Strong opening bids - again
The following hand was opened with 2Cs and 2Ds (both strong) at two tables enabling them to reach grand slams in Spades. I didn't apply any penalties as the players weren't aware of the rules. I want to push out a note to club members on the rules and in particular the penalties involved, can someone help please?
spade K Q J 10 9 6 5 2
heart - -
diamond A 7
club A 8 5
Comments
Interestingly, this hand qualifies for the "strong" 1C open in precision, but not for a "strong" 2C or 2D open in ACOL/Benji
"To be considered a strong opening bid, the minimum allowed by agreement
is:
(a) Opening bid of 1 or 1: at least 13 HCP
(b) Above 1: at least 16 HCP, or 13 HCP in two suits containing 10+ cards."
I think that this is one of those really borderline cases that test the ruling - a semi-solid 8 card major, a void and 2 outside aces sound like a 'strong' hand.
Seems strong to give precision players such a huge advantage in such hands over traditional ACOL/Benji players for such hands.
It also strikes me as interesting that this hand would also have qualified under the previous rule of requiring 5 controls (2 for an A and one for a K).
It is also why I like 2C to be "intermediate to strong", which has the unfortunate effect of ruling out 2C including clubs
Hi Alan
Not sure where your club is but rest assured I don't think your club is any diiferent to maybe 60+% of the rest of the clubs in the country as far all players understanding their responsibilites. Not sure whether you have spoken to the club committee about this, perhaps that might be the first step.
Having approached the committee you might need to consider whether all players will (firstly ) read your "note" and (secondly) whether they will take on board the implications. Could a better result be reached by discussion with a teacher on how to get over the point at a "quick" visual presentation before a play session and invite questions during the tea break (if you have one).
Is it possible that the two pairs you have "captured" are the only pairs in the club that would ever consider doing this? If so, has the discussion you have had with them deterred them from doing it again (or at least be within the "Strong" guidelines in the blue book). Of course you will have to watch for the copycats.
Personally I don't think a reminder from the TD at the begining of each session would go a miss. I usually select one from about four different problems that come up. 1) Call me for any irregularity or problem.s 2) Don't read out loud the results from other tables, put the bridgemate in the middle of the table so that all can see (even though the screen is so small that most players can't see the bridgemate never mind the screen). 3) Don't discuss the hands untill all the boards have been completed in the round (although gettting most to understand this only lasts for the first round) 4) Remember to make your lead before entering the contract on your scorecard or in the bridgemate.
Hope this helps, I understand your frustration and the difficulties that can hit you in a club session.
Thanks both for comments and I will take on-board Martin's recommendations - seems a very good idea to me.
Should I award Ave- to offenders and Ave+ to the offended in future?
Ouch. This is a difficult subject because, as Martin says, it's actually perfectly legal to agree to open hands like this in a Benji-like opening, provided that:
The sad thing is that there are also pairs who don't know the regs, but who are actually playing exactly this agreement: they might not have discussed it explicitly but they would have higher requirements for hands with a long minor than hands with a long major. I have serious concerns about ruling some pairs' agreements as legal (when they know the "trick" for how to disclose it) while ruling other pairs' agreements as illegal on the same hand (when they don't know the trick), when there is a good chance that their agreements are actually the same.
So this may be controversial but in a club I would not rule this opening as illegal. If pushed I would "remind" the players who did this that they can only do this when their long suit is not clubs, and I would advise them that in other EBU events they might be ruled against unless they are careful about how they disclose their bid. But I would not be comfortable with handing out bunches of averages each time a hand like this was dealt.
As one of the offenders pointed out, replacing the 5Cs with the KCs and putting a low Diamond in place of the ADs would make the hand OK for opening 2Cs. It's the same shape but one point less with 13 points in the two longest suits.
I know the EBU has thought long and hard about the definition of a strong 2C/2D opener and it was very difficult for them to finalise a solution. I couldn't find the original thread but the problem (I think) they were trying to solve was that players would open 2Cs/2Ds with the above hand and with the ADs (say) replaced by a small card - 10 points but only 5-losers making it very difficult to defend against. A problem for the EBU of damned if you do and damned if you don't.
