[dumm0]

1H P 2S

An opponent requests an explanation. Ah! We haven't agreed anything. Traditionally the jump shift is 16+ HCP, forcing to game at least, but this treatment is no longer universal. I have opened a can of worms and then jumped into it. I vote for "no agreement". At least that is the truth. (This did not happen.)

1H P 2H P
2S

An opponent requests an explanation. We haven't agreed anything here, but the response should be the same. The opponent demands to know what the 2S bidder means by the bid, irrespective of whether or not we have an agreement. BBO rules are crystal clear. You are not obliged to explain what you intend any particular bid to mean. You do have to explain your agreements. (This did happen.)

In the main, BBO members use the rules sensibly. For example a 4NT bid with a parallel chat "3041" or a 4C bid accompanied by a "splinter". Nobody objects to that. However disclosure rules do not seem to be understood, even by advanced and experts.

[paulg]

I think it is a truism that most intermediate and advanced players, and some experts, struggle with the disclosure regulations in face-to-face bridge. On BBO, few of the advanced players understand them and many of the experts have their own idiosyncratic view of what they mean.

In more serious events hopefully the director is able to assist. At a normal table, unfortunately, it's often the price for playing random opponents.

[Tramticket]

So when you bid 1H-2S what did you expects to happen? Did you expect:

(a) To utterly confuse your partner,
(b) That your inteligent partner would make some sensible assumptions and place you with the hand that you hold - maybe based on shared knowledge and experience.

If you are sensible and hoping to score well, your answer is probably closer to (b) than (a). This shared knowledge and experience constitutes an implied agreement and the laws oblige you to disclose such implied agreements to your opponents.

A response such as "this sequence has never arisen for us, but I am expecting partner to interpret as strong and game forcing" would seem appropriate.

[pescetom]

 Tramticket, on 2020-May-21, 10:20, said:

So when you bid 1H-2S what did you expects to happen? Did you expect:

(a) To utterly confuse your partner,
(b) That your inteligent partner would make some sensible assumptions and place you with the hand that you hold - maybe based on shared knowledge and experience.

If you are sensible and hoping to score well, your answer is probably closer to (b) than (a). This shared knowledge and experience constitutes an implied agreement and the laws oblige you to disclose such implied agreements to your opponents.

A response such as "this sequence has never arisen for us, but I am expecting partner to interpret as strong and game forcing" would seem appropriate.

BBO play has many parallel universes, but in mine people self-alert anything except a natural bid.
Strong and game forcing is natural (albeit obsolete), so any other implied agreement should be alerted.
I also consider it unethical to make an unusual bid with no certainty of shared knowledge and experience, but that is another story and probably unsolvable with current BBO mechanisms and online laws.

[mycroft]

I wrote a long post and killed it because it was a screed. Plus I've said it all before. Basically a reiteration of "No agreement" being almost always not Full Disclosure, instead "No Agreement, but". Plus the fact that Self-Alerting is very useful for avoiding many FTF issues, but does have this one - and with the proliferation of not only pickups, but global pickups (so you don't even have "most players around here..."), it actually is a problem.

But since Mr. Tickets up there said everything I was going to in 5 lines, that's a good thing. Thank you!

My only other comment about this is "it's a pickup game to enjoy pushing cards on BBO. If I do tell the opponents what I have and partner guesses wrong, we get a bad score. This matters none, except to a few electrons." Tell 'em how you hope partner will take it (or tell 'em what you think partner will know to guess with) and let the chips fall. If not getting a bad board because you told the opponents what you hoped your agreement was and it was wrong is that important to you, don't play pickup on BBO - only play with partners you *do* have agreement on.

And frankly, 1H-2S - sure, there are ways and ways (and I would have expected it to be QTxxxx and a card, not old-fashioned SJS. Note: I *prefer* SJS! But "nobody" plays that where I play.) But 1H-2H; 2S - you clearly bid it intending to show or ask something (almost certainly about spades). If you didn't think partner would get it, you would have made a vaguer, but less confusing invitation (3H) or just blasted game. "I'm making this bid to get/give information to partner, but I don't think you're entitled to guess" seems like prima facie Full Disclosure violation.

[johnu]

 pescetom, on 2020-May-21, 15:16, said:

I also consider it unethical to make an unusual bid with no certainty of shared knowledge and experience, but that is another story and probably unsolvable with current BBO mechanisms and online laws.

I would say "stupid", not unethical if there is a good chance partner won't know what your bid means. Even if I am playing with a favorite long time partner, I try not to make unusual bids that can have different meanings that have not been discussed. I am willing to end up in a less than optimal contract, but not a ridiculous one.

[johnu]

 dumm0, on 2020-May-21, 05:47, said:

1H P 2S

An opponent requests an explanation. Ah! We haven't agreed anything. Traditionally the jump shift is 16+ HCP, forcing to game at least, but this treatment is no longer universal. I have opened a can of worms and then jumped into it. I vote for "no agreement". At least that is the truth. (This did not happen.)

IMHO, in online bridge, most explanations of "no agreement" are intentional misinformation. Assuming this is a strong jump shift, is it that hard to say "16+ HCP, forcing to game, but there is a chance partner may be playing something else"? By making the bid, you are assuming that strong jump is your agreement and hoping partner is on the same page.

 dumm0, on 2020-May-21, 05:47, said:

1H P 2H P
2S

An opponent requests an explanation. We haven't agreed anything here, but the response should be the same. The opponent demands to know what the 2S bidder means by the bid, irrespective of whether or not we have an agreement. BBO rules are crystal clear. You are not obliged to explain what you intend any particular bid to mean. You do have to explain your agreements. (This did happen.)

