Bidding -- Some Thoughts

First, learn a system and learn it well. As with everything else in this book, this is not offered as a final step but as a first step toward a formidable game. Even if you feel you are far too imaginative and free a spirit to be tied to any framework, you'd do well to learn a system. It'll give you a certain confidence in the handling of the cards, attract better partners, and not least, give you a sound knowledge of the framework you're imaginativeness will take you beyond. In every field of endeavor, even the innovators have had to learn the basics before they can innovate.

You should know how to count points, how many points and how many cards in a suit you need for each bid, how many points you're denying on any non-forcing bid, and of course, what your partner is promising and denying with his bids. You also need to know what bids are forcing and what ones are not. This should be balanced against the three key figures discussed elsewhere and carry you to reasonable resting places.

Don't bid the same values twice. I had originally intended to say, "Bid you hand and shut up." I decided against that not so much because of the rather rough language as because I would have had to make so many qualifications. Here I need make only one: Occasionally your hand looks better after your first bid, because of a surprise fit and you can properly re-evaluate it upwards. But this is the exception rather than the rule. So I caution you against looking with any great fondness on this re-evaluation.

Rebidding one's values a second and occasionally even a third time is a primary cause of overbidding. And that's why I oftentimes want to shout out, "Just bid your hand and shut up!" To be sure, bridge is rarely that simple. First, you must keep your ear cocked for forcing bids. Also, you may want to double foolhardy opponents even after having bid all the values of your hand. You may want to show preference for your partner's first suit (which, of course, doesn't show any added values).

But all those qualifications aside, there really isn't much excuse for bidding the same values a second time. Your partner loses confidence in your bids, gets overly cautious for fear you'll rebid the same values, with the upshot that your partnership potential begins to tumble.

Actually, I find this a very relaxing position. When I have bid all my values to the hilt, I figure I'm out of it -- well, except for the qualifications above. I've bid all my values, it's up to my partner to decide whether to continue or not, and I'll be comfortable with whatever my partner chooses, at least until there is evidence that I shouldn't have been.

Bid your hand and no one else's. Bid the values of the 13 cards before you -- not your opponents' for them, not your partner's for him. How can anyone bid another's hand? Well, in an absolutely literal sense, you cannot, but there are two ways one can do so substantially. One is to bid for the opponents: "I was hoping to buck them up a level. Then I would have doubled." And they didn't fall for the bait? Leaving you out on a limb? You can't foresee what the opponents will do, and would do well to stick to bidding your values. Also (on taking partner out of a perfectly good double): "I was just certain she had a void in diamonds." But you can't see her hand, so you'd do well to bid on the basis of what you see.

What is doubtless far more common is to bid a partner's hand for him or her. This surfaced on OKbridge not long ago: 4 diamonds (opening), pass, 5 diamonds, down one for a poor score. We (the opponents) were headed for an unmakable four hearts, as my partner assured me. "I thought you would have had the ace of diamonds for that bid," said the 5 diamond bidder, who held the king.
Well, no, he didn't have the ace of diamonds and didn't promise it. The promise of that bid, vulnerable, is 8 tricks in diamonds on any fairly normal distribution. So the partner needs three tricks to raise the bidding one, and that's his task, to ask if his hand opposite that opening bid warrants another bid. As it happened, his queen of clubs meshed well with the opening bidder's K J to hold the result to down one. If we substitute the ace of diamonds for the K J of clubs, does that make the hand stronger? Actually, it makes it weaker if the person with the ace of diamonds gets the king of clubs. For now declarer would gain a diamond winner and lose three club tricks instead of one. If I, sitting on declarer's left with the ace of clubs got the king of clubs while my partner gave up the ace of diamonds, now the exchange leaves the potential neither weaker nor stronger: one more club loser, one less diamond.

Also on OKbridge, after a bad double: "You kind of gave it away," said the successful declarer to the doubler. "Well, you people were bidding so tentatively, I thought my partner must have something," replied he, bidding his partner's values that he couldn't see in place of the person who could see them if they were there.
Another rather explicit case occurred when a player raised his partner's four heart pre-empt to five over a 4 spade bid -- holding nothing of value, nothing that could take a trick. He had a singleton heart and maybe a queen and a jack. Whoops! One too many, he acknowledged after down 700 (it was a while back). "Of course it's one too many," I was brazen enough to point out. "You don't have a ghost of a trick to offer your partner." "I don't hafta have a trick for my partner," he asserted. Well, that's funny. I always thought the whole point of bidding was to determine how many tricks your side can take in your best denomination, balanced against the scoring system. But he seemed to think there's no connection, or at least no real close connection, between the tricks they can take and the bidding! Obviously he was bidding his partner's heart suit, not his hand in relation to that heart suit. You've got to bid your hand, your potential for meshing with your partner to produce tricks, whether bidding to make or bidding to sac, and trust that your partner is doing the same. Then you might have the makings of a good partnership.

