The Valule of Fits

Fits lend substance to your combined hands, making it possible for you to be a little more aggressive in pushing for the privilege of naming trump than you'd wanna be on a non-fit. How many points would a fit represent? Oh, I wouldn't touch that with a 10-foot pole. There are so many variables. And I would imagine the answer would have to range everywhere from zero -- if you've got all top cards, who needs a fit? -- to um-m-mm, 25, as you pull home an unbeatable slam on, say, 10 hcp's and of course an extraordinarily favorable distribution. The only thing I'm prepared to say is that with a fit, and we're presuming enough hcp's to enter the bidding and discover it, you can afford to push a little bit more where you wouldn't without knowledge of a fit, and with a good fit, you can push a bit more, and with a a slam-dunk fit, you'll wanna be very eager to name that suit trump, and reluctant to give up the ghost.

And if fits are valuable, there are two pieces of advice I would offer, the first being that you'll want to announce that fit to partner (we're assuming you have enough points to bid), unless you have a very good reason for not doing so and you know you'll get another chance to bid. (If, for instance, you're making a forcing bid.) That is particularly with major suits. I'll get to the minor in a moment. And the second piece of advice is that a two-suited hand allows for a bit more aggressiveness than a one-suited of the same length. For on a two-suiter, you're doubling your chances of finding a fit, no?

Let me take a moment to go through my lexicon on fits. A seven-card fit is no fit at all. Every 26 cards must have at least two, possibly three, 7-card suits or an 8-card or longer suit. So seven is the shortest you can get for your longest suit. That's not to say that such holdings aren't playable as your best trump contract. A 4-3 fit is called a Moysian fit, and given, say, a shortage with the short trump, such a holding might do very well, thank you. And that's not to take up 5-2 and 6-1 fits. But it's no fit, really, not what would qualify for the common expression: "We have a fit in hearts.".

An eight card fit is a modest fit. I italicize that word because players often treat that known fit as license to pump up the bidding. Well, of course an 8-card fit is traditionally a sufficient number to control the hand when you've got a clear preponderance of the hcp's. But it won't make up for any great shortfall in points, and I could point to minus 500 scores on 8-card fits when the opponents had only a partial going for them on 22 or 23 hcp's. How much can it compensate for with that rather modest 3-card dominance? With 8 cards and 20 hcp's, I'd postulate a 2-level bid as about your maximum. Such a figure can't be guaranteed, of course. With such unknown matters as the split in the opponents' hands, finesses being on or off, and certainly not least, just where your partner's hcp's are, that number can vary. Oh, and one more variable: the level of declarer play and that of the defense. And when you're below 20 hcp's by at least 2 points, maybe three, you're asking for trouble. In any event, even on a benign 3-2 split, if you hafta spend 6 trump to get out their trump, you've only two trump left, which cannot win more than two tricks.

A nine-card fit is a good fit. A very good fit, if you will. But the trump are not unlimited. I've seen so many 5-4 fits that would be cakewalks on a 2-2 split, but which proved insufficient for declarers who took three quick rounds of trump that I thought of initiating a category for such trump holdings. Yes, even with 5-4 fits, you wanna be careful that you don't squander any before you're ready to cash out.

A ten-card fit approaches the realm of the slam-dunk. However, I'm going to exclude one type of 10-card fits, and that's a 5-5 with mirror distribution, no singletons or voids. Indeed, I've seen 10-card fits that of weren't quite enough length to do what declarer wanted to do. However, with a singleton or void, particularly if facing a singleton or voice in another suit in dummy, then a 10-card fit will serve well enough as a slam-dunk.

Which brings us to 11- and 12-card fits, which I term slam-dunk. You have so many tricks riding on asserting your intent to name trump that I have a separate category for such hands. Deciding when you've pushed just hard enough, that the opponents are already in negative terrority or that one more pump on your part would probably be too expensive (if vulnerable) is not always easy and covered under that category. But I would give up the ghost of naming trump only reluctantly. Here are some of the pitfalls in the search for a good fit:

We don't know if we have the hcp strength to explore a little more. Sometimes the opponents will jack the bidding up too high for safe exploration, while at others it's our own borderline holding that inhibits us. Then there's that guy on the other side of the table. Will he have the character and philosophy to accept an occasional misfire, or will he jump all over me?

We have to decide between a wimpy major suit and a sound fit in a minor.

