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DavidKok, on 2026-March-04, 23:51, said:
These are good points, and I feel I should have clarified something earlier. I do not want to maximise the frequency of these bids. They are bad bids. When they come up, we are often behind. I want to cap their frequency and hope to survive, not make them more common. In the past I've also said that I'd be happy giving them up completely and playing a different treatment, and I have for example played the 2X and 2NT gadget without the 3X bid for a while. Unfortunately most of my partners insist on giving every bid a meaning, so this completes the set.
I'm glad you brought up the 16 total tricks. As you rightly imply, dealing ourself 5♠5♣, some fraction of the time our failing 3♠ is a good sacrifice - we need to look at more than just the probability of making. The scenerios you're describing have both a weak overcaller and a big misfit. Obviously we can't do anything about the misfit, but with a weak 55 I would prefer a 1♠ overcall to a 3♦ jump overcall.
Personally I ran some simulations a few years ago, dealing myself a 5M5m hand and asking how often I wanted to play in which strain. The results surprised me: it was the major about 80% of the time, the minor 10%, and partner's strains or NT the remaining 10%, if I'm not mistaken (I'm going by memory here, if you're interested I can search for the exact outcomes). It seriously made me question why I'm showing the second suit in the first place - of course it's for hand evaluation and lead direction and identifying the double fit, but still. The example (1♦)-3♦* auction is not good, and it is not always right to bid it even with the same shape.
The same does not apply to the 2X and 2NT overcalls, which are low enough to win regularly when they come up. I think the known suits in the two profitable calls more than make up for the imperfect options on the third two-suited hand type.
Lastly I personally do not play split range, and require 5-5 (or longer) for all these bids. Keep in mind these bids primarily exist out of luxury, not necessity: we can bid our suits one by one with less extreme hands. It doesn't plug a system gap, people just wanted to fill out their card. In general I think the utility of two-suited overcalls is awfully overstated, and relaxing the shape requirement to increase the frequency seems like a really poor idea to me.
I'm glad you brought up the 16 total tricks. As you rightly imply, dealing ourself 5♠5♣, some fraction of the time our failing 3♠ is a good sacrifice - we need to look at more than just the probability of making. The scenerios you're describing have both a weak overcaller and a big misfit. Obviously we can't do anything about the misfit, but with a weak 55 I would prefer a 1♠ overcall to a 3♦ jump overcall.
Personally I ran some simulations a few years ago, dealing myself a 5M5m hand and asking how often I wanted to play in which strain. The results surprised me: it was the major about 80% of the time, the minor 10%, and partner's strains or NT the remaining 10%, if I'm not mistaken (I'm going by memory here, if you're interested I can search for the exact outcomes). It seriously made me question why I'm showing the second suit in the first place - of course it's for hand evaluation and lead direction and identifying the double fit, but still. The example (1♦)-3♦* auction is not good, and it is not always right to bid it even with the same shape.
The same does not apply to the 2X and 2NT overcalls, which are low enough to win regularly when they come up. I think the known suits in the two profitable calls more than make up for the imperfect options on the third two-suited hand type.
Lastly I personally do not play split range, and require 5-5 (or longer) for all these bids. Keep in mind these bids primarily exist out of luxury, not necessity: we can bid our suits one by one with less extreme hands. It doesn't plug a system gap, people just wanted to fill out their card. In general I think the utility of two-suited overcalls is awfully overstated, and relaxing the shape requirement to increase the frequency seems like a really poor idea to me.
Thanks, that closely fits my reflections after this useful initial exercise.
In particular, only one deal had game in clubs against 5 with game in spades. And all the deals that made game in spades would have had the same conclusion had we simply bid spades (which of course does not mean that the clubs are not working, just that we didn't need to show them). I actually intended to make this point in a later post, after studying whether or not a choice of 1S/3D/Pass based upon hand evaluation and vulnerability was effectively optimising things or not (there were 2 pretty impressive hands that still failed to make 9 tricks).
But yes, looking at these deals I begin to suspect that the main usefulness of these conventions is that they convince us not to pass with a low HCP 5-5
