Is this a forcing pass?
My partner and I play a system where if the opponents open 1 of a suit and it goes "(possible passes) -1x - pass - 2x - pass - pass then next player (me) cannot pass.
We always alert whatever this bid is (because it may not be representative of the hand), but should we alert partner's pass (the one after the 2x)? Whilst it is in all senses a natural bid (unlike most forcing passes), the knowledge that I am forced to bid might be of interest to the opposition.
Comments
Does your partner make their pass on hands which most players wouldn't pass on (e.g. because they know you're forced to bid, they might potentially pass on a strong hand)? If so, you need to alert it.
If your partner's pass shows the expected sort of hand (i.e. a hand that wants to pass out 2x), but the agreement is to bid on anyway, you wouldn't alert it. The reason is that you're entitled to choose the meaning of your bids based on the meaning of the opponent's bids, so you're entirely permitted to base the forcing-or-not meaning of your bid on what the opponent's pass means. Imagine the following bidding sequence:
Pass, 1!h, Pass, 2!h;
Pass¹, Pass², Pass
¹ Alerted as forcing, but the sort of hand that would normally pass 2!h
² Alerted as showing 19+ HCP
Now the opener gets annoyed. "You said pass was forcing! I'd never pass to show a strong hand if I knew you could pass the hand out." And from your point of view: "my partner is a passed hand, you have 19+ HCP, your partner raised your opening bid, my partner doesn't have an opening bid or pre-empt; of course I'm going to pass, passing you out in a partscore is clearly going to be better than anything that happens after I interfere".
Who's in the right here? Clearly, you are. When you defined the pass as forcing, you clearly didn't have something like the opponents' system in mind, and choosing to pass out the allegedly forcing bid is clearly the best option on the hand.
As a result, the "forcing" nature of the pass is dependent on the meaning of the opponent's intervening call; it's more like "in this system, I find it right to bid over any normal pass by the opponents". Really, "forcing" isn't a great description of a bid; calls are typically forcing because they're vague or potentially unlimited, and thus require partner to keep the bidding alive so that the caller can describe their hand further, so the call should be described according to the hand type that it shows. (For example, a strong 1!c is best described as, e.g., "16+ any shape, no upper limit", rather than as "16+ forcing"; the "no upper limit" makes it obvious that responder will try to keep the bidding alive, but you shouldn't make promises about your own system before you discover what the opponent's is.)
That said, in practice your partnership is likely to take advantage of the forcing nature of the pass to pass on some hands which would otherwise be forced to bid; as such, the pass has an unexpected meaning (being potentially stronger or more willing to compete than a normal pass over 2-of-a-suit). So you'd alert it as, e.g., "might be much stronger than a regular pass", "either a normal pass or a strong hand with long hearts", or whatever the bid happens to show.
Especially if opener wants to trap pass!
I think the Pass is alertable under Blue Book 4B1.
No - we always play the bid straight.
I think that there is perhaps something more problematic about this method.
It reminds me of the following story. Two keen but not very experienced (descriptive but politically incorrect epithet omitted) players hadn't played much against the Multi. One day an opponent opened a Multi and his partner passed it and they got a bad result. After the session they put their heads together and devised a compulsory reopening defence to a passed out Multi.
Some time later they sat down to play against a pair of recent junior internationals who opened and passed a Multi. They wheeled out their compulsory defence, duly alerted and explained, and history does not record whether they got a good or a bad result on the board. Two boards later opponents opened another Multi, responder passed on a 19-count and doubled everything in sight once the compulsory defence was wheeled out. One telephone number later and the pair were seen making a hasty amendment to their immaculate system cards. Next to "compulsory re-opening when opponents' Multi passed out" they duly inscribed "except against X and Y" [the names of the juniors in question].
My point is that if playing against a system where opponents cannot systemically pass me out in an opening bid and a single raise, I would want to know this and perhaps adapt the style of my single raise. Not that I'm suggesting a single raise on a 19-count, but I certainly might want to make a single raise on certain hands that were generally considered a little heavy where I might normally find some other bid.
I guess you should put it this way: there's no such thing as a forcing call, only a call that says something that means your partner will nearly never want to pass over it. (For example, most players, if asked, would say that 2!d over 1NT is forcing, but the reason it's forcing isn't that it's defined as forcing; it's that it shows hearts (not the suit bid), and is unlimited (so the 1NT bidder can never know that passing is right). If the player to the opener's right passes, and that's alerted as "22 HCP and eight hearts", you'll suddenly discover that 2!d isn't actually 100% forcing after all.)
Thus, stating that a call is forcing is a really bad description of the call. If you happen to always reopen despite your partner making a natural pass, it's surely the reopening call that gets alerted, not the pass, because it's the reopening call that has an unusual meaning. (The only times I'd want to hear a call described as forcing would be in phrases such as, e.g., "only forcing bid, anything else is a natural signoff", where it's being used to explain the basis on which a vague partnership agreement was made.)
Sometimes the "best" (if illegal) agreement is "except if it come up before against these opponents"
Best (an surely illegal) is "except if opponents have read this in advance"
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There is no such thing as a forcing call in the sense that the partner of the player who made it can always double-cross him by declining to be forced (and is entitled to take opponents' table action into account in deciding to do so). For example, I play a Multi which has strong options, but they are quite rare, so on the grounds of frequency (at Pairs) it would not be daft to pass it with a string of diamonds and not much in either major. It's not generally my style to do so, but I would certainly be more inclined to consider it if RHO had taken forever to pass partner's Multi.
But there is such thing as a forcing call in the sense that it is a call that, by partnership agreement, cannot be passed. There are two types of forcing call, I guess - calls that are forcing because of the logic of the situation such as ais523's transfer example; and calls that are forcing because the partnership has agreed that they should be forcing, even though it might be perfectly reasonable to play them as non-forcing. I think that to stress the forcing nature is only unhelpful in the first case, where you should be stressing the agreed meaning (which just happens to lead to the logic that partner will never pass). I can think of plenty of situations where I would want an opponent to tell me as part of his explanation that a call was forcing.