Much the same holds when a minor suit game meets up with a no trump game in our decision-making.

A balanced suit vs. an unbalanced (both majors or both minors) shouldn't give a problem -- usually. The balanced should get the nod. But what if there's an egregiously weak balanced suit vs. a powerful unbalanced suit. If there's a third suit with some top honors, or perhaps even one, you just might find the latter serves you better. Rare, but occasionally encountered.

Conventions not too rarely get in the way. "Is the convention still on with that interference by RHO?" "Are we playing XXX or is that Joe I agreed to play that convention with?" "Is four clubs Gerber or is pard rebidding that club suit he mentioned earlier?" There are other occasions that the possible or even probable misinterpretation of your bid as a convention inhibits your exploration.

Much the same holds with cue bids. Will they be read as an exploration for a trump contract or as only a cue bid, possibly with a stiff ace? Of course if one bids an opponent's suit, it's a cue bid. But other situations might bring ambiguity when either a no trump game or a slam is in the offing.

The good news, however, is that our opponents will be encountering the same difficult choices. Remembering that your goal isn't a flawless perfection, unless you're some sort of kook, but to do a little better than your peers, to muster just a little more common sense, perhaps pay a little closer attention to what's being said at the table, you can expect or hope to handle those difficulties as well as anybody -- well, anybody in your circle.
And bottoming out the list is that perhaps Number One impediment to finding and settling in your best denomination, which is -- um-m-mmm -- your partner. Partners are those guys who say, "I want my suit to be trump, wah, wah!" They're the guys who won't shut up when a fit is found, though it be a modest one and all his values have been bid already. They're the guys who get fancy and don't mention a fit until the bidding is too high for them to come in. Oh they mean well, certainly. You can't live without 'em -- well, except for that magic time when dummy comes down and you're in a feasable and makable contract. But they're not all bad, and our confreres have to put up with partners, too. And of course, it's our responsibility to make sure that the partner of our partner gets his bidding right, too! Which may not always be the case. And so it goes.

I have 13 illustrations of good fits not handled productively, which I tabulated thusly:

In four cases, only one suit of a two suiter was bid. Sometimes, of course, we don't feel strong enough for a second bid, but these were not such cases. What would you overcall one spade with, holding these two suits?

Q 6 5 4 2
A K 10 5 4

And the answer has to be two hearts. You have a partner, and a second suit to fall back on, and bidding two suits doubles your chances of finding a fit. Dummy looked like this:
K J 10
6 3

In four cases, a sound 10-card minor was sidestepped for a wimpy major, or letting the opponents have the bid. (In some of these cases, it's the defenders I'm looking at who didn't find a good fit.)

In two cases a partner with a powerful, but not self-supporting major suit, insisted on naming this suit trump at the expense of a balanced fit. You've got to understand that by and large when you have good controls, you're going to get just as many tricks on that strong unbalanced suit when it's a side suit as you would naming it trump -- and more winners out of the balanced suit. In neither case was declarer able to run that suit without loss, though the balanced suit as trump would have allowed escaping losers in the suit.

In one case, a modest but sufficient 4-4 diamond fit -- indeed, the only denomination allowing slam on any lead -- wasn't discovered when neither partner bid the suit. One pair wound up in no trump, the other in clubs, each unmakable on a spade lead.

Once with four-card support in hearts, a bidder chose to cue bid his opponent's suit rather than mention the fit. At his next chance to bid, at the four level, he passed, evidently figuring he wasn't strong enough for a second bid. Which is a pretty good reason for announcing a fit at your first opportunity.

Once it was a very modest 8-card diamond suit that went unbid in favor of a rebid of a 6-card heart suit opposite a void.

And once, in what can only be termed a gross example of bid-hogging, there was an insistence on a sound 5-card spade suit while the bidder held six-card support of his partner's heart suit! A slap-in-the-face, partner-I-wanna-play-this-hand bidding like that can only do serious damage to a partnership relationship.

I have no way of establishing how representative these examples are, and indeed, the last one was too bizarre to be at all common. But three recurrent errors do stand out, to wit: bidding only one suit of a two-suiter, shying away from a fine minor-suit fit, and insisting on a long, powerful suit as trump in the face of a known balanced fit (both majors). Or I could categorize that last type as "Partner, I want my suit to prevail. Ya understand?"

Mazel tov.