For online bridge, "No agreement" sounds a little weaselly to me. You bid 2♠ and are presumably hoping partner interprets it the way you intended. Why not just say that?

[mikeh]

In online bridge one should always self- alert artificial or unusual treatments. Online bridge is far superior to in person bridge in this regard. In person, one cannot alert one’s own bid since doing so, absent screens, unavoidably tells partner that one has alerted.

Note that, with screens, both players alert...each alerting their screen mate.

IMO, context is important. I occasionally play, and will definitely soon be playing, some ‘serious’ bridge, with a partner with whom I have many pages of notes, and a complex method. If we run into an analogous situation in a serious match, either us or the opps, ‘undiscussed’ or ‘no agreement’ might be ok. The exception would be if we had not discussed this exact situation but had agreements on closely analogous auctions

Then, I’d say ‘undiscussed but in similar situations we play that it show such and such’

But in a non-serious game, having named what I intended to be a strong jumpshift, I’d definitely say ‘undiscussed but I intended it as strong’.

Let’s say I merely say undiscussed, and this leads to 4th seat wrongly guessing it’s weak, and coming in on a long suit and the missing values, and going for a number in a situation where opener clearly played you for a good hand. Surely we’d all feel badly and, worse, the opps might well feel they were misled. Why risk creating such feelings?

While I don’t play casual games on bbo, I used to. I remember playing with a French expert. Our only discussion was ‘standard carding’ and then the game began. Our opps, who knew my partner well, knew we had no agreements, but had they not, I’d certainly have told them my intentions

As an aside, the second hand we played, I held AKQ A10xx AKQx Jx and responded 1H to her 1C opening, wondering how I’d continue, given that we had zero agreements on bidding. Not to worry: she rebid 5N!

What should I bid and why?

[DavidKok]

 mikeh, on 2020-May-22, 18:27, said:

As an aside, the second hand we played, I held AKQ A10xx AKQx Jx and responded 1H to her 1C opening, wondering how I’d continue, given that we had zero agreements on bidding. Not to worry: she rebid 5N!

What should I bid and why?

I'd start with a nice little mental breakdown. You have about 17 points more than required so far(!!) and three first-round controls, and partner seems to be inviting for a grand slam. Under other circumstances 5NT could be 'pick-a-slam'. Here that is entirely impossible: if partner can support multiple suits she has some sort of 18-19 balanced or three-suit hand, and those are far too weak for such a jump. I think I would expect partner to have something like a 5/7 or 6/7 in hearts and clubs, although personally I would always bid either 3♠/4♦ (splinter) or 4♣ (5+ suit solid from the top, GF in hearts) with that holding. What would 3♦, or even 2♠, be here without agreements? Even if the club bid is not available due to not having any agreements the splinters should be quite common these days.

What to bid depends entirely on context. If your partner was looking for only the ace of hearts and perhaps an outside ace in spades or diamonds she could have shown some shortness and then made a key card asking bid. Plus on a freakish hand like -, KQxxxx, -, AKxxxxx I would always bid as slowly as possible. So my guess is that partner has some weakness in hearts and/or clubs beyond just missing the ace, and your job is to sign off in 6♥ now.

I'll throw in a bit of a mean twist at the end of this analysis: I think this bidding sequence is likely to be confused or bad - why eat up 4 (four!) levels of bidding room when you want to start grand slam investigations? At the table I would not be surprised to score 6♥+1. And honesty compels me to say that part of my suggestion above is designed for a pleasant (for me) post-mortem instead of a pleasant game. The analysis above caters to such a rare hand (say, -, Kxxxx, -, AKQxxxx) that it is simply more likely that there is some silly bidding error. I run into those at a far higher rate than I see hands like this. You could try to be an 'expert partner' and make a positive bid, hoping to end up in a(ny) grand slam, but this would only win opposite hands where 5NT is a bad bid.

[Cyberyeti]

 mikeh, on 2020-May-22, 18:27, said:

As an aside, the second hand we played, I held AKQ A10xx AKQx Jx and responded 1H to her 1C opening, wondering how I’d continue, given that we had zero agreements on bidding. Not to worry: she rebid 5N!

What should I bid and why?

GSF - 6♦ A or K, I'd expect a freak -, Kxxxx, -, AKxxxxxx or similar.

[mikeh]

 Cyberyeti, on 2020-May-23, 03:10, said:

GSF - 6♦ A or K, I'd expect a freak -, Kxxxx, -, AKxxxxxx or similar.

You’re close

Obviously partner has two voids, since she was asking only about hearts.....I pictured void Kxxxx void AKxxxxxx as a minimum or Kxxxx AKQxxxx

In either case, assuming 7 (or 8) club tricks, we can count 13 winners in notrump. As it happened, she was being a little ambitious, but not unreasonably, with QJ9xxx AK10xxxx

7N played well when clubs behaved, but she could have fallen back on the heart finesse so it was still a great contract. The heart Kx were offside.

[DavidKok]

In all my excitement I failed to count to 13, how embarrassing.

[Cyberyeti]

 DavidKok, on 2020-May-23, 10:43, said:

In all my excitement I failed to count to 13, how embarrassing.

I give the automatic (and forcing) 6♦ reply to 5N and then I hope I picture the hand and bid 7N over 6♥

This hand reminded me of an auction where I was looking at a decent 25 count and partner opened and then jumped in a second suit (which for us is 2 good 5+ card suits, but not a great hand) for a 4 bid 7N=.