P.S. I meant to include CMOT_Dibbler's recommendations as well as Martin's. Many thanks both. What an excellent forum this is.
I think it's a better hand in some ways with the KC rather than the AD. And wouldn't personally open either of them a strong two. But I think avoiding borderline cases is pretty much impossible.
Usually there's also a trade off between rules being simple and easily understood and the number of 'strange' cases like these ones and it's not necessarily desirable to sacrifice the first for the sake of greater precision. I think the current regulation is the best definition anyone's come up with, so long as we feel we need a definition of 'strong'.
As others have alluded to, the lion's share of the problem is around disclosure and the hand with AK of clubs being 'legal' doesn't solve that.
I think that there being 2 different definitions of strong is not 'simple'. The original hand in question meets the requirement for an agreed 'Strong 1C' open as with precision, but is not sufficiently strong enough for a 'Strong 2C' open as with ACOL/Benji.
To my mind this unfairly advantages those playing precision (and the like) and disadvantaging those playing more natural opening systems such as ACOL, Benji and even SAYC.
I understand the problem that is being attempted to be resolved here - that people open 2C with hands that are closer to pre-empt strength that may put off the ops from finding their game or slam. However, this current solution just changes the look of these borderline cases - this hand in question did meet the previous requirements, but not the current one.
I would think that a simple solution would be a requirement to announce - Forcing based on HCP, or Forcing but may just be very distributional. Maybe a point range such as announced with NT opens? 2C - "11 to 23, the weaker the hand the more distributional we will be".
These would have the advantage of alerting ops to 'strong' openings that may not be that strong in HCP and seems in my experience to match how Benji players bid already - 2C for either a strong NT or a distributional hands and 2D for strong NT or other 24+HCP game force.
Really? Requiring the strength to be in the long suits seems really weird to me. I can understand wanting to prevent people making "strong" bids on hands without much defensive strength. But if that's the idea, why disallow hands which have an ace or king outside the longest suits, when those are more defensive than hands where the high cards are in the longest suits? The old rule-of-25 seemed more suitable for this reason. (Though I've never really understood the focus on two-suiters for this. Most of the problem hands that come up are single-suited, like the one in this thread.)
Apologies for the rant that follows, but this thread has touched a bit of a nerve.
I really wish the L&E would stop trying to ban Benji.
Benji is widely played at clubs all over the country, and almost universally (at least in my experience) it is described as "8 tricks". That is all people expect. Yes, there is an implicit requirement that the hand is too good for a pre-empt, and we do need to do something to stop people opening it on wholly pre-emptive types which are unexpected. But every time the L&E has come up with something, they've managed to disallow hands which are completely normal Benji openers, like the one in this thread. And so every so often we get these threads where a completely normal Benji opener has come up, lots of players have unsurprisingly opened it with a strong bid, and the poor TD has to decide whether they're going to give out a load of averages and make everyone unhappy.
In a previous iteration of the rules there was much debate about the requirement for "8 clear-cut tricks". Why on earth was "clear-cut" even required? That's not what people play; it's not what people expect from their opponents. The L&E seemed to think that club players ought to have higher requirements for their Benji openings. Perhaps that would be good bridge, but it's not the L&E's responsibility to teach people good bridge. What we do want to do is protect people from things that are unexpected and hard to cope with; but any hand which has 8 probable tricks and enough defence that it's not obviously a pre-emptive hand is not unexpected. It is utterly crazy in my opinion to put in place higher requirements than those that are commonly understood by most club players in the country. If you have a commonly-played system amongst club players, and opponents understand it, then making it illegal is pointless and causes massive problems.
I admit that getting this right is a hard problem. But if we end up with something that disallows routine Benji openers, then we have failed.
There is no problem opening these hands 2D or 2C provided it is made clear that the hand might not be "strong".
That is all that is required "8 playing tricks in any denomination - if the suit isn't clubs the hand may not be strong" -
Benji players might like to add - 2D = "Game forcing with a strong hand or 8 playing tricks in Clubs with a hand that isn't strong." That seems to get around all the problems.
(probably not the place to comment, but I think having 2 clubs as the sole "strong" bid overloads it.)