Bid as if you trust your partner -- always. Even when you're morally certain your partner is screwing up? Yes. Even if partner screwed up 3 consecutive hands? Yes. I offer three reasons for this:
(1) Even when you're right about your partner's bid, it's very doubtful that you're going to do a whole lot better looking at the backs of your partner's cards than your partner can do looking at the faces.

(2) And when you're wrong, when your partner's bids were on the money, now you're going to look silly for having steered the bidding away from a good resting spot and make your partner wonder if you know all that much about bidding.

(3) There can hardly be a progression toward a skilled partnership if you're bouncing off good bidding practices to compensate for partner's stupidity every so often. Consider what happens when you do compensate in the right direction. What does your partner learn. You can tell him he's lucky you compensated, but what he's going to see is that there's nothing wrong with his bidding. You got to the right spot, didn't you?

What to do with a partner whose bidding is so off the mark as to destroy your fun goes beyond this rundown of good bidding practices. That's something you'll have to solve as your common sense dictates. I am referring only to those times when actually are partnered with someone. Bid as if you trust your partner. There are bound to be occasions when this trust is vindicated.

Go easy on the conventions until you get some experience behind you. Blackwood and Stayman are excluded from this caution, which is to say, they should be included in your learning of a system. Perhaps weak two's should be close behind. I might give my personal bias on conventions beyond those two stalwarts: I have resisted almost every convention recommended by a partner and then after playing them, have come to like and enjoy them -- such as Michaels, Flannery, Brozel and a few others. So I'm certainly not trying to scare anyone away from conventions permanently.

Nevertheless, I have seen any number of people who have played together for years, including some married couples, who get screwed up on their conventions. "Oh, I forgot we were playing [xxx]." or "I didn't think it applied there", "I thought that bid was natural on that sequence." What's worse, I have seen any number of players who were more knowledgeable about a host of conventions than about the basic principles of the game! And they are not the strongest players in the game.

So this is really the caution here: Don't look to conventions to compensate for any shortfall in a basic knowledge of your bidding system. They can't do it. You can live without all these fancy conventions for months (always excluding Blackwood & Stayman). Indeed, you can play whole sessions where you resort to conventions only a couple of times or once or even not once. But you can't live without a knowledge of how many points you're promising, what your partner is promising and denying and what level your combined hands indicate.

Any convention might get you to a few nifty spots the not-so-learned aren't reaching. Of course. But you're bidding for the long run. Tournaments aren't decided by one or two boards, you know. They're decided by enough boards that the people who know what they're doing should come out ahead, even if they falter here and there and yield an occasional score to the duffers. And I would say strongly that your first task is to develop a good strong grasp of your bidding system. Then you might think of incorporating some conventions into your system.

And when you do take up conventions, make them as uncomplicated and unambiguous as possible. Second only to one partner's forgetting that they play a convention is forgetting whether it is played in these circumstance, (which is usually an intervening bid by an opponent). Fr'instance, if you play Brozel, I would recommend playing it in any position at any vulnerability against strong and weak no trumps. If you run into two or three disasters under a certain condition, then it's time to change your approach. If you play Gerber, I like the flat statement that 4 clubs immediately after any (natural) no trump bid is Gerber. Period. That means if you want to bid clubs as clubs, you can bid 3 clubs or 5 clubs, but not 4 clubs. The infrequent times you wish you could bid 4 clubs as a suit will be more than made up by avoiding any question of when you're bidding Gerber and when you're bidding a suit. Such a no-nonsense, uncomplicated rule should also clarify 4 no trump. If immediately after a no trump bid, it must be quantitative. If not, it must be Blackwood.

Jacoby transfers? Off in any competition? I like to say, "If a bid doesn't interfere with transfers, then I'm into a transfer, and if it does, I'm bidding naturally." Thus, one no, double (or two clubs) doesn't interfere with transfer bids, so 2 diamonds means hearts, and 2 hearts means spades. But one no, 2 diamonds inhibits my ability to make a transfer to 2 hearts, so 2 hearts MUST be natural, and by extension, 2 spades also. I don't know if I've ever had a partner who agreed.

