[Hanoi5]

You hold:

♠Jx
♥AKQ
♦JTxx
♣QJxx

Your partner deals and opens 1♣. You have a gadget to show balanced hands with no 4-card Majors 13+ by means of 2♥ (but this is also used to show 13+ with strong hearts or 13+ with an unbalanced support for clubs), however before partner can use the relay to ask what you have LHO preempts in spades and partner passes:

1♣-(Pa)-2♥*-(3♠)
Pa-(Pa)-???

Opponents are red and you're white, partner's pass should be 'nothing extra in my hand' (?). with the hand shown:

1. You shouldn't have tried to show a balanced hand lacking a stopper in an unbid suit, but then what if you had QJx AK JTxx QJxx?
2. If you don't agree with 1 or if you do and hold the second hand instead, what would double mean? Under this Vulnerability would it show the balanced hand that wants to penalize? If you lack the stopper or have an 'ugly' stopper (Q32) would you prefer doubling or bidding something? Pass is not an option, is it?

[the hog]

I am always bemused by these questions. You have a system bid, you use it and you don't know the continuations when the opps intervene. If you don't know what to do with YOUR gadget, why ask the rest of the posters?

[the hog]

Duplicate post.

[mike777]

given OP I guess double but...

fwiw prefer to start with 1d to keep the bidding low at this point.

over 3s and assuming pard passes..I will x in bal seat.
--

[EricK]

I would have thought that X shows strong balanced unsuitable for 3N; 3NT shows strong balanced hand suitable for 3NT; 4♣ shows the unbalanced ♣ hand, and 4♥ shows the ♥ hand.

[helene_t]

Whatever partner's pass means, x must be right

[Codo]

Double of course... Erics scheme looks easy enough, doesn`t it?

[helene_t]

EricK, on 2013-June-18, 23:32, said:

I would have thought that X shows strong balanced unsuitable for 3N; 3NT shows strong balanced hand suitable for 3NT; 4♣ shows the unbalanced ♣ hand, and 4♥ shows the ♥ hand.

Yes, except that maybe 4♦ shows a hand with hearts that doesn't want to make a nonforcing 4♥. Stronger hands with clubs can bid 4♣. Stronger balanced hands can double or maybe bid 4NT (which probably shows 19-20 with a double spade stopper).

[Zelandakh]

I think that X here is a form of Thrump, asking for a stopper. That might be with the balanced hand but possible also with clubs, assuming that 3NT can still be our best spot with that hand. Otherwise, what Eric said. One addition would be to define 4♦. It looks like the main hand we are lacking a bid for here is a slam try with hearts, so that would be a reasonable candidate.

[PhilKing]

Dump the convention.

[Hanoi5]

Thanks to all the people who contributed with an answer. I don't neccessarily think the convention should be dumped, just improve the agreement by defining it better and talking out the proceedings after such a situation. Anyway I think it should be done with stoppers in all unbid suits but as mentioned first by EricK you can have an 'unsuitable' hand for NT, like Ax or Qxx as a stopper. Double would work fine in such a situation but then I wonder if there's a way to double for profit, but the answer I suppose lies with opener: with some trumps (like 2 to an honour or 3) s/he should double to give responder the opportunity to pass for profit (especially in this situation where the Vulnerability makes it worthwhile) and reserve pass to hand where you want to wait for partner's description.

[mikeh]

nothing to add in terms of what to do at this point, but I think this gadget, viewed in isolation, seems silly.

It is however a mistake to assess this sort of gadget in isolation. It seems to me to encompass various hand types that would usually be shown by other calls (altho strong jumpshifters would use the call for the strong heart variant).

Thus the questions that need to be asked are:

1. do the partnership methods, before adopting this gadget, fail to allow efficient auctions when responder has a balanced 13+ with no major? Do they fail to allow efficient auctions with gf unbalanced club raises?

I've never had a problem with balanced 13+ hands over 1♣. If I can't bid some systemic number of notrump, I can bid 1♦ which conserves bidding space.

I've never had a problem with unbalanced gf raises of clubs: I can always start with a splinter or if 5422 bid my side suit.

2. Having lumped the balanced and unbalanced-club gf hands into 2♥, has this allowed the calls that would otherwise have been used for those hands to be put to a beneficial use?

3. never ever evaluate a gadget on the assumption that the opps won't compete. Here, the 3♠ call seems to have hit a seam in the methods, but what about a 4♠ call? Say we hold some 2=6=3=2 good hand. It won't usually be possible to risk 5♥ and, if we do, opener is guessing as to range. So we double. But wouldn't we also double with the balanced hand? So opener looking at 1=4=3=5 passes the double and we defend their 10 card fit while never even knowing about our own 10 card fit. If opener pulls, then we'd have 3=3=4=3 13 and be in a bad contract at the 5-level.

I could go on at some length.

The gadget sounds like someone came up with a solution to a non-existent problem and thought this would be sexy to play. I may be being unfair, but that's the impression I get since I can't imagine a well-designed method that needs to lump 3 quite different and generally easy to bid hand types into a space consuming jump in our own constructive auction.

It's one thing to say that opener can relay, when the opps stay out, but another thing altogether to say that such a relay solves, rather than creates, problems. I won't go into detail, but just bear in mind that opener won't always have a boring hand of his own and that even when he does, you've just used up another round of bidding, eating away at your bidding space while exchanging very little information.

[FM75]

You have a

• GF hand.
• Gadget.
• A hole in your partnership agreement.

You don't have:

• An agreement for handling interference over your gadget.
• An agreement on whether partner expects you to double?
• An agreement on what partner's double would mean?
• An agreement on a pass by partner.

Since this is in the Natural Bidding section, you are now on a guess. Any action you make needs to be consistent with whatever existing agreements you have. Is double by you penalty or takeout? If you made your conventional bid now, assuming it still exists, does it describe your hand? Do you have any agreements for dealing with 3 level preempts in non-competitive auctions? Are they available here?