han, on 2011-July-04, 07:01, said:
He thinks you have a GF hand with spades and clubs, and he has neither. Why didn't he double 3H?
The heart of this thread was to determine whether 3
♣ was forcing. Everyone who has mentioned that good bad 2NT is needed IMO acknowledges that without further agreement that 3
♣is forcing. Since partner has forced twice it is hard to take pass as NF.
More importantly I did not double 3
♥because the 3
♣ denied interest in defending. We are playing support doubles and I had passed possibly concealing penalty double of 2
♥. Partner then denied wanting to defend and forced with 3
♣. I showed my
♦ length as it was the cheapest descriptive bid and waited for him to tell me why he forced. While he may have both black suits he could also have a
♠ one suited GF.
The crux is now that having heard two forcing calls I am supposed to assume the pass of 3
♥ is now a sign of weakness. What I heard was a request to double if I had the possible penalty double. Surely I should not have less to double. I figured he might have 6
♠ that were weak so I tried 3
♠ to show my good two card support.
Jay will never agree to play good bad 2NT. So we need to handle this without such an agreement. I think on style/agreement is to fall back on "traditional' natural bidding, whatever that may be. So IMO Jay over bid his hand with 3
♣ and then expected me in this case to ignore what I was shown. I hold that you can not blow hot and cold and need to consider what minimum you have promised. So if you do overbid you can not expect partner to be able to figure it out.
For our partnership I think the best suggestion I saw above was to make a negative double with Jay's hand. That gives a good chance of being able to show the weak distributional hand that was held without forcing.
"A stopper is neither weak nor strong but thinking makes it so." H. Kelsey