An Unconventional look at Bidding Conventions

An Unconventional look at Bidding Conventions

Let us view bidding, in abstract terms, as a dynamically changing strategy to explore a limited terrain, to secure a hidden treasure. The hidden treasure being the optimal final contract for the given deal. Please note that I say deal, and not hand. I also say secure, and not locate. So, if you get to a contract by a method that permits its defeat, you might in fact have allowed your opponents to secure the treasure that you had merely located.

So one might say that bidding is the process of discussing a treasure map in front of characters waiting to steal the treasure from you. Sometimes your forces are strong enough so that you need not worry about your treasure being stolen. But there are other times when you might indeed need their unwitting and unwilling help to secure the treasure for yourself.

Given the constraints in bidding, first you and your partner need to be on the same page about how you would go about locating and securing the treasure. This means knowing the aspects of your hand that will be useful to the partnership in exploring/locating the treasure, and also knowing the dangers of having your weaknesses revealed by your exchanges, and potentially having these exploited by the opposition.

Initially, the partnership would start out in an exploratory mode, and at some point in the auction switch to exploit the available information, to gamble with a bid to secure the treasure at some location. The success will depend on getting the strain right and also the level, most times. From the right side, without revealing too much, or with calculated deceit, will make up the other successful cases.

The strategy to use to go about the above business will require a certain amount of skill, acquired through experience, to find the right balance between exploration and exploitation. The risk-happy and the risk-averse will naturally have different styles, as will the technicians and the artists.

If an important feature with a relatively high frequency of occurrence cannot be expressed using the repertoire of bids/conventions available to you, you are going to be disadvantaged. So good bidding methods should enable you to express important features that have a high frequency of occurrence conveniently. The failure to use these conveniences on a given hand will then help assert the lack of such features.

Whatever your style or preference, it just makes sense to be clear about the features that need to be expressed during the exploration. After all, you need well defined norms and guides, for the thrill of violating these at just the right time! Seriously, how do we go about identifying all these features that need to be expressed conveniently?

Analyzing our strategic requirements, may result in the following sample set of features, for example, along with many others not contained in this list.

1)        Asserting having the strength likely to be needed to secure the treasure at some location, in a suggested strain

2)        Agreeing that the strain seems appropriate, or suggesting an alternative.

3)        Suggest that we explore at a (much) higher level, in this or other strains.

4)        Worrying that we may not have the strength to hold on to the treasure at this/higher levels.

5)        Showing different features of shape – balanced and unbalanced, one, two or three suits.

6)        Playing strength such as long suits, and ruffs

7)        Double-fits and misfits

8)        Hands that have improved with new information, and those that have not.

9)        Canceling previous agreements on strain and/or level.

10)     Features related to strategy during the play, such as control, tempo, and vulnerable holdings

 

The existing systems cover many of these important features, but fail to do justice to a few. Understanding that many of the problems we face in bidding is because of these omissions is the first step in moving towards better bidding methods. It is my hope that the members in this forum will help develop methods for expressing these and many more useful features, to truly take Bidding to new heights.

At least for exploration purposes, we should be prepared to look at even apparently weird looking approaches. For instance, we are all familiar with the expressive power of the take-out double. This power is what offsets the disadvantage and the dangers of entering the auction that belongs to the opponents. The single bid is able to say a lot more about the shape of that hand than the original opening bid. In other words, the take out double has more information content than an opening bid. This increases the probability of the defensive side finding a fit (and safety) with practically no further exploration.

Can we apply the above feature of take out doubles to opening bids of a new bidding system? What if we combine this idea with another – that of playing from the right side? Then another kind of “natural” system will in essence be opening bids and responses that only indicate the least likely strains for the partnership! This charade can go on till someone in the partnership is ready to exploit the available information by declaring the trump suit from the correct side. This will be in dark contrast to the present method of naming the strain long before it is clear who among the partners should be declaring the final contract.

What kind of conventions and methods will it take, to make such weird systems playable?

Any takers to explore such strange ideas? But one thing is sure – even if no great new system emerges from all this, mere discussions of such ideas will give each of us some unique insights into the systems that we actually choose to play.