Perhaps I found my soul mate after all. Wanting to see what a pair was doing in 2 diamonds down four when the other guys had all the diamonds (well 8 of them), I found the bidding had gone one no, double, 2 diamonds self-alerted, and out. Of course this was meant as a transfer to hearts, where they had nine.

If there is any resistance, it is better to take the simplest interpretation. Any intervening bid means transfers are off. Okay. Let's just make sure we agree. When we get comfortable with each other's bidding -- particularly if we've seen a few disasters -- then we can think of a few adjustments.

Keep away from ambiguous bids! It's not all that rare that a partner makes a bid that simply is incomprehensible to his partner, almost guaranteeing going astray, not to mention the times a partner has some idea of what the bid means, but unfortunately has an equally plausible second idea as well. Please bear in mind that your partner can't read your mind and no matter how obvious the meaning of a bid is to you (looking at your 13 cards), you must take into account what it will sound like to your partner.

I just saw a query on the discussion group. With 7 hcp's and two 10's, 4-4 in the red suits (diamonds very strong), a woman bid a diamond opposite her partner's one club opening bid and wanted to know if partner's rebid of 2 no was forcing. A couple of us told her no, it's not forcing, but you've got enough to go on to game. I suggested 3 no, while the other person suggested 3 clubs, check-back Stayman. Well, I dunno. I don't think I'd like to try Stayman there unless I've had an explicit agreement with my partner that such a bid would be Stayman. Since the woman didn't know if the bid was forcing, I'm going to guess that she's not playing with savvy partners of long experience. I'm a little afraid that 3 clubs would be interpreted as a suit bid (the opening bid was a club), and I'm going to hear a pass and the later explanation, "Oh, I thought you didn't like no trump and wanted to play it in clubs."

Of course my decision could turn out wrong. There's no system and no policy that'll get you in the best possible spot all the time. But I like to steer clear of bids that could be misinterpreted by a partner, and I think in the long run, that's going to pay off.

Listen to your partner. Very carefully. This will not only preclude a certain number of wrongheaded bids, but will go a long way toward cementing good partnership relations. When you make a flagrantly wrongheaded bid, you're going to sacrifice a certain amount of your partner's respect. When you do this after your partner has given not one but two warnings, you're going to be sacrificing more than a little respect. Listen. From my observation, weak and inexperienced players are far, far more fearful of not bidding enough than of passing. But when your partner's passing and you'd bid all your values, you'd do well to heed your partner's warning.

When in doubt, it would be wise to think of keeping your partner happy. I am not suggesting any violation of your system or of elementary bidding principles here. I don't think you'd have any reason to want to keep a partner who requires that to be happy. Nor am I suggesting a continuing deference or submission to a partner's wishes, for such a situation soon degenerates into resentment when one feels all the giving and consideration comes from his or her side of the table. But there are times when it's not real clear what you should do, and often, I would say in such situations, you could do a lot worse than taking account of what's likeliest to upset your partner.

I would cite the hand where two ladies wound up in 7 no missing the ace of hearts on this bidding (13 hcp's opposite 19), one club, diamond, heart, spade, no trump, 4 no, 6 no, 7 no. My original thought was that the grand slammer, even in ignorance of what 32 or 33 hcp's signifies, might have figured that with a slam in the offing, almost anyone would be more upset at being overbid by a trick for a negative score with all that potential than at being underbid by a trick where they'd doubtless have company. And she might have saved the day by saying, "Well, might as well keep her happy since I don't know how many aces we have." Later, I felt that the 6 no bidder herself might have saved some acrimony by responding with the number of aces she held. If you would pass a 4 no bid if quantitative and of course bid if Blackwood, then you have a conflict. But if you would bid over 4 no if quantitative, then it won't do any harm to treat it as Blackwood if there is any possibility that's what your partner means. So either could have saved the score by a vector toward keeping the partner happy.

A few other cases I might have cited are already included in the next section advising you to keep away from bad bids. So I'm not suggesting any skewing of your style toward your partner's satisfaction so much as an added motivation toward common sense when in doubt and contemplating a far-out bid that could make you look like a genius or a hero if right. Your partner is going to be far more upset over the wild bids that deservedly go wrong than pleased with the occasional stabs that go right, where you're far likelier to hear, "You were darned lucky," than any reference to your ability to read the cards well. Keeping your partner happy might pay off far more than you realize in the long run.

