[mgoetze]

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Our 1♦ opening is usually 5+ diamonds. 3♣ showed 4+ diamonds and a decent 5-card club suit.

3♦ and 3NT are clearly to play and 4♦ would, per our general agreements, be Minorwood. However, what should 3♥ and 3♠ by North mean here?

The auction continued...

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This may depend on your answer to part 1 of the question, but what do you think 4♦ means? What would 3♠ have meant?

[the hog]

Stopper showing. So 4D denies a S stopper.

[gszes]

majors NT minors

We have already decided the major suits are out so next we concentrate
on NT. The 3h bid (while it may be natural) is primarily an attempt to
explore for 3n by showing "stuff" in hearts for NT and denying significant
spade "stuff". This is based on the concept of with one worry suit ask with
more than one worry suit tell. This auction leaves both hearts and (more
obvious) spades as worry suits. There was some reason for the 3c bid and
we have no clue how strong responder is so it seems best to assume 3NT should
be reached if it is reasonable before worrying about 5+ of a minor.

[Cthulhu D]

gszes, on 2014-December-19, 07:19, said:

majors NT minors

We have already decided the major suits are out so next we concentrate
on NT. The 3h bid (while it may be natural) is primarily an attempt to
explore for 3n by showing "stuff" in hearts for NT and denying significant
spade "stuff". This is based on the concept of with one worry suit ask with
more than one worry suit tell. This auction leaves both hearts and (more
obvious) spades as worry suits. There was some reason for the 3c bid and
we have no clue how strong responder is so it seems best to assume 3NT should
be reached if it is reasonable before worrying about 5+ of a minor.

This is basically my agreement, except if opener then continues on after a 3N or 4D bid it was an advance cue for slam.

[ahydra]

Agree with the others that 3H is showing a stop. 4D depends on whether the fit jump was GF. If it was then I'd say this was a natural slam try (Minorwood in your agreements). If not, then it's just denying a spade stop.

ahydra

[Zelandakh]

While it is far more popular to show a stop in 2-suited auctions, there is a small advantage to reversing this to asking. Basically we have 4 cases - a stop in 0 1 or 2 suits with the 1 case being for either unbid suit. To cope with this we need 3♥ to handle 2 cases. Playing standard you either have 3NT show no stopper (not ideal) or have no reasonable call on the 0 stopper case. You could, of course, invent a heart stopper, and this is probably what most would do. In that case describing 3♥ as showing a stopper is (arguably) MI though.

With the reversed meanings you can bid 3♥ with 0 stops or a spade stop and use 3♠ to check back for the spade stop. Then 3♠ shows a heart stop and 3NT both - easy.

As for 4♦, obviously denying a stop in the appropriate major. No need for it to be a slam try - we can go with 4♣ or 4M with that - and this caters to the case when Opener was planning to make their own slam try over 3NT (ACB auction). Indeed, if we also play 4♣ as a FJ (so 3♣ is limited) it is possibly impossible for Responder still to hold a slam try, so that information is relevant to the discussion.