"Unlimited" majors, strong clubbers?

I'm critical of his series. We have this from his intro...

DavidC said:

But ignoring competitive auctions is a fairly easy mistake to make. I've often seen systems suggested where a 1C opening is made on a variety of possible hands, and the idea is to reveal which hand type is held with the rebid. Such systems often violate the Think-Competitive principle: if the opponents interfere at a high level, it may be too dangerous for opener to describe his hand. It is of course possible to create a workable multi-way 1C opening, but you have ensure that you can cater for all the various hand types in competition.

Elsewhere he writes...

DavidC said:

Polish Club is one of my preferred systems, and it demonstrates many of the things I've talked about in my series on bidding theory. It features a multi-way 1C opening bid fairly similar to the simpler example, Swedish Club, which was discussed there. But there is an additional natural hand type that is included in the bid, making it essentially a three-way bid.

So he kind of has to square this somehow....

DavidC said:

Some systems have bids which are explicitly defined as multi-way bids. Perhaps the archetypal example of a multi-way opening bid is the "Swedish" 1C opening, which shows either a weak balanced hand (11-13 HCP, say), or a strong hand of any shape (typically played as 17+ HCP). Natural systems do not use this sort of bid; however, many opening bids still contain a wide variety of possible hand types. For example, playing strong NT and 4-card majors, a 1H opening could be anything from a minimum balanced hand to a very strong 1- or 2-suiter. Clearly these are very different hand types, so the bid can be thought of as a multi-way bid in much the same way as the Swedish 1C is. The only difference is that the hand types in the natural bid are not separated by such a clear dividing line.

Essentially he says that natural systems (say opening 1H with xx AQxxx xxx AQx or x AKQxx AKxxx Kx) are multi-way, too. He has a point there, but what about the obvious comparison of little club to strong club? He's referring to strong club auctions in the passages that follow...

DavidC said:

The small number of one-bid hands also gives responder an unusual problem. Suppose that he has to deal with a low-level overcall (somewhere between 1H and 2S, say). When he has a "positive" hand, good enough to force to game opposite opener's known strength, things are generally fairly easy. But more interesting is when he has a slightly weaker hand, a "semi-positive". These are not good enough to force to game immediately, so they have to be bid carefully, not going past the best part-score. Much of the time, it will be best to pass and wait for opener to describe his hand. However, since opener can occasionally have a one-bid hand, passing may result in the overcall being passed out. So responder is forced to act on a semi-positive hand if he wishes to compete for the part-score opposite a one-bid hand.

Now, if opener actually turns out to have extra values, any action from responder effectively commits the partnership to game. So the range of strength for the semi-positive hand types needs to be very narrow - not good enough to force to game immediately, but happy to play in game if opener has any extras. This does not seem to be very efficient: you are using an awful lot of system (the semi-positive responses and their continuations) to cater for a very small number of hands (opener's one-bid hands). This takes away space that could be used for more common hand types. Well-designed systems can use transfers or suchlike to combine the semi-positives and the positives into a single bid, but you still see the problem with semi-positives when responder makes a double, or where there isn't room for transfers, or when opener is prevented from showing his hand by having to cater for responder's possible minimum.

You can contrast this with the multi-way opening bids discussed previously. The equivalent of "semi-positive" hands for Swedish Club are those hands which want to compete opposite a weak NT hand, with the auction 1C : (2D) : 2S being a classic example. This has a much wider range. At the lower end, it only needs to be good enough for game opposite the strong option, so perhaps 6+ HCP. This is almost the same as opposite a strong opening bid. But the upper limit is determined by whether it is good enough to force to game immediately, which is much higher for the multi-way opening. So these semi-positive responses, which use up most of the available space, are much better used after a multi-way opening.

Some Strong Club systems go so far as to make responder's pass forcing over certain overcalls. In a sense this avoids the problem of having a small number of one-bid hands to deal with, by requiring opener to always take a second bid. But of course this takes away one of the main advantages of strength-showing openings, which is that they describe the strength of their minimum hands (particularly balanced hands) without opener having to take a dangerous second bid.

So somehow Swedish or Polish Club is better placed than strong club after say a 1C start and a 2D preempt? Little club responders can make a non-forcing bid here (say 2S) with 6+ hcps and that's equally welcome opposite a weak NT or a strong hand. If opener has a strong hand, he bids again and forces game.

But if we know opener has a strong club, we're so much better off. Just as an example, we can use ciphers here (2H transfers to spades, possibly willing to pass 2S) and 2S as GF hearts because responder can count on a big hand. The transfer in other words caters to hands that want to compete and not force game even though partner has a strong hand; this ought to represent a two-point range or so that little club can't handle. Little club couldn't also use the 2S bid to force game with hearts because responder would need to have essentially an opening hand to do so. No, little club is disadvantaged here. Also, little club has to reserve bids to force even against the possibility that opener has a weak NT.

DavidC makes a couple of mistakes. One is that little club is so much overloaded in comparison to strong club. Little club is essentially the strong club plus weak NT plus maybe clubs. It really should be a tremendous violation against the thrust of his articles.

The other mistake is that he forgets that strong club empowers responder to act with less. It's not all about opener describing his hand, whether it's balanced or unbalanced. It's a lot about responder bidding with fewer values and showing his own shape.

yunling, on 2017-October-08, 03:02, said:

I don't think limited 1M is a significant winner here. If so, we should probably make the range of a 1M overcall narrower as well——which is contrary to expert practice. They believe double than bid a new suit with 16-17 is a loser. Opening 1M is a little different from overcalling but the risk and award are similar.

My choice is extending 1M to the lower edge instead of the higher one. I think it is clear that being able to open 1M on 9/10 count is a bigger winner than 16/17.
So I rate
9-15 > 11-17 ≈ 11-21 > 11-15

16-17 hcp hands are problem hands in most systems of bidding. That reason is why Precision does so well with these strength hands.

As to defensive bidding, 16-17 hands are again problems and many of my partnerships use the Power Double to show 16-17 hcp hands, even with a 5 or 6-cd suit.

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