What & Why (13)
The following deal occurred recently, and provided a very interesting bidding exercise which was presented to our panel as a progressive exercise, starting with the following bidding problem: In a teams match, your partner opens 1S and this is the hand that you have been dealt.
 4 |
 AQ92 |
 J |
 AKQJT83 |
The first question was: what is your bid? Everyone’s answer was either 2C or 3C (the latter if the jump shift was very strong and showed very good clubs). That was the old style jump shift and one can hardly argue with it if that is part of your system. Most of us these days would just bid 2C and start slowly because that will allow for more discussion. But before going any further, let us agree on one thing: when partner has opened 1S, what can you expect the end contract to be? Surely a slam as long as partner has one ace, and a possible grand slam if partner has two aces and one or two kings. Would two aces and only one king be enough? If the one king was the king of hearts, probably. Can we ever find out enough? Probably not, if you think about how you expect the bidding to go after you have
responded with a bid of 2C.
What you can expect to happen is that when you bid 2C partner will bid 2D and now you will have to bid 2H as ‘fourth suit forcing’ and that may create complications if you have no specific agreement with partner as to what the next bids mean. The only panelist who has suggested a meaningful answer to this was Gerry, who said: “In one successful partnership we used to play that after 4th suit forcing at the two level a raise of the fourth suit was ‘no extra shape, no stopper, no support’ so here we would be 5341 or 5242 without a heart stop. 2NT would therefore show a heart stop.” Presumably that heart stop would have to be Kxx in this part icular case, but could also be Kx. I think that is a great way to treat this problem and as it happens partner would have bid 2NT. After that it would be a matter of time before you would find that partner has two aces as well as the king of hearts. How to do that? Why not use “Key Card” with responses that include the fourth suit as the ‘trump suit’. Do you see the advantages of that? The response to 4NT would have been ‘three key cards’ which would then be the two aces and the king of hearts, good enough for you to take a shot at 7C. Well done Norma who bid to a lucky 7C after finding partner with two aces and two kings (though the kings needed to include the HK to make 7C a good proposition), and to those who bid to the safe 6C as well as the less safe but very good 6NT.
I will show you the full deal IF you want to see it, because with it goes a story of how I handled this hand, with unforseen but lucky consequences that could have been disastrous.
