More adventures with Colin

You are sitting North.  West the dealer passes with no-one vulnerable.

Do you open this hand?  I think you need to, but a lot of people don’t.  It doesn’t make the Rule of 20.  But those spots cards are gold.  These hands are easy for Colin and I, we open them 2♠, showing spades and a minor.  This has two advantages, it let’s us differentiate between these hands and a hand with less shape and more high cards and it starts the bidding up higher.  I have found these two bids work very well.  Still I think it is often better to open this hand 1♠ , than passing.

Last night those who opened this hand got a good result and those who didn’t, generally got a poor result.  Let’s see what happened if you passed first.  

In many cases the auction went like this:

Yes, you can bid now but it is a good deal more dangerous than before.  If you pass the opponents are in 4♥ on the next bid and you will play there.  That is how the auction usually went.  Those who opened 1♠ rapidly arrived in 4♠ (as did we and if needed I would have bid 5♠).  Here is my hand

I know it’s easy for us to get to the right contract, but that is the point.

It was actually (for us) a rather dull night without the usual weird bidding.  We did have one interesting discussion about signalling.  Do you have a way for asking partner to continue a suit that is led when you would normally be in a suit preference situation.  For example partner leads the ace in a suit your side has bid and raised and dummy has a singleton.  What Ray and I do is play an honour (assuming we can afford it) to ask for partner to continue the suit.  Does anyone else have any thoughts about this situation.

Last night declarer was in slam and dummy had the doubleton king in a suit that Colin and I had bid.  Colin led the ace and I see this an an analogous situation.  I wanted the suit continued so I played the queen.  Maybe that card should have a different purpose.  On the hand in question it didn’t matter.  Still food for thought.