The Captain of the auction is the person in charge!   The Captain will frequently make the final important decisions in the auction or ask partner one final question about their hand before the auction ends.  The Captain of the auction is frequently faced with decisions like:

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.