Keep away from bad bids and the good bids will surface sufficiently often by and by. What's a bad bid? Well, going down 700 when the opponents are only going for a partial. Or going down 1100 when they're only going for game, and occasionally only for a partial. You got a bad break? Well, that possibility should be part of your consideration when deciding whether to make a bid. That is not to say you should be cowed by fears of the worse possible stack against you -- for who could bid if always cowed by such fears? -- but do you have a reasonable assurance of sufficient winners for your bid? If you do, you're not going down 1100 on a bad break when those guys only have game.

Bidding slam missing two aces, no bidding from the opponents, no void anywhere is a bad bid. (I can think of two instances right now. Like Blackwood is for sissies?) Bumping partner's six bid to seven, without a void after partner used Blackwood and decided settle for six is a bad bid. It just shouldn't be. It may be a way of telling a partner you don't care much for continuing the partnership, but there are more courteous ways of doing that. Cue-bidding with slam potential and not getting a club stopper, then bidding slam anyway is a bad bid. The above instances are all drawn from real life.

What about bidding slam on two aces and a void, then finding the void is opposite an ace, and you have two quick losers? No, that's not a bad bid. All bidding is a bit of a risk. Bidding a small slam with a void and two aces is at least in the ballpark, and if the bid goes awry, this has to be balanced against the times it goes right. I would say much the same if the opponents pre-empted you out of Blackwood and there was evidence that you're in the slam range, only to find out that you're missing is two aces. Those aren't bad bids. Those are risks that just didn't pan out. Bad bids are those that just don't have any rhyme or reason to them. They just don't add up. There's just nothing they can be balanced against. Keep away from them. Like the plague.

When you lay your hand down as dummy, if you have made any positive, unforced bids, that dummy should bring a smile to your partner's face. Do you think it will?

If you have a bid that shows both your distribution and your strength, you'd do well to get it in right then. The problem with not doing so is that at your next bid, you may no longer be able to describe your hand. Where you might have jumped to 3 spades at your first opportunity, now over 3 diamonds 3 spades sounds competitive rather than a positive liking for the suit as trump, and over four diamonds, you're not strong enough for game. Oh, if only you'd made that descriptive bid the first round, you could relax and let your partner make the decision. There are other advantages of getting that descriptive bid off your chest. Now your partner learns rather early what the potential of the hand is.
Show major suit fits as early as practical, which is immediately if your hand warrants only one bid. Much like the preceding paragraph, major suit fits tend to settle one thing anyway: that is where you'll probably find your best settling point and that's the suit where you're most competitive. There are to be sure occasional reasons for not showing a fit immediately. Those are hands where you're reasonably certain you'll be able to show the fit later.

As for minor suit fits, I would say two things. If you have a positive liking for no trump, i.e., have all suits stopped and perhaps a tenace position or two, you might well bypass a fit-showing bid for an announcement that you rather fancy a no trump contract. But if you have one suit completely unstopped, like a low doubleton or three small, then I think you'd do well to show a fit if you have one and let your partner do what he or she will with the information.

A funny thing happened on the way to the end of this chapter. I had originally intended just a brief overview before launching into the specific types of bidding strategies a developing player should soon incorporate into his bidding style. Those other pointers collectively were to be the meat of the section on bidding.

Now, however, I have come to feel that the above pointers are really the meat of bidding, while the specific strategies, which are not incidental by any means, are secondary. There are times when you can play a whole session without using any conventions (not even Blackwood or Stayman) and sessions where you never really have a choice between a major and a minor (though I must grant that if going for the major is second nature, experienced players might not notice some such hands that an inexperienced player would).

But there aren't any sessions nor even any hands where it's unimportant whether your calls have any relation to your playing strength, nor hands where it's unimportant whether either player can judge the viability of bids made. So . . I'm going to take a rather no-nonsense position here vis-à-vis the above pointers: if you can learn and incorporate all of them and abide by them, you're going to be way ahead of the general run of players. You're going to be way ahead of those who can rattle off 10 conventions they play, but can't or won't count points, can't or won't listen carefully to their partners, can't or won't refrain from bidding the same values two or three times, can't or won't base their bidding on the 13 cards they can see. You're going to be way ahead.

Way ahead. But learn these points first, and learn them well.

K 8 5

Q 9 7 4

A Q 9 6 4

A K 8 6

Which suit would you like for trump?