[akwoo]

Just mildly annoyed.

Sectional Swiss on Sunday - 7th out of 20, 1st in C Strat.

We gained 2 game swings from our 10-13 1N openings purely because the opponents didn't know what they were doing. Once because our opponents were playing DONT - they didn't know another system and didn't want to think about one. A second time because they didn't have their 2nd round agreements straight.

Now, the first one was against the folks who were 2nd in C, and the second was against folks playing a variable NT, so I don't feel as bad, but I really don't particularly want to win this way...

Of course we could've played better and gotten better opponents.

[jillybean]

Why aren’t you playing in AX?

[jdiana]

akwoo, on 2025-March-04, 12:18, said:

I really don't particularly want to win this way...

I think that ship sailed when you decided to play a weak NT.

Seriously, once you announced your range, that's all you can do. Most lower-level club players almost never encounter weak notrump openings (at least they were very rare when and where I was playing several years ago*) and so don't have separate systems for strong and weak NTs. (We had a very simple system on our card but it never came up.) If they see if often enough, they'll learn to deal with it. The only other thing you can do is play up but I take it from your OP that you were playing against these opponents because of your results in earlier rounds.

*If I get back to playing in the club later this year as planned, it will be interesting to see what's changed. Maybe weak notrump openings have filtered down to the masses. I expect to see more aggressive openings, overcalls and preempts.

[akwoo]

jillybean, on 2025-March-04, 19:37, said:

Why aren’t you playing in AX?

What AX? 20 teams total, all in one Swiss. We were 7th, and in the 6 rounds we faced the teams who were 3rd, 4th, one of the ones tied for 5th, 8th, 9th, and 10th.

[jillybean]

Well done.

[blackshoe]

Far as I'm concerned, any pair who are too damned lazy to prepare for situations they might legitimately face at the table deserves whatever they get.

That said, there are defenses to 1NT that work reasonably well whatever the range of the bid. DONT is not one of them.

[mikl_plkcc]

jdiana, on 2025-March-04, 20:36, said:

I think that ship sailed when you decided to play a weak NT.

Seriously, once you announced your range, that's all you can do. Most lower-level club players almost never encounter weak notrump openings (at least they were very rare when and where I was playing several years ago*) and so don't have separate systems for strong and weak NTs. (We had a very simple system on our card but it never came up.) If they see if often enough, they'll learn to deal with it. The only other thing you can do is play up but I take it from your OP that you were playing against these opponents because of your results in earlier rounds.

*If I get back to playing in the club later this year as planned, it will be interesting to see what's changed. Maybe weak notrump openings have filtered down to the masses. I expect to see more aggressive openings, overcalls and preempts.

Although not the case in my club (we only have a few pairs playing weak NT), I think that that weak NT is fairly common in other clubs where most players play Acol.

[jillybean]

Noone plays Acol in the clubs I play at.
The NT openings range from, and vary as to seat and vulnerability
10-13
12-14
15-17* most common
16-18

[mycroft]

I play odd systems because I like them. I play odd systems because I find them better (for me, or just better). Sure, I play some odd things because they put the opponents under pressure other opponents aren't under; but because they are hard to defend, not because they're odd and unexpected.

I can't avoid the conflict without avoiding the odd stuff. But I've complained about the One True Bidding System before. I'll do my absolute best, especially against the weaker players, to carefully explain what is going on, and maybe even how to think about it. If you've 5000 MPs playing 2300, if you've never seen this before, that's not my problem, it's legal.

[helene_t]

blackshoe, on 2025-March-04, 23:10, said:

Far as I'm concerned, any pair who are too damned lazy to prepare for situations they might legitimately face at the table deserves whatever they get.

That said, there are defenses to 1NT that work reasonably well whatever the range of the bid. DONT is not one of them.

https://images.app.g...vjCgNsUDTWCNkw9

[jillybean]

Such a great cartoon, Helene.

[Cyberyeti]

I sometimes feel like that when I play Ekren and opps haven't discussed whether 2♠ is natural over 2♥ 4-4 or 5-4 either way in the majors.

