[the hog]

I am Roland and Uwe on this one. I would also have passed instead of bidding 1H and rebid 1S after the 1H bid.

[cherdanno]

I sympathize with gnasher's sentiments but also it would not have occurred to me that 3♣ is FSF for anyone. For one thing I would never bid 1D-1S-2N with 4153 shapes. For another thing, the purpose of bidding out your shape with 3♣ with 4153 or 4054 is not only to find a club fit, but also to possible find out when to avoid 3NT when partner's hearts are too weak.
Btw, if I played 3♣ as artificial here, I would just take it as a game try (AKA "please bid 3N if you have a club stop, or something higher than 3♦ if you think we should play 5♦), not as a game force.

[mikeh]

Quote

mikeh, on Jun 23 2009, 12:00 AM, said:

The idea that 3♣ was FSF is risible.

3♣ is natural in standard methods

One of the few unattractive features of these forums is the way that some people insist that what is standard for them is the only standard.

It seems clear from the comments that 3♣ has different meanings to different people, and that this difference depends partly upon their location. Personally I find that quite interesting, and am pleased that a discussion involving players from all over the world has unearthed this difference. In contrast, I find the comments quoted above quite uninteresting.

I'd prefer not to get into an exchange of personal insults, but if I do, it won't be by way of a reference to 'some people' when I am slagging one particular person

I don't claim to be 'the' expert on what standard bidding is, anywhere. But I have read very widely. My reading leads me to suggest that even in the UK, the standard meaning, amongst the broad bridge-playing population, for 3♣ is natural.

I would not for a moment suggest that I know what the common expert treatment is in the UK, or even in NA since I don't travel to tournaments any more...

I happen to think that 'natural' is the sensible, optimal treatment. I can see why some would disagree. But that is a different argument: only a fool would argue that 'optimal' and 'standard' address the same issue. It is perfectly appropriate, in some cases, to argue that a treatment is standard and sub-optimal. Thus, many players adopt minority usages because they see them as better than standard, and, over time, some of these usages become the new standard.

Maybe that has happened in the UK... I don't pretend to be an expert on standard UK methods.... but from the reading I have done over many years, I am confident that the artificial usage advocated by gnasher didn't form standard until recently, if at all. BTW, I don't equate usage by the top 10% of any area's players as 'standard'. Standard is what the majority of reasonably competent players understand to be the 'normal' usage... and that, in turn, is not always the same as what they consider to be 'best' usage.

If gnasher can demonstrate that currently accepted bridge texts in the UK recommend this FSF usage, than I will have learned something, and will be grateful. If he can't then he is guilty of precisely what he accuses me of... conflating his view of what is best with standard.

[Fluffy]

I will sum with you Mike .

People tend to extend the scope of conventions, I don't really understand why. 4SF is a convention used by RESPONDER, on the 4th bid on the auction. it happens ONLY on uncontested auctions.

Anything else than that is a special agreement .


Keep your conventions under contol, you will win a lot more by avoiding missunderstandings than what you win by the use of conventions.

[gnasher]

mikeh, on Jun 23 2009, 03:19 PM, said:

I'd prefer not to get into an exchange of personal insults, but if I do, it won't be by way of a reference to 'some people' when I am slagging one particular person

There is much to be said for assuming that what someone has written is what they actually meant. I wasn't referring to you alone - there are other posters who sometimes display a similar attitude, and that part of my comments related to them too.

And if you want a discussion to remain civilised, you would do well to avoid using a wordier equivalent of "LOL" as part of your argument.

[gnasher]

mikeh, on Jun 23 2009, 03:19 PM, said:

Maybe that has happened in the UK... I don't pretend to be an expert on standard UK methods.... but from the reading I have done over many years, I am confident that the artificial usage advocated by gnasher didn't form standard until recently, if at all. BTW, I don't equate usage by the top 10% of any area's players as 'standard'. Standard is what the majority of reasonably competent players understand to be the 'normal' usage... and that, in turn, is not always the same as what they consider to be 'best' usage.

If gnasher can demonstrate that currently accepted bridge texts in the UK recommend this FSF usage, than I will have learned something, and will be grateful. If he can't then he is guilty of precisely what he accuses me of... conflating his view of what is best with standard.

