RESPONDING TO SUIT OPENINGS

When your partner opens one of a suit, he has given you a great deal of information; you have to be prepared to respond in kind. What you say next will go a long way toward determining whether or not your partnership will buy the contract and at what level.

Support for One of a Major:

If your partner opens 1H or 1S, you know he has five of that suit. Since you are looking for an eight-card fit with partner, you only need three of your partner's suit to support him. With 3-card or better support, the only remaining concern is how you should support him. If you have 0-5 HCP you should pass. If you have 6-9 HCP, bid two of your partner's suit. If you have 10-12 HCP, bid three of your partner's suit. If you have more than 12 HCP, bid a new 4-card or longer suit. In this last case, your partner must bid again unless your opponents drive the bidding way up. Finally, if you have a relatively poor hand (the points are a judgment call, but use 5-9 HCP as a guide) and extra length (usually five or more cards in your partner's suit) or other distributional factors such as voids, bid four of your partner's suit immediately. This last point illustrates a basic axiom of bidding: If at any time in the bidding you know what your final contract should be, bid it directly. Every piece of information you pass to your partner is information you pass to your opponents, and you want your opponents as close to blind as possible.

Why should you bid a new suit when you have a lot of strength? Why not just bid game? The fact your hand provides enough strength to make game in a major when added to your partner's hand doesn't mean you don't have the strength between your hands to go for some kind of slam. Your partner may well have more than 12 HCP. One good rule of thumb is this: Never open if you haven't got a second bid when your chance comes around again, provided the auction hasn't gone too high by that time. If your partner abides by this simple axiom, a new suit over partner's major will almost guarantee another bid from him and give you time to show more of your hand. While most such auctions end in game, sometimes the extra information leads to slam contracts. Note that this is not in contradiction to the idea that you should place a final contract when you know what it should be; in this case, you don't have enough information to say that game is all you can make.

Support for One of a Minor:

First of all, remember that you still want to find a major suit fit if possible. Your partner may have opened one of a minor, but that doesn't deny four cards in at least one of the majors. Keeping this in mind, always bid a major that has at least four cards before supporting your partner's opening bid of one of a minor. If you have both majors, show hearts first; if your partner has hearts, he will support you, and if he doesn't he can still bid the spades, if he has them, while keeping the bidding low.

The rules for supporting minors follow many of the same guidelines as those for supporting partner's major. Let's start with the basics. It takes more to support a minor suit than to support a major suit, and this is true for two reasons: first, game in a minor is reached at the five level instead of the four level; and second, opener promises fewer cards in the bid suit with a minor opening than with a major opening.

While game in a major generally requires an eight-card fit and 25+ HCP to have a good chance of success, game in a minor generally requires 28+ HCP and an eight-card fit to show any real promise. This brings up a good point. Assuming the same 8-card fit, the difference between a safe contract at the X level and a safe contract at the X+1 or X-1 level is roughly 3 HCP in the middle levels. This number decreases at lower levels and increases at higher levels.

If you recall, a bid in a minor only promises three of that suit, though an opening bid of 1D very strongly suggests at least four diamonds. This means that you need five clubs to support partner's 1C opening and four diamonds to support his 1D opening (the cases in which opener has only 3 diamonds are so rare that this is sufficient, and even then, a major suit fit is usually in the offing). The upshot of all of this is that you want to have a couple more points for your encouraging bids in support of your partner's minor opening than you would in support of a major opening.

Standard raises of partner's minor suit opening are much like raises in major suits—with 6-9 HCP, bid two of partner's suit; with 10-13 (or a bad 14), bid three of the suit; with a stronger hand, bid a new 4-card suit.

Bidding When You Haven't Got the Cards to Support Partner's Suit:

When you don't have enough of your partner's suit to support him but you do have some points, you need to keep the bidding going in an attempt to find another fit. Just because your partner opens 1S doesn't mean he hasn't got the cards to support one of your other suits. If you bid a suit after partner opens, you are showing at least a 4-card suit. From there, you can negotiate the final contract.

The standard way to respond is by bidding "up-the line," which means bidding your cheapest available four-card or longer suit, if you have more than one. The idea here is to preserve the principles of opening bidding. While there are cases in which one or the other of you could bid suits out of an up-the-line sequence, those situations are rare and complex, better left to advanced partnership agreements.

You know what you need in terms of cards to support partner, but what about points? At the one level you should have 6 HCP to bid a new suit. At the two level, you should have at least a solid 10 HCP. If you are wondering why you need these kinds of points, look back to what you need for each level and consider the total points you will have with bids at each of these levels. After you subtract what you know your partner has, you will have an idea what you need.

Sometimes you'll have 6-9 HCP and a four-card suit in a flat hand. In this case it is best to bid 1NT after partner's one-level opening bid, provided you lack support for your partner's suit. You provide a wealth of information: You have denied sufficient length to support your partner's, denied a singleton (unless it is in your partner's suit) or void, and denied a 5-card suit (note that 1S over 1H shows a 4-card or longer spade suit). This means that when you bid 2H over partner's 1S, you guarantee a 5-card heart suit and 10+ HCP because you would have bid 1NT or 2NT if you had had a fairly flat hand (a direct 2NT response by you shows 10-12 HCP and NT distribution). With all of that information, your partner can easily determine his next bid.

Bidding a New Suit With a Strong Hand:

Sometimes your partner opens one of a suit, and you have strong points and a long suit. With 16+ HCP and a 6-card or longer suit (or a 5-card suit headed by two of the top three honors) other than the one your partner opened, jump bid (bid your suit at one level higher than the first available level). This is called a Strong Jump Shift. While this might seem to work against the principle of preserving bidding space, in fact it does not. With your partner's opening strength, your strength, and your suit length, you shouldn't need much room to find a good contract, so the loss of one level is acceptable. Thus your bid of 2S after partner opens 1H (assuming your opponents don't interfere, which is unlikely considering they have no more than 12 HCP between them), shows 16+ HCP and a solid spade suit. Even if it takes time to find the right denomination, the 28+ HCP you and your partner share makes a 5-level suit contract safe.

Bidding Higher:

While there are formal guidelines for explaining higher bids once you and your partner have started your bidding dialogue, most of them can be derived by you, the player. If your partner has denied, implicitly, a four-card holding in a suit, you have no reason to show four cards in that suit. This means that if you bid it, you are promising more than four cards there. Similarly, your partner can take that same information and determine when to support you with three or fewer cards.

There's nothing wrong with reading books and articles on how to bid at the higher levels, but experience and a little deduction will teach you more than you are likely to get from any book or lesson, at least when you are starting out. It will take some time at first, but with a little practice, it will become second nature, no stranger than those (formerly) mysterious addition tables we all battled against when first we met them. Also, as with anything in bridge, developing agreements with a regular partner will improve your bidding, provided you play with any regularity.

Responding After You Have Passed:

If you are in first or second seat, you may not be able to open, so if your partner does, you actually have a little more freedom in responding to your partner's opening bid. First of all, you have already limited the strength of your hand: you don't have enough to open. While you still don't want to respond with fewer than 6 HCP, you can be marginally more agressive with regard to level because your partner will understand that you are bidding for one of two reasons, assuming he hasn't forced you to bid. You will only enter the bidding if you are trying to prevent a disaster because of a terrible fit or if you want to compete with your opponents. This not only shows your partner a fairly precise point range but also tends to show a little more about your hand than it would had you made the same bid without having passed first.