The Familiarity Factor in Georgia Tech's Triple Option and Asbury-Gannon Swedish Canape

Every time I watch a Georgia Tech football game on TV, the announcers talk about how the Georgia Tech wishbone, triple option offense is so difficult to defend. Part of it is because they are good but they do have an inherent advantage of unfamiliarity. The opposition is not accustomed to defending against an unconventional offense so regardless of whether the offense is technically any better than a standard offense, the defense is at a disadvantage simply because they haven’t practiced against it much and don’t know a lot of the little nuances.

 

Similarly, that is the same advantage of Swedish Canapé. Whether or not you agree that canapé is a better bidding system than SAYC or 2/1 or precision, you’d be crazy to not agree that we gain a slight advantage simply by playing a system that most people are unfamiliar with. Even with explaining all of the bids, it must be harder to defend against simply because the situations that arise are different from what you’ve seen before. Plus, there are lots of little inferences and nuances that can’t really be explained, like when we open a 4 card major but never get to bid our 5 or 6 card side suit. The opponents often forget that we could have that hand but we are consciously aware that opener could be 4-5 but if opener has 5+ in the suit opened, he has no 4 card side suit.

 

General consensus is that what bidding system you use doesn’t matter much. In the long run, all bidding systems are almost equally effective as long as you know your system and follow the system. So, at the beginning of learning a new system, you will always be at a slight disadvantage because of not knowing the system fully, but once you master a strange system, you will have a slight advantage over the competition. Every system has some system wins and some system losses but those differences are small compared to the difference in experience from playing or playing against a particular system.