I don't know about recent publications, but here is one from a few decades ago:

Precision Bidding in Acol; Crowhurst, on 1974, said:

1♥ 1♠
2♦ 2♥
10 AK1053 KQ75 AJ10
Bid 2NT.  This shows the usual 17-18 points, and the inference is that the 2NT bid was delayed because of a singleton spade.
...
1♥ 2♣
2♦ 2♥
A52 AJ1053 KQJ4 8
Bid 2♠.  This hand is worth a game try after partner's original two level response, but 2NT would be a poor bid in view of the fragile holding in spades. The bid of the fourth suit will allow partner to bid notrumps if he can offer any assistance in spades.  If not, he should be able to sign off in 3♥ or to jump to 4♥.

[Jlall]

I think we can just believe gnasher without him proving it lol, it's not like he's foo. Also Frances always thinks everything is fsf too so that is good evidence to support that that's how they roll in England.

I will join the people suggesting that 3C natural is a better treatment.

[mikeh]

[/QUOTE]

Quote

Precision Bidding in Acol; Crowhurst, on 1974, said:

1♥ 1♠
2♦ 2♥
10 AK1053 KQ75 AJ10
Bid 2NT.  This shows the usual 17-18 points, and the inference is that the 2NT bid was delayed because of a singleton spade.
...
1♥ 2♣
2♦ 2♥
A52 AJ1053 KQJ4 8
Bid 2♠.  This hand is worth a game try after partner's original two level response, but 2NT would be a poor bid in view of the fragile holding in spades. The bid of the fourth suit will allow partner to bid notrumps if he can offer any assistance in spades.  If not, he should be able to sign off in 3♥ or to jump to 4♥.

I am aware that standard UK bidding accords to the sequence 1♥  2♣ far less significance than does standard NA bidding, but I have never read anything that suggests that the sequence 1♥  2♣  2♦  2♥ could be perpetrated on a misfitting 5 count! Obviously, if I am wrong, and acolites would commonly respond 2/1 and then bid 2♥ on, say, xxx xx xxx KQxxx, your second example is analogous to the subject auction. Altho, if the methods allowed this, I'd be surprised that anyone would suggest a FSF call on the example hand.

Otherwise, I respectfully suggest that the tone of the quoted authority is to the effect that the 2/1 promised some values and perhaps even that the 4th suit bid shows a fragment in the suit... 3-4 cards... which, frankly, sounds a lot more like a 'natural' bid where I come from.

And this is leaving aside the rather obvious point that in the auction 1♥  2♣  2♦  2♥, the odds that responder has 4 spades are vanishingly small.... or am I as out to lunch on that part of standard bidding as gnasher thinks I am elsewhere? So, there is no need to use 2♠ as an attempt to find a playable contract in that suit.... unlike the subject auction.

The first example could almost be a prototypical illustration of a point I made in my first post: if partner has 4=1=5=3 with a club stop and lots of extras, he'd bid 2N, not 3♣

So I appreciate the effort, but find the examples unpersuasive, altho not uninteresting

[ArtK78]

IMO (for what it is worth), the term "fourth-suit forcing" refers to the fourth of four consecutive bids in four different suits, the fourth of which is, by agreement, artificial and forcing.

Anything else is not "fourth-suit forcing" as the term is generally applied. A partnership can certainly play a fourth suit bid on the fifth or sixth bid of the auction as forcing and artificial, but I don't believe it is accurate to refer to that call as "fourth-suit forcing."

There are analogous situations. For example, new minor forcing is a bid of the unbid minor on the fourth bid of the auction which begins 1m - 1M - 1NT. There is another new minor forcing sequence which is fairly well known, but it is referred to as extended new minor forcing:

1♣ - 1M
2♣ - 2♦*

1♦ - 1M
2♦ - 3♣*

If one plays extended new minor forcing, the last bid in each of these sequences is artificial and forcing. But it is not "new minor forcing" in the traditional sense.

On a side note (that I have mentioned before), Sonny Moyse used to refer to new minor forcing as that "petty little odious bid." His contemporaries began to refer to new minor forcing as PLOB. The Bridge World article on extended new minor forcing was titled "Extended PLOB."

[gnasher]

mikeh, on Jun 23 2009, 07:36 PM, said:

.... or am I as out to lunch on that part of standard bidding as gnasher thinks I am elsewhere?

