Friday, May 05, 2006 6:47 PM

Hand Evaluation – Tactics ( Good Bad 2NT )

PITBULLS:

You cannot “ have your cake and eat it too” . Free bids have become extinct in today’s game. Bidding freely does not show extra like they did in the good old days. If your hand was good enough to open , it is good enough to compete. Bridge is “a bidders game” made free bids as extinct as the dinosaur. D.S.I.P. competitive doubles have been invented to help people compete with this understanding. Perry & partner missed a baby game because of that confusion. Perry’s partner was still playing old fashioned “free bids” & Perry was allowing partner leeway in accordance with the modern notion of competing. You cannot have this apparent contradiction. If you want to compete on the “modern nothing” at the 3 level , you need to play the “good bad 2NT” as a partnership agreement.

Perry held ♠xx ♥QJxx ♦AQxx ♣xxx , his partner opened 1♣ . The opponents overcalled 1♠ , Perry doubled & 2♠ to his left. Partner “freely” bid 3♦ so that ended the auction but 5♦ was lay down. Should Perry have bid again ? I do not think so, as partner is just competing & Perry was all in for his negative double. At my table , the bidding went identical except that Kiz & I play the “good bad 2NT” . I had the inference that Kiz had something when she bid at the 3 level. If Kiz just wanted to compete in diamonds , she would have bid 2NT. I must bid 3♣ , she bids 3♦ so the situation is immediately clarified. At our table , I raised to 4♦ followed by Kiz bidding 4♥ Kickback KCB. Quite a difference in the two auctions !!!. After finding out we do not have the required Aces for 6♦ , Kiz bids 5♦ & claims.

Good bad 2NT is a competitive tool to bring free bids at the 3 level back into vogue after they interfere in the sandwich position. Think about it. You cannot jump to the 3 level any more with invitational hands when the opponents bid at the 2 level in the sandwich position. You either must play the free bid concept & give up competing or play the good-bad 2NT. 2NT means “bad” as a memory aid. You just want to compete with a bad hand , to be a nuisance. It’s a way of telling partner , I just paid my card fees , so I am allowed to bid in the modern way.

These situations come up time and time again. I prefer the freedom of being able to compete with light distributional openers without partner punishing me. Therefore D.S.I.P. competitive doubles & “good bad 2NT” are two understandings that allow me to do this. Some partnerships do not play these tools nor do they play “free bids” , they just bid . If partner punishes them by believing them, its “bad luck” so partners fault. If partner does not bid again when they do have a good hand this time , again its partners fault. Nice gig , if you can get it. This is called “random Bridge” popular in Casinos everywhere.