Lead-directing doubles can be helpful in getting partner off to a good opening lead. These lead-directing doubles are common when the opponents make an artificial bid. But when the opponents make a cuebid of our suit, then a lead-directing double is also very common. Here we focus on this situation in detail in order to structure our agreements to allow us to communicate in the most effective way we can.
In competitive auctions where the opponents have found a fit, we will compete aggressively – especially at matchpoints. We will frequently use double (for takeout) with three-suited hands and sometimes with two-suited hands. To handle these situations, we want partner (Advancer) to have a tool to help us find our best fit. As usual, in competitive auctions our choice of convention will be 2NT. This gadget is called Scrambling 2NT.
Good/Bad 2NT gives Opener two ways to compete to the 3-level – by bidding directly with a “Good Hand” or by bidding 2NT first with a “Bad Hand”. By using 2NT as a relay bid, instead of a natural call, this allows for a more precise description of Opener’s hand. Let’s see how it works through examples.
When the opponents stay out of our auctions then we usually have clear agreements about the meaning of a 4NT bid – usually Quantitative in a NT auction and Keycard in a suit auction. But in a competitive auction we are more likely to use 4NT as a bid showing 2 places to play. Let’s look at some of these auctions so we know what partner is trying to do to when they use 4NT in a competitive auction.
When the opponents open the bidding with a 3-level preempt then much of the tension in our decision-making process comes around “Should we bid beyond 3NT?” This is especially true when the opponents open the bidding with a 3-Major preempt. Because when we have one long minor suit then we likely want to play in 3NT or 5-minor. This allows us to use 4-minor in some interesting conventional ways, just as we do vs. a 2-level preempt.
In competitive auctions where the opponents have found a fit, we will compete aggressively – especially at matchpoints. We will frequently use double (for takeout) with three-suited hands and sometimes with two-suited hands. To handle these situations, we want partner (Advancer) to have a tool to help us find our best fit. As usual, in competitive auctions our choice of convention will be 2NT. This gadget is called Scrambling 2NT.
When we open the bidding with 1NT, showing 15-17 points, if an opponent makes a penalty double, we are less likely to be looking to invite or bid game. We are usually looking to escape from a 1NT contract and attempt to find some safer place to play. This safe place will hopefully be our largest fit or a long suit in the weak hand (in Responder’s hand). In order to find this place to play we need to look at how Responder’s bidding options change after a penalty double.
There are many systems the opponents play in order to interfere over our 1NT opening bid, but almost all of these systems use the 3-level (actually 2NT+) for the same meanings – 2NT as a weak bid showing both minors and 3-level bids as weak with a long suit, preemptive. It is important that you and partner are on the same page for how to deal with this higher-level interference
We can use a 5-Major bid for something other than to end the auction. 5-Major can be bid concisely for a variety of reasons -- to take away bidding space from the opponents or to ask partner a specific question (which we call the “obvious question”). Let’s look at our options for how to make use of this 5-Major bid.
Minor suit slams are much harder to bid than Major suit slams. This is especially true after we open the bidding with 1NT (or 2NT). We start off the auction looking for Major suit fits and only then look for our minor suit fits after that. These Major suit showing bids are the cheapest bids and that means that our minor suit showing bids take up more space. We look at how we overcome this bidding challenge to bid good minor suit slams.