Just to be clear, I don't think you're wrong about the "standard" meaning of the 3♣ bid in the original sequence. I'm happy to accept that it's standard to play it as natural throughout North America.

I think that you're wrong in believing, as you apparently do, that there is a globally standard meaning for that bid, especially in the face of posts by six different players from three different countries which imply that they play it as artificial.

[jdonn]

I do agree with Art regarding the name of the convention. It's a similar mistake some people who bid 'gerber' over 3NT make, I believe it's defined specifically as a jump. If you play 3♣ artificial and forcing here you aren't playing "fourth suit forcing".

[P_Marlowe]

ArtK78, on Jun 23 2009, 02:43 PM, said:

IMO (for what it is worth), the term "fourth-suit forcing" refers to the fourth of four consecutive bids in four different suits, the fourth of which is, by agreement, artificial and forcing.

Anything else is not "fourth-suit forcing" as the term is generally applied.  A partnership can certainly play a fourth suit bid on the fifth or sixth bid of the auction as forcing and artificial, but I don't believe it is accurate to refer to that call as "fourth-suit forcing."
<snip>

How about: if we have bid three suits naturally, bidding the 4th suit is
artifical?
Please keep in mind, that this definition is independ from the round of
bidding and the position the bid occurs.

By the way, FSF is a british invention, so if someone from North America
claims, that something british influenced player claim to be FSF, is not
FSF, than this dangerous.

With kind regards
Marlowe

[gnasher]

To show how little we're adding to the sum of human understanding, here is an RGB thread from 2001 where an Englishman (David Stevenson), an Australian (Kieran Dyke) and someone whose nationality I don't know (Bill Spight) say that this type of sequence is Fourth Suit Forcing, and various Americans say that it isn't:

http://groups.google.co.uk/group/rec.games...619ec48cfe5ad37


Regarding nomenclature, I believe that this is a difference between American and English usage. In England people use the term "Fourth-Suit Forcing" to mean "an artificial bid in the fourth suit which asks for more information and promises nothing in the suit", regardless of who bids it and regardless of whether we were already game-forced.

I know that it has a more limited meaning in the USA and Canada, so on these forums I try to remember to use a phrase such as "like FSF" instead of just "FSF" when appropriate. Presumably, though, nobody misunderstood what was meant by "3♣ is FSF".


Regarding whether Crowhurst meant his examples to cover all sequences of the form
  opening - new suit response
  3rd suit - preference
I am confident that he did. He has always been a most thorough author, so if he believed that the basic meanings of bids varied according to the order of the suits or the level of the first response, he would have said so. Likewise, having given a hand where opener bids 2NT with AJ10 in the fourth suit, if he'd intended his next example, where opener bids the fourth suit seeking "assistance", to mean "showing a fragment", he would have said so.

However, I'm not going to track him down to ask him. Nor do I have any more recent Acol textbooks, having given up on the system in serious partnerships some time ago.

[NickRW]

Hmm. Since this seems to have become a debate about what English people would bid, I think that a few Acol players would have thought of opening the stronger hand with a strong 2♦ or a Benji 2♣. (Personally I think they would be wrong, but the hand certainly isn't that far off and if the primary suit was a major I would probably be tempted to join them). Secondly, even for those that would open 1♦, I can't think of anyone who has some sort of outlet for strong twos in their system would not rebid 2♠ at their second turn. Thirdly I can't imagine many Acol players thinking that the responding hand was worth anything other than pass - again it is a function of strong twos that responding on 4 counts is not necessary.

As to the fourth suit forcing thing - the argument that this should not be treated as fourth suit forcing obvioulsy has some merit - but the oldest rule I can remember in Acol is that a new suit at the 3 level is always forcing - so the debate about whether it is 4sf or not is somewhat academic in an Acol context - partner cetainly cannot pass it.

Nick

[jdonn]

It's like when I learned about the whole anticlockwise / counterclockwise thing. I normally blame Americans for being the ones to butcher the language, but in this case let's just call it a draw.

What the heck, I just went to look them up and there is also contraclockwise. Does anyone use that one?

[Jlall]

jdonn, on Jun 23 2009, 05:22 PM, said:

What the heck, I just went to look them up and there is also contraclockwise. Does anyone use that one?

Can't have a baby if you do it contraclockwise!

