December 1, 2005

Non-Systemic Conventions

Serious 3NT

When a major suit has been agreed upon below 3NT, either partner making a cue bid that bypasses 3NT suggests only mild slam interest. A player who bids 3NT is showing serious interest.

Good-Bad 2NT

In a competitive auction where we are willing to compete to the three level, 2NT can often be used to show the weaker of two possibilities, much like lebensohl. "Better Bidding with Bergen" details the mechanism.

Landy

We use Landy whenever the opponents open 1NT except vs strong notrumps at matchpoints, where we use DONT.

Minorwood

It is easy to come up with Redwood/Kickback auctions that are dangerously ambiguous, e.g. 1H-2D, 3D-4H. An attractive alternative is to use four of the agreed upon minor as an RKC ask. You're not giving up much - how many times have you wanted to invite a minor suit game or compete to four of a minor recently? Right! This bid is so useful that the easy way to think about four of a minor bids is to identify when they shouldn't be interpreted as asking for keycards. These are those cases ...

when the bid could be some other conventional call, a splinter, Texas transfer etc.
when the bidder has limited his hand such that slam interest would be unfathomable.
in any competitive auction (even when made with a jump).

Another feature of Minorwood is that a followup 4NT bid is to play. A relay by inquirer (excluding 4NT) is for the queen if the initial response didn't reveal it, otherwise it asks for specific kings. We show specific kings when holding the queen in response to the queen ask, or NT lacking that. Without the queen rebid the anchor minor.

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