it preempts the auction and makes slam bidding less effective than is usually the case after 1H. Meanwhile, it solves what is really not much of a problem (especially if one has good methods after 1H 1N) at the cost of losing 2D.

I played the Kaplan inversion for a while many years ago. As with most gadgets, there were some advantages but on balance I didn't like it. The worst is that 1H 1N is forcing, showing spades. Often the auction would otherwise have gone 1H 1S 1N....and we can't get there after the spade-showing 1N. Other times, we do get to 3N, but wrong-sided. Plus opener's rebid over 1N aren't designed for accurate bidding. 1H 1S 2C: I show 5-4 or better in standard. In the inversion, 1H 1N 2C: who knows what my clubs look like?


I realize that we all like to feel that we understand bidding. Most of us don't, or at least not very well. There is an arena in which bidding ideas are tested: high-level tournament play. Bad ideas rarely survive for long. You don't see much flannery or Kaplan inversions in high-level bridge. You do find quite a few expert pairs using the 2C rebid as 2+ and using a form of Bart over it.

Here's a hint: if you are using an approach that has been around for many, many years, and find that very few, if any, top pairs, playing a generally similar basic approach, are playing it, the odds are that you're using a gadget that is beyond its best before date. It may well have been extremely powerful in its day, but new and better mousetraps have been invented since then.

I am with Vampyr in feeling that 2D is a very useful opening bid, natural and weak. I play it in my two most serious partnerships and have never regretted it. In one of them we did, for a while, play 2D as a weak weak 2M, and 2M as constructive, but found that the weak 2D was a better use (plus when one holds a weak 2D hand, it is painful to be unable to open 2D. If one passes, one may never catch up, and if one bids 3D, one may be too high). Now, everything in a detailed bidding scheme is connected, and we use 2-way drury responses to a 3rd and 4th seat major, which means that we can't bid 2D with the weak 2D hand that was forced to pass. If we played one-way drury, being unable to open 2D on say AQ10xxx and a side King wouldn't be so bad, since some of the time we get to respond 2D to our partner's 1M.

This interconnected nature of bidding is very important to remember when deciding whether to adopt a particular gadget. Always ask: what problems does this solve (the easy question) and what problems does it create (the hard but more important question).

mikeh, on 2019-August-19, 14:02, said:

Why don't people play 1H-1NT as as inv or less with spades? It seems to solve the hands you most commonly have, let you get out in 1NT the highest % of the time, find all 4-4 fits, in return for making auctions with 5 spades and a game force a bit cramped, though not that cramped really. Rebids after 1H-1S are something like

1NT: Min balanced or diamonds - This bid is awkward, I hope you're playing a 14-16 NT!
2C: Clubs
2D: Hearts
2H: 4 spades 5 hearts
2S: Natural reverse

and then it mostly works. I guess all the changes you're making to standard might be a bit ugly here, but it lets 1NT be not forcing under every circumstance.

Then here you can get your hand across perfectly: 1H-1S-2H and responder knows 100% what's up and has plenty of time to stop gracefully. Also most hands go 1H-1S-1NT-pass out.

Quote

If your jurisdiction allows it, you can also put the weak long diamonds hand into 2C and then just play 2D flannery if you want.

mikeh, on 2019-August-19, 14:02, said:

There is a version of Kaplan Inversion that has effectively been tested at that level without being extensively played. It is to use the same structure as over a 1♠ opening, making a 1♠ response the Forcing NT and 1NT becomes game forcing with spades. Whether that is an improvement over the normal form of KI is not really for me to say but it has to be sound if the normal 1♠ structure is good.

As far as 2 bids go, I believe there has been some evidence produced that 2♠ > 2♦ > 2♥ in terms of effectiveness generally and that to some extent that relationship holds regardless of how those bids are played. So count me in the group of those that hold 2♦ in high esteem.

Zelandakh, on 2019-August-19, 18:03, said:

It's weird that this is heavily contested, because it seems obvious that 2S has the most pre-emptive value, and 2D gives the opponents the most space, but the least direction on where to go, and 2H gives people a clear direction and enough space to explore it at the two level. I really want to work out how to play 2C as a weak pre-empt because I think it would be super effective.

Cthulhu D, on 2019-August-19, 17:49, said:

Why anyone wants to weaken their 2C structure is beyond me. Why anyone thinks that having to bid, say, 2S over 1H with all gf 5+ spade hands also escapes me. Both seem to me to be solutions in search of a problem. Otherwise known as creating a worse mess than the one that one is purporting to solve

mikeh, on 2019-August-19, 18:30, said:

Taking them separately: With 2C it's because you believe the net benefits are more significant than the net negatives. Would be the same reason you do anything! I do it because I think having a weak 2D in your 2C results in less preemption and the benefits alternative use for 2D is substantial.

