Thursday, March 29, 2007

Dealing with opponents strong club opening

Everyone understands that the best way to defend against a strong club is to get in their face... however most people do it with the completely wrong hands. My ideas aren't perfect but I've had a reasonable amount of success against it.

For starters, all of these conventions people play, suction, crash and whatever other strange artificial systems are definitely worse than just playing natural.

I use Mathe: (1C*) X = Majors, 1NT = Minors everything else natural

For the most part, coming in at the one level actually helps your opponents, it doesn't hurt them, so being overly aggressive to overcall 1 with the wrong hand types can be fatal. The key is to take away multiple bidding levels. The best way to do this is to have your partner raise your overcall. In my mind its best to overcall most unbalanced hands over 1C but stay out with balanced hands. The idea is that when i overcall 1H over 1C and my partner has 4 card support and a balanced hand, I want them to jump to 3... taking away all part score bids from my opponents. If I am overcalling 4 card suits, and balanced 5332 hands we will just set our side up for a big penalty.

Dealing with a Precision 1D opening (could be short)
Its bets to play that (1D*) 2D is just natural, and (1D*) 2H is michaels, giving up the weak 2H bid in order to be able to get the natural diamond bid in there.

1 comment:

Sartaj Hans said...

Hiya Gavin,
Great going with the blog. Good luck.
The juniors mentioned your site.

Agree with you that random conventions over strong club are vastly overrated.

Sartaj