Strong 4441 hands

July 1st, 2008  ~  Colin Lee  ~  2 Comments 

So how do you handle the strong 4441 hands in your system?

They are frequently the hardest hands to bid as most systems assume 5 card suits in a lot of sequences.

There are proponents of Roman 2♦ (showing any 4441 or 4450 with 16-24 HCP)

I’ve heard some people suggest you should just bid the hand as balanced;

Any way you treat it – it’s a hard hand to bid – especially with a singleton black suit:

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Mixed bag / Rebids over 1C – 1D

June 30th, 2008  ~  Colin Lee  ~  No Comments 

So here’s some quick system stuff:

1C – 1D – 1M is the starting sequence:

What should bids by responder mean now? What’s the difference between 2M, 3M and 4M? What should 1NT / 2NT mean?

So I’m of the opinion that NT should never be natural where one hand is 0-7 and the other is 16+. I don’t want the weak hand on play; however, there probably is some merit to 1C – 1D – 1S – 1NT being natural (4-7 with 1-2 spades?) since there is no other way to show this hand without being overly complex. I haven’t thought too far into it – but what about playing 1NT as forcing or semi forcing?

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Transfer responses

June 24th, 2008  ~  Colin Lee  ~  1 Comment 

Well it was mentioned in a previous post’s comments so I might as well get to it now as it leads into a bunch of other things later and basically totally invalidates everything I’ve talked about to date!

So let’s start – we are talking about playing transfer responses to the opening strong 1♣ bid.

So we have choices for natural transfer responses (obviously we could bid completely artificially but I’m still trying to show natural hands):

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Bidding over 1M – Game forcing

June 22nd, 2008  ~  Colin Lee  ~  4 Comments 

Um, is this the right room for an argument

So I left off talking about raising a GF bid at the one level – now at the moment, we are working in a, mostly, natural system so I’m not going to talk about relays or artificial bids.

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Building a bidding system

June 20th, 2008  ~  Colin Lee  ~  3 Comments 

Since my mother (Linda) is talking about the play / things we are doing at the table – I thought I’d look at the other aspects of what we are exploring which is our bidding system.

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