Monday, January 08, 2007 2:59 AM

Strong 2 Diamonds II

PITBULLS:

The strong 2♣ opening sometimes makes bidding your hand a nightmare. The reason for this is the auction is off too a poor start with the artificial 2♣ bid and the quite often waiting or artificial response. You are already at the two level and you have still wasted two bids. Here are two hands bid at the same Spingold match and messed up at both tables.

The 1^st one is the very hard to bid, strong 3 suiter. ♠void ♥AKJx ♦AKQx ♣AKxxx opposite ♠J10xxx ♥xx ♦xxxxx ♣Q . Opening 2♣ with these hands leads to horrible auctions and opening at the one level is silly. We open 2♦ with these hands and partner must bid 2♥. With 3 suiters there is a standard relay of 2♠. Partner must bid 2NT and you bid your stiff. With this particular hand , we bid 4♠. OK , responder knows we have a demand 2 bid with 3 suits and a spade void. The 5^th diamond and the club queen must be gold so we leap to 6♦. Both tables barely found their diamond fit let alone got to slam.

Same match this hand came up. ♠A ♥AKQxx ♦K109xxx ♣A . We all know what a 2♣ structure does to mess up two suiters and both tables got to 4♥ when 6♦ needed a 3-2 break or a stiff diamond honour.. Responders hand was ♠xxx ♥Jx ♦Ax ♣xxxxxx . We open 2♦ and responder must bid 2♥. The opener now bids 3♥ and responder gives preference to 4♦. Opener now bids 4♥ to confirm the 6-5 so what now ? Responder has Ax in the 6 card suit & Jx in the 5 card suit so 6♦ is a decent undertaking so responder bids 6♦. This was cold. We have the inference that 5-5 in the reds are opened 2♣ with hearts as the anchor suit. With diamonds as the anchor suit , we open 2♦ and responder knows we have at least 6 of them when we show our 2^nd suit as 5.

There is a lot to be said for natural bidding if you do not subscribe to a 1♣ system which keeps the bidding very low.