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eyhung, on Jan 25 2010, 01:16 PM, said:
My comment was not regarding the analysis, but the fact that passing, giving E/W a free run, often led E/W into bigger trouble than doubling, according to the analysis of the three people listed. Maybe pass is better than double, but I certainly didn't like some of the constructive auctions given by those forum posters which led to pass being rated better.
There are a couple comments about this.
One is that double actually gives the opponents more space (since they can now pass without risking an end to the auction, they can redouble, etc). So you'd expect the opponents constructive bidding to get a little better sometimes after a double. Another is that the double locates cards in the play, so sometimes makes it easier to declare the hand, or to right-side a notrump contract.
Yet another point is that there's often a decision in standard bidding whether or not to pass the opening with a borderline hand. If you pass, then you give the opponents an easy balancing call and you also might miss a game if opener has some super-max. If you bid, you will get too high when opener has a little extra and pushes for game. There isn't a real clear answer to this, but I took the route of "respond very light" which means that I do occasionally get into trouble when opener has extras in a constructive auction, but I also steal a lot of contracts when opener is minimum. If I took the other route of passing the opening with most five-counts, then it would appear that my constructive bidding is "better" (in the sense that I reach better contracts when given free reign) but the performance of pass would actually improve because N/S can still reach their games when it goes 1♠-Pass-Pass but have trouble reaching game after 1♠-P-1NT.