Now that I have completed my service work for the summer, I feel justified in going to spend 10 days goofing off, sightseeing, drinking, but mostly playing some serious bridge in Toronto. Go here first and here next to read about my experiences as a volunteer and crew leader for the River of Life service project last week.
I head out Thursday afternoon to Toronto via bus from Macon to the Atlanta airport, flight to Buffalo, and then a bus to Toronto, and return home 10 days later. If all goes well, I'll be playing bridge 9 days straight in main events with Sean. If things don't go quite so great, I'm sure I'll find plenty of fun things to get into.
I did get to play bridge twice last week and at least one interesting question arose. We all know that you should have 26 points to bid major suit and NT games but 29 to bid minor suit games simply because you need 11 tricks instead of 10 or 9. So, when an auction starts 1H-2C and you eventually decide you can’t play 3NT and don’t have a major suit fit, can you cancel the game-forcing part of the 2C response? I mean, theoretically, you need some extra values for bidding 5C to be right so there should be some invitational bid even after you've game-forced. A minimum opening opposite a minimum game force is only about 25 points but it seems that most people nowadays say you have to go ahead and bid 5C because they prefer to use a 4m bid to be roman key card blackwood.
1H-2C; 2D-3C; 3D is the start of a sequence in question. Perhaps the only way to stop in 4C should be for responder to bid 3S over 3D (basically asking for a spade stopper) and opener retreat to 4C (with no spade stopper and no extras). But even then, there are a significant number of people who think 4C should be stronger than 5C. Does the game-before-slam principle apply here or are we in a slam try auction whether we want to be or not? If responder bids 4C over 3D, is that forcing or invitational? If we’ve determined that 4C in either auction is forcing, is it Minorwood or not? So that you don't have a misunderstanding, unless you have a chance to discuss all the little variations of sequences that lead to a 4C bid, it is probably best to treat a 2/1 as a game force without exception and a 4m bid as minorwood anytime you are in a game force.
With my regular partner, we play that we can stop in 4 of a minor. We play kickback and not minorwood though so it is easier to treat 4C by opener in your given auction as passable.
ReplyDeleteGood luck in Toronto! It's a great city - wish I could have gone.