One of our most commonly used tools for determining if we should bid slam or not is Keycard Blackwood. The most popular version of this is 1430 Keycard. This tool allows us to exchange a lot of useful information with partner.  We attempt to determine how many of the 5 Keycards we have, plus we also hope to be able to determine if we have the Queen of the trump suit. When ♠ is the trump suit, then we have plenty of bidding space to communicate, but when lower-ranking suits are the trump suit, using 4NT to ask for Keycards leaves us little room to exchange information without getting the auction too high.  To fix this problem, some partnerships use Minorwood for their minor suit Keycard auctions, but this does not solve our problem in the ♥ suit. There is another approach, called Kickback, that tries to solve this problem. Let’s see how this works.

In an Ace-asking auction, when we make the follow-up bid to ask partner about their Kings, we usually do so to investigate a grand slam (though some partnerships do this in order to determine if 6NT is good contract).  Most partnerships start with the agreement that they answer this question by showing their number of Kings.  But sometimes, a Grand Slam is not about partner having 2 or 3 Kings, but about them having the right single King.  This “right King” is often the one opposite our long suit – allowing us to produce a large number of tricks.  To get this information, many partnerships evolved their King-showing methods from “number of Kings” to “Specific Kings.”  Here we look at how we can use Specific Kings in a variety of our Ace-asking auctions.