[mikl_plkcc]

For us, we have an agreement for defence on any meanings, so if it actually turns up, as 2♥ shows 2 suits, our defence of "when opponents have shown 2 suits" will be activated, therefore

X = takeout for the remaining suits
2♠ = I have a strong ♦ hand
3♥ = I have a strong ♣ hand
2NT = natural and stoppers in both suits
3♣, 3♦ = natural, non forcing and competitive, and can be extremely weak.

How effective are such agreements?

[Cyberyeti]

mikl_plkcc, on 2025-March-16, 06:38, said:

For us, we have an agreement for defence on any meanings, so if it actually turns up, as 2♥ shows 2 suits, our defence of "when opponents have shown 2 suits" will be activated, therefore

X = takeout for the remaining suits
2♠ = I have a strong ♦ hand
3♥ = I have a strong ♣ hand
2NT = natural and stoppers in both suits
3♣, 3♦ = natural, non forcing and competitive, and can be extremely weak.

How effective are such agreements?

The problem is if you do have ♠AKQ10xx and a minimum opening hand, what do you do ? There is a difference between 5-5s and suits that can be 4. That I have Jxxx, QJxx, xx, xxx shouldn't matter, you want to show spades.

[jdiana]

mikl_plkcc, on 2025-March-16, 06:38, said:

For us, we have an agreement for defence on any meanings, so if it actually turns up, as 2♥ shows 2 suits, our defence of "when opponents have shown 2 suits" will be activated, therefore

X = takeout for the remaining suits
2♠ = I have a strong ♦ hand
3♥ = I have a strong ♣ hand
2NT = natural and stoppers in both suits
3♣, 3♦ = natural, non forcing and competitive, and can be extremely weak.

How effective are such agreements?

I haven't kept up with all of your posts very closely but IIRC you've been playing with your partner for only a few months. Is that right? My impression is that you have a very complicated bidding system for such a young partnership. Was it something that one of you had already developed? Do you find yourselves having many bidding accidents?

Sorry if this is off-topic, but I'm just interested in how partnerships develop, document and practice their bidding systems. The general advice for newer players (like me, since I would be starting over if I get back to the club again) is to start with few conventions and then add one at a time as necessary. I've always been a little impatient for that approach, even though I think it's probably right.

Adam Parrish has promised to do a series of articles on his bidding system starting soon. I'm really looking forward to that.

[helene_t]

 mikl_plkcc, on 2025-March-16, 06:38, said:

For us, we have an agreement for defence on any meanings, so if it actually turns up, as 2♥ shows 2 suits, our defence of "when opponents have shown 2 suits" will be activated, therefore

X = takeout for the remaining suits
2♠ = I have a strong ♦ hand
3♥ = I have a strong ♣ hand
2NT = natural and stoppers in both suits
3♣, 3♦ = natural, non forcing and competitive, and can be extremely weak.

How effective are such agreements?

Sounds good, except that i wouldn't bid 3m with extremely weak hands. Maybe 10-15 or so.

Assuming we are talking about a 2h opening.

[akwoo]

1) There is a reason that Ekren (and other artificial preempts other than 2N) are illegal in the ACBL except in top level competition. They legitimately take serious agreements to defend against. It's particularly a problem in large pair events where two thirds of the pairs are simply too lazy to bother coming up with an agreement. (My Precision partnership used to play 2N openings as both minors, preemptive (now we play it as both minors minimum opener). It requires a pre-alert. When we played it in a national event at the NABC, every pair we played against quickly discussed what they were doing over it. When we played it at a Regional, almost every pair decided to not bother and hope it didn't come up (which it almost never does).)

2) mikl_plkcc's agreement isn't optimal, but it's okay. For a slightly better generic agreement, I would suggest that X is penalty-oriented (usually a strong NT with stoppers hand but not always - on strong NT hands a penalty double will usually be a good score even if not optimal) and NT is takeout for the unbid suits. The X isn't that useful against 5-5 two-suited preempts, but necessary against 4-4 or even 4-5 preempts.

