The Raw Truth of Bidding with SAYC

First I am going to start this off with the poem of the week.  I have decided to memorize poetry as part of my “improve my mind” therapy.  So here is the poem:

I’m Nobody! Who are you? by Emily Dickinson

 

 

I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us -don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

…………………………………………………………………………………..

Now I wonder why I picked that poem.  Am I feeling discouraged?  Is there a problem with my self esteem?  Definitely not!  It just seems to fit with the economy.  I suppose we will all have to wear long skirts soon.

Kathy and I had our lesson yesterday.  The idea was to begin a look at one of a minor.  The problem isn’t the opening bid or even the response.  It is all the paths that you can follow from there.  We happened upon a reverse and I realized that it was just too much to talk about then.  So we decided to do that next week.  Kathie is going to work through Chapter 5 of

25 Conventions You Should Know

I plan to reread it to so that I am consistent with it.  This area is so full of potholes and problems. Ray and I worked on ways to simplify the continuations since we always seem to get stuck in the mud. 

At the beginning of the lesson we discussed what to do after opening one of a minor and hearing partner’s one level response.  If you had a four card major you could bid should you bid that now or should you bid 1NT.  I think this is a matter of partnership choice.  With most partner’s I prefer to bid 1NT with a balanced hand.  So if I make another suit bid at the one level I have an unbalanced hand. 

There is an advantage to bidding the major.  First, if you are not playing some sort of checkback you may lose the major and second if you don’t bid an available major you don’t have it.

Kathy told me she goes back and forth sometimes bidding the suit and sometimes bidding 1NT.  This seemed to be the worst of both worlds.  We agreed on bidding 1NT with balanced hands.  We can see how that goes.  I am not sure it is the right choice.

What do you think?

We talked about forcing and nonforcing bids.  My simple rules was that any new suit by responder was forcing and a repeat of a suit was not forcing (unless opener had created a force).  We have yet to talk about the dreaded fourth suit forcing.  It seems that a lot of the time your main objective is to set up a force rather than to sensibly bid your hand.

with SAYC has a lot of holes.  I think in the end you just muddle through, do the best you can and that usually works pretty well.  I probably use too many conventions and understandings anyway.