Competitive auctions are the most difficult in all of bridge. They require the most precise bidding and you and partner working together to land “on your feet.” Fits are an important part of these competitive auctions. We must find our fit and determine the size of it without competing too high in the bidding and without overstating our values.
The most important part of constructive bidding (and many times of competitive bidding) is finding fits with your partner. Specifically, the game of bridge is built around Major suit fits. There are many tools that we use to help us find fits with our partner, and we will review these tools below, but the most important tool for finding good fits with your partner is to use what you know from the auction to help you visualize the hand.
When partner opens the bidding and the opponent makes a takeout double, we need to know how to deal with this interference. We first want to consider what is likely to happen in the remainder of the auction. If we have just a few values (minimum hand, less than 10 HCP) then this will likely continue to be a competitive auction – with us having about half the values in the deck and the opponents having about half. In a competitive auction, it becomes important that we are able to show our suits (and find our fits) quickly so that we can effectively compete in the bidding. Thus, we want to construct a system that will allow us to do this!
How to respond to a takeout double is an important topic to discuss with your partner, but a discussion that most partnerships forget to have for many years. The question that you need to ask partner is “What do my bids mean in response to your takeout double?”
2 Over 1 Game Forcing (2/1 GF) bids are the core of a modern approach to bidding. The primary idea is that when partner opens at the 1-level and we bid a new suit at the 2-level (not including jump shifts), this is a game forcing bid – meaning neither Opener nor Responder can pass below game. This allows both players to confidently describe their hands – knowing that all their bids are forcing and they won’t get “dropped” before reaching game.
When we are a passed hand and partner opens the bidding, we must be careful in trying to describe our hand. Partner’s opening bid in the 3rd seat can be light in values, trying to be destructive or lead-directing, so we cannot respond to it in the same way we would a normal opening bid. Specifically, if partner opens 1M in the 3rd seat, we should not go jumping around without a very special hand. Let’s look at how we should respond when partner opens in the 3rd seat.
In bridge, we are frequently faced with bidding decisions during which we must guess. They may be educated guesses, but fundamentally we are guessing at what partner has and how that will fit together with our hand. Becoming proficient at this part of the game requires experience. The Optimistic Minimum is a concept that will help us in this decision-making process. Let’s see how it works.
One of the most frequent defensive situations we face is leading partner’s suit. It makes sense for us to have lots of agreements and discussions about the meaning of these leads in different situations. So, we will spend some time discussing this in detail and make sure that you and partner have good agreements.
When partner opens 1NT our primary focus is to look for Major suit fits. When we do not find these fits we will usually bid the appropriate number of Notrump (2NT, 3NT, 4NT, 5NT, 6NT, or 7NT) based on the strength of our hand. However, occasionally we will have a highly unbalanced hand and want to do something other than bid Notrump.
