[zillahandp]

Opening One ht on a three losers hand is poor bid in my view, how will you ever catch up?

[manudude03]

zillahandp, on 2015-April-30, 16:58, said:

Opening One ht on a three losers hand is poor bid in my view, how will you ever catch up?

2C auctions tend to be pretty primitive, so when there is a legitimate choice between opening 2C and making a 1-level bid, then the majority vote pretty much always goes to opening at the 1-level. Your rebids are also important. If you have a hand like Ax AKQx AKJxxx x which is 1 point more than the OP and you will still find a lot of people opening at the 1-level.

Going back to the OP hand, suppose you did open 2C, the auction may well have gone 2C-2D-2H-3D, now you are likely endplayed into 3NT missing slam opposite xx Kx xxxxxx Qxx. If you bid 4C instead of 3NT, you will likely end in 5C with partner potentially hitting with xxxx x QJxxxx xx or something. That is a worst case scenario, but it's important to cater for it when you can.


ps. I find double clear.

[jdonn]

I'm not sure about doubling vs bidding, but I'm completely sure 5NT is better than 5♥. It has more ways to win and a bigger payout for being right.

[foobar]

---

Thanks for the responses.

The auction shown here happened at the other table. At our table, South opened 1♣ (16+), West jumped to 5♦, North passed (ostensibly showing 0-5, but undiscussed at this level), South choose X (takeout, after considering 5N) and we defended 5♦-X for -300.

Both 6♣ / 6♥ come home on the layout, but luckily we lost only 9 since they stopped in game.

[P_Marlowe]

5NT

[gszes]

The lack of definition makes this tougher than ususal. I am assuming weakish means no aces and less than 6 useful hcp overall. I realize this adds a bit of non existent clarity but it is a very reasonable weakish definition. P rate to have around 3hcp and with the huge 5d bid there is a really strong chance of a decent sized trump fit. This means entries to partners hand (via the trump suit) and any finesses we need are very big favorites to work in our favor.

Partner passed over 5d so we can pretty much rule out any really long suit (7+ even if weak) or 6+ if halfway decent. This means there is still tremendous slam potential in this hand that just seems too hard to ignore. IMHO a 5h bid here would be a hand with around ten tricks and 1 suited. While our hand is not worth ten tricks the ability to play in (probably) 2 strains makes the odds of 12 tricks pretty decent.

It is vastly more likely opener will hold a 22 balanced hand than the 3505 that we hold. Double should be reserved for the much more run of the mill type hands where the odds of slam are significantly reduced. If one wishes to make a case that they feel the odds of slam are too small than x is the way to go for them with the realization that p will almost assuredly pass the x. For me I need to bid

5n

to show p I have enough to strongly consider slam with 2 places to play and we play in our first reasonable fit.