[mikeh]

Andy, it occurred to me that maybe we got off on the wrong foot on this thread because of some confusion about the methods under discussion.

The OP was in the general bridge forum... my assumption is that in this forum 'standard' is either Standard American or something close to it. A method that I will refer to in this post as 'Standard'.

Of course, we all know that one country's standard is another country's esoterica, but in these forums, rightly or wrongly, people tend to specify their methods whenever playing Acol or precision, or SEF, or Polish Club, etc... and often simply to say 'standard' or nothing at all when meaning standard american.

In that sense, 'Standard' is much the same system whether played in the UK or Brazil or New York... in the latter it will be commonplace (standard) while in the former it may be viewed as weird, because the local 'Standard' is another method entirely.

When I stated that in Standard, 3♣ was and should be natural, I was not claiming that it was natural in Acol.... while I may have views on whether it should be, those views are irrelevant, since I wasn't talking about Acol, any more than I was talking about precision or Culbertson (not to mention that I have only dabbled in Acol and that was many years ago, so I am not qualified to discuss the method in detail)

In a real sense, 'Standard' is more or less universal... although as a catchall system it caters to various idiosyncracies... which minor to open with 4=4 or even many 4=5 hands is one, in which even in NA, amongst Standard bidders, there are two major schools of thought.

The fact that you and, I assume, many players from a non-standard background, consider it routine to bid 3♣ as artificial doesn't affect whether such a meaning is 'standard': you don't play 'standard' as I understood the concept in the context of the OP. Nor do I... but I used to, and I am very widely read in 'standard' methods... so I expressed my view of what 3♣ meant in the context of the 'standard' to which I was referring.

[the hog]

gnasher, on Jun 24 2009, 04:23 AM, said:

To show how little we're adding to the sum of human understanding, here is an RGB thread from 2001 where an Englishman (David Stevenson), an Australian (Kieran Dyke) and someone whose nationality I don't know (Bill Spight) say that this type of sequence is Fourth Suit Forcing, and various Americans say that it isn't:

http://groups.google.co.uk/group/rec.games...619ec48cfe5ad37


Regarding nomenclature, I believe that this is a difference between American and English usage.  In England people use the term "Fourth-Suit Forcing" to mean "an artificial bid in the fourth suit which asks for more information and promises nothing in the suit", regardless of who bids it and regardless of whether we were already game-forced.

I know that it has a more limited meaning in the USA and Canada, so on these forums I try to remember to use a phrase such as "like FSF" instead of just "FSF" when appropriate.  Presumably, though, nobody misunderstood what was meant by "3♣ is FSF".


Regarding whether Crowhurst meant his examples to cover all sequences of the form
  opening - new suit response
  3rd suit - preference
I am confident that he did.  He has always been a most thorough author, so if he believed that the basic meanings of bids varied according to the order of the suits or the level of the first response, he would have said so.  Likewise, having given a hand where opener bids 2NT with AJ10 in the fourth suit, if he'd intended his next example, where opener bids the fourth suit seeking "assistance", to mean "showing a fragment", he would have said so.

However, I'm not going to track him down to ask him.  Nor do I have any more recent Acol textbooks, having given up on the system in serious partnerships some time ago.

Just in case someone says, "who the hell are these people"? Kieran is a top professional player in Australia. Stevenson is the EBU's premier tournament director. Don't know Spight.
I agree with Andy and would have thought it 4sf. Natural may well be a better method, but I would suggest that this is a personalised and not standard treatment.

Btw Josh, I have never heard of counterclockwise. I assume this is an American term?

[Codo]

Mike,

as you wanted Andy to back up his experience with a written article:

May you show me, where it is written in stone, or at least in letters that 3 ♣ is artifical? Which author does back up your opinion?

Buit besides this, this is a poor reason anyhow. Like usual it is more a matter of what you are used too then of evidence what realy is superior.

[gnasher]

cherdanno, on Jun 23 2009, 10:06 AM, said:

Btw, if I played 3♣ as artificial here, I would just take it as a game try (AKA "please bid 3N if you have a club stop, or something higher than 3♦ if you think we should play 5♦), not as a game force.

That's what I would assume too. Although hands that improve to become worth a game force do exist, they're rare. Responder has quite a wide range in this sequence, so it seems better to include some invitational hands.