zhasbeen, on 2017-November-06, 17:29, said:
I can imagine opening 1NT with my hand, but if I'm going to do it with 2 doubletons I want at least Kx in each of them. If I were to make an exception with Jx or Qx it would be with a strong 6-card minor and 2-2-3 in the other suits.
This is kind of antiquated thinking. Requiring stoppers in all suits for NT openers went out the window many decades ago. People found out that it's more effective to just open 1nt on average.
Reversing only gains in rare situations vs. opening 1nt. These are mainly situations where you belong in clubs for slam/game. Responder may just blast 3nt at some point and not have a great system to look for a club fit with say 4324/3325 type of hand, and down you go on a diamond lead. You also tend to gain when partner has 4 hearts and not enough to bid over 1nt.
On the other hand, 1nt vs. reversing gains when:
- responder is weak with 5 spades, you get to play 2S rather than getting higher.
- responder is weak misfit with say 4342, you get to play 1nt instead of being at 3c.
- sometimes responder is weak with heart fit or club fit, but 1nt makes but 3c/3H doesn't.
- 1nt preempts opp from finding their spade/diamond fit.
- 1nt-3nt or other simple auctions reveal less about your shape to the opps and let them guess wrong on opening lead or the defense.
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How can you rebid 2NT off that auction with Jx of diamonds?
I'd want to be stronger to rebid 2nt instead of reversing (I'm a 1nt opener). But rebidding 2nt on Jx of diamonds (which would be routine if you were say 3325 shape and 18, Jx of diamonds) often works out. Partner will often have help in diamonds, or will get you to a major instead of NT. If the opps had diamonds to run, a fair percentage of the time they will have bid them.
As for the people who reversed than bid 2nt, even that isn't completely unreasonable:
- partner will often be 5242 or 5332 or 5143 with some help in diamonds, 3nt can be perfectly reasonable spot, and might be better than 52 spade fit
- if partner has club support no diamond help, after 2nt he can bid 3c (or 3d artificial if 3c is NF to play), and you can support spades then, and he will know only 2 and bid 4S/3nt/4c/5c intelligently.
This might arguably be better than supporting on 2 and encouraging partner into a 5-2 spade fit even when he is 5242 with diamonds decently stopped, because most people will assume 3 spades is 3415.
- partner not really supposed to have this great heart fit but GIB is broken here.
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Is the bidding table you use available on BBO? Have there been instances of when you played that contradicted the bidding table? Either way I'd be interested in checking it out.
There is a practice section on BBO where you can set up bidding practice tables and use robots. You can use the advanced dealing features to predeal a hand and test out options. If you want to force certain auctions it can take a bit of tedious getting up and swapping yourself between the north/south seats.
Your last hand post is certainly ridiculous bidding by GIB. It has a lot of problems in this area, finding the right passes/preferences in competitive auctions; competitive auctions just find lots of holes in the DB. Unfortunately there is not much to do but post the hand here or use robot report, the programmers have to fix them piecemeal, when they are doing that they hopefully figure out rule additions to cover as many analogous auctions as possible.
Try to use links to myhands (either go to bridgebase.com/myhands, or in BBO go to your my BBO, recent hands/tournaments, and use export deal/handviewer link) to get a tinyURL, so that the hands you post include the bots highlighted bidding descriptions. Visit the link in a browser so you can copy/paste the full expanded URL Use
[hv=(expanded handviewer link URL)]400|300[/hv]
Rather than manually constructing the handviewer yourself or using screenshots.