3) With regards to doubling 5♦, the situation is the following. If you think about it even a little bit, you'll realize that passing 5♦ is never the optimal action. If 5♦ makes, you should've bid 5♠. If 5♦ goes down, you should've doubled. The problem is that you don't know which one is happening, and getting it wrong is costly. Passing is basically signing up for -4 IMPs or so. Acting gets you to +2 when you're right, but -12 when you're wrong. (Numbers are made up but not completely off.) This is a risk tolerance question you have to agree to as a partnership - will you sit for a small minus (or an average-minus at MPs) or gamble for a better score? Part of it is also what you're aiming for - your risk tolerance is different when your goal is a positive game (or breaking 50%) versus when you're thinking 1st or bust.

4) High-level competitive judgement is for many players the very last part of their game to develop, because you only get a chance to develop this skill against good competition (that is actually making high level competitive bids you have to make decisions over) and even then there aren't so many hands (maybe one per session) where it comes up. However, these decisions swing a lot of IMPs.

5) For most partnerships, the advice to develop agreements slowly is a good one. However, new expert partnerships come to the table with a lot of understandings under the guise of "expert standard", and it also makes sense for pairs of young ambitious players (milk_plkcc - your partner is, if not young, at least ambitious, I hope - otherwise you're going to wear them out pretty soon) to develop these kinds of understandings quickly. Bridge is different for pairs of older less capable players who may have trouble remembering their agreements as it is (or need to spend so much mental energy remembering their agreements so that it affects their play).

[jdiana]

akwoo, on 2025-March-16, 12:53, said:

Bridge is different for pairs of older less capable players who may have trouble remembering their agreements as it is (or need to spend so much mental energy remembering their agreements so that it affects their play).

Yes.

[blackshoe]

helene_t, on 2025-March-15, 04:08, said:

https://images.app.g...vjCgNsUDTWCNkw9

Heh. 70+ years ago, I was Calvin. :-)

[mikl_plkcc]

Cyberyeti, on 2025-March-16, 09:05, said:

The problem is if you do have ♠AKQ10xx and a minimum opening hand, what do you do ? There is a difference between 5-5s and suits that can be 4. That I have Jxxx, QJxx, xx, xxx shouldn't matter, you want to show spades.

I will pass. If the auction ends up (2♥) all pass, then it's bad luck. The pass-out seat has a responsibility to keep the auction open if short in the opponent's suit. Evening holding AKQTxx I wouldn't really want to compete when it is well known that an opponent has at least 4 in the suit, I won't be able to run the suit. Even if partner has 3, a 4-0 break means that any likely game will go down as well.

If the opponents introduce a third suit, then our agreement for "when they have shown 3 suits" will be activated, which means all but the last suit is natural, and I can then bid ♠ at that point.

jdiana, on 2025-March-16, 09:23, said:

I haven't kept up with all of your posts very closely but IIRC you've been playing with your partner for only a few months. Is that right? My impression is that you have a very complicated bidding system for such a young partnership. Was it something that one of you had already developed? Do you find yourselves having many bidding accidents?

Sorry if this is off-topic, but I'm just interested in how partnerships develop, document and practice their bidding systems. The general advice for newer players (like me, since I would be starting over if I get back to the club again) is to start with few conventions and then add one at a time as necessary. I've always been a little impatient for that approach, even though I think it's probably right.

Adam Parrish has promised to do a series of articles on his bidding system starting soon. I'm really looking forward to that.

In the first few sessions we messed up a lot of bidding when the opponents intervened so we wrote a set of generic agreements as soon as possible which can be used to handle any conventions showing any combination of suits. However, we still haven't thoroughly discussed "either-or" bids (such as defence to multi 2D) or "pass-or-correct" bids.

helene_t, on 2025-March-16, 10:50, said:

Sounds good, except that i wouldn't bid 3m with extremely weak hands. Maybe 10-15 or so.

Assuming we are talking about a 2h opening.

As mentioned, it is a part of generic agreement, therefore if their opening is strong, then our overcall can be extremely weak; if their opening is weak our simple overcalls should be more constructive. This is bridge logic. We don't really have agreed range for some of our overcalls, we have only agreed shapes, and if their overcall can be anything 0-30+ our response can also be the same as well, focusing only on establishing the exact trump length (by ours and theirs) to compete.