[MickyB]

Yup that works fine, giving away more info about opener's hand though, and it means you lose our meaning for a 3♠ bid on this auction (it shows a good hand on the auction, no wastage if minimum)

Transferring to a 5 card minor feels strange at first, but I don't see a problem - 1345 and 1336 are bundled together relatively painlessly IMO. Certainly better than ambiguity over whether the hearts are three cards or four, or not having a way to bid the hand at all.

[awm]

The nice thing about not actually bidding the shortness is that it maintains the short suit as an anti-cuebid. Even fairly minimum GF hands with a singleton can produce slam opposite a maximum with nothing in the short suit. For example opposite a strong notrump:

x
Kxx
AQxxx
Qxxx

xxx
AQxxx
Kx
AKx

The north hand doesn't really qualify as a "slam try" opposite 15-17 by most measures (it's only 11 hcp) but you can see that slam is actually pretty decent on this pair of hands. There are many such examples. It's nice to have methods where you can distinguish the bottom hand from some hand like:

Qxx
AQJx
Jxx
AJx

In both cases you want to play in hearts opposite a 1-3-(45) pattern, but the first hand makes slam pretty easily opposite very mild extras from responder, whereas the second hand you are happy to be in 4♥ instead of 3NT and don't really want anything to do with 5♥. Playing 3♥ as the fragment, opener can bid 3♠ to show a "perfect hand" like the first one (leading to a relatively easy path to slam) whereas a direct 4♥ (bypassing the 3♠ call) would show a hand like the bottom one. If 3♠ shows spade shortage, then you'd have to bypass 4♥ to show the good hand, which turns out to be fine when you have slam but is not so good when responder is dead minimum (say the same hand without one of the minor queens) and you end up playing a level higher.

This also helps decide when you want to play 4m after opener bails with no stopper, versus when you want to play 5m (or similarly 5m and 6m).

Against well-prepared opponents, it shouldn't really help you in terms of lead direction to bid the shortage, because they could easily agree that a double of the short suit asks for the lead of the fragment (you're not going to play in responder's singleton doubled at the three level in any case). The only issue is that bidding the fragment sometimes "wrong-sides" a contract, which is probably a more serious concern when the notrump opening is stronger (Keri Garrod and to a lesser extent the original Keri was designed with weak notrumps in mind).

[mcphee]

I dub the convention, No Name. It was great to hear from so many who didn't know

[Gerben42]

"No Name" is a silly name for a convention, or for anything really.

The one with the wizard is nice.

[hrothgar]

mcphee, on May 25 2007, 03:55 PM, said:

I dub the convention, No Name. It was great to hear from so many who didn't know

While this convention doesn't have a name, "No Name" is already in use.

"No Name" is a Polish strong pass system. I doubt that this would cause much trouble in North America. Most of the players don't know what a strong pass system is, let alone that No Name is an example of one. However, the purist in me cringes at using the same term...

[glen]

sp1iNTers