With the 2nd option, you just bid 1S and see what opener does. If partner bids 1NT you've got tons of space to unfold the hand (we use 2C as a relay here which gives lots of space), and if partner shows his shape you've got the location of 9 cards in his hand and plenty of space to unwind the details.

It finds all 4-4 fits, all 5-3 fits and the only time you past 1NT with a 4-3 or 5-2 major fit and less than game forcing strength is if opener is 4=5-(2-2) or 4=5-(3-1). The downside is

Kaplan Inversion works great, btw, when your 1M openings promise unbalanced hands. When you remove the possibility of having 5332 hands from the equation, then not being able to stop easily in 1n is not a problem. I'm presently playing GUS, and it does that by moving those hands into the 1n opener, so our 1n opening is in the 12-16 range.

RuflRabbit, on 2019-August-18, 19:12, said:

If in your methods you rebid 2♣ (or 2♦?) with other distributions, e.g. 5=3=3=2 or 3=5=3=2, then 2♣ needs to be alerted. If you only rebid 2♣ with specifically 4=5=2=2, then the ACBL is essentially saying that the chance of this happening is low enough that partner should expect 3 or more clubs. IIRC, this has been confirmed at least several times in the ACBL Bulletin.

HardVector, on 2019-August-17, 11:04, said:

You can play Kaplan interchange without playing Flannery. In that case, 1♠ shows 0-3 spades and 1NT shows 4+ spades. If you play 1♠ as 0-4 spades, then you will usually miss a 4-4 spade fit when opener has a minimum hand because neither partner is strong enough to introduce spades as a real suit.

If you use Flannery and use 1♠ response to 1♥ to show 0-4 spades, you can still have problems finding a spade fit. Opener could have 6+ hearts and 4 spades and be unable to open with Flannery. Flannery players almost always have an upper limit of ~15 or 16 HCP to use the bid. Many players require fairly strong hands to reverse, so there may be a gap between a hand too strong for Flannery, and a hand not strong enough to reverse. You can miss a spade fit if you have a gap hand. You could lower the limits for a reverse into spades so there is no gap, but you would have to make adjustments to cater to lower reverse requirements.

thepossum, on 2019-August-18, 01:38, said:

Opening 1♠ and rebidding hearts shows 5+ spades and 4+ hearts if you are playing a 5 card major system. Responder will not play opener to only have 4 spades and longer hearts. You will frequently end up in spades instead of NT when NT is right, and spades instead of hearts when hearts is right. When you rebid 2♣ after a forcing 1NT, everybody at the table should be aware (maybe not brand new players to tournament bridge, but most beginners learned 5 card majors (in US) and should have been taught to rebid 2♣) that 2♣ can possibly be bid on a doubleton. So who is being mislead?

thepossum, on 2019-August-18, 01:38, said:

Everybody takes a flier once in a while. With a fairly random 4-5-2-2 with 11-12 points, there are 3 big problems with opening 2♥.

1. Bad or mediocre 5 card suit. May not be a problem if your partner knows you preempt like Marty Bergen, but a problem for most.
2. Enough points for most players to open at the 1 level, and lots of points outside the preempt suit. More defense than offense potential.
3. 4 card side suit in spades. A strong deterrent to opening 2♥ for many players.

Any one of the above is a bigger problem than making a forced rebid of 2♣ on a doubleton.

thepossum, on 2019-August-18, 01:38, said:

Opening 1♠ with 4-5 in the majors is the exact opposite of describing your shape when partner expects you to have 5+ spades. You talk about occasional flexibility in number of cards. Why is being 1 card short not OK when talking about a rebid in clubs which partner knows has the possibility of being a doubleton, but OK when talking about 1♠ which promises 5 spades playing a 5 card major system. One of the goals of a 5 card major system is finding an 8 card fit as soon as possible and you can't do that if you are only playing 5 card majors some of the time.

thepossum, on 2019-August-18, 01:38, said:

Are you saying rebidding 2♣ is a bid intended to mislead the defense? Or that it isn't "fair" to the defense? The ACBL (OP is apparently in ACBL territory) disagrees and goes as far to say that rebidding 2♣ specifically on a 4=5=2=2 hand is not even alertable. Other jurisdictions may have different regulations.

As far as getting to good contracts, opening the bidding with 1 of a major promising 5+ cards when you only have 4 is much more likely to end up in a bad contract.

RuflRabbit, on 2019-August-18, 19:12, said:

The way I've always interpreted that clause is that it means that partner bids as if you've shown 3+ clubs. For instance, if he has 2 hearts and 5 clubs, he passes or raises clubs (depending on strength) rather than taking a preference to hearts. He doesn't make a special allowance for the possibility that it may be only 2, and you don't have any system to inquire.