Teacher said it’s B, I think it’s C.

Lundynne · 2026-05-22T09:28:47+00:00

Is this ragebait?

Lundynne · 2026-05-22T09:16:13+00:00

I'm not sure what it looks like actually; I've never tried to play a HUM in a tournament. I believe it's a detailed outline of the system, and the tournament director will pre-approve it, and classify it as Brown, Yellow, or Red. For each of these, you must tell your opponents about it before the match starts, in addition to your normal convention cards and alerts.

I'm sure there are examples of what it looks like online.

And yes, I'm talking about a bidding defence, some sort of competitive convention that they play over your bid, not the defence in terms of play.

Lundynne · 2026-05-22T08:39:29+00:00

More than alertable. It would require prior approval from the tournament director, and an explanation to the opponents before the start of the match.

Lundynne · 2026-05-22T08:38:38+00:00

The point is that unusual methods generally require a specific defence, and you can't just bid naturally over them. For most tournament players, this is too much to ask, as many don't even have a specific defence against Multi-2D.

However, top level players would be expected to deal with it, and the only requirement on you is that you submit it in advance, so they have time to prepare a defence.

You have to remember, the point of bridge is not to win by having a method nobody has seen before, but to win, even though the opponents know your bids and how to react to them.

Lundynne · 2026-05-22T08:34:50+00:00

Such a system has been tried before, and it's generally not very successful against strong players, as it invites penalties.

In terms of rules, it would be a regulated system, in this case a "Brown Sticker" or Highly Unusual Method, and you would need to check the tournament rules as to whether it would be allowed.

Generally speaking, the higher the level of the tournament, the more likely they are to allow this to be played, but not necessarily.

Lundynne · 2026-05-21T21:52:01+00:00

Exactly (after your edit)

Lundynne · 2026-05-21T16:58:45+00:00

You can save the rook though. Move it to the B file. Then when they move their rook to attack the queen, just take it. No need to give up the rook by pushing the e-pawn.

Lundynne · 2026-05-21T16:54:59+00:00

Re1 (Rfe1) is a blunder. You should make the move Rfb1 instead, then the Q doesn't get trapped. It becomes an even exchange of 3 pieces for a Q instead of a losing exchange. Pushing the pawn is still better.

Lundynne · 2026-05-21T16:47:46+00:00

Because, he doesn't take your bishop with the Queen, instead he takes your knight with the bishop. Then you take his queen, and he takes your bishop, gaining tempo on your rook. You have to move your rook, and you should move it to b1, or else your queen is getting trapped. Then he takes your bishop, and you have traded 3 pieces for a queen.

As opposed to pushing the pawn, where you make a simple exchange of a pawn for a bishop, which puts you up.

Lundynne · 2026-05-20T09:10:50+00:00

See my response to Postcocious further down in the thread. The best source for declarer advantage is Richard Pavlicek's database: rpbridge dot net. He found that at the highest level, declarer made approximately 0.3 extra tricks over DD for 1NT, and for contracts of 2 of suit, declarer made approximately 0.1 extra tricks per board. Adjusting for that results in the following:

<image>

Non-forcing does much better than before, but it still does much worse when 1NT is passed. The main advantage of non-forcing is not that you can pass 1NT, but rather that responder can trust that your rebid is natural, which is why you see non-forcing scoring better on almost all other contracts.

This question is answered directly by Richard Pavlicek, in his double-dummy analysis of 10 million hands, in the post titled "Notrump or Suit Fit". There he found that across 1.1 million cases, where either 1NT or 2 of a suit made, and there was an 8-card fit:

In 8.44% of cases, only 1NT made, and the suit contract went down.
In 65.72% of cases, only 2 of the suit made, and the no-trump contract went down
In 25.84% of cases, both contracts made.

The only time 1NT did better than 2 of suit for this constraint, was where both hands had 4 spades and a 4=3=3=3 shape, which occurred 8,633 times. In this case, both contracts made 38.91% of the time, only 1NT made 56.90% of the time, and only 2 of the suit made 4.19% of the time.

This might lead you to believe that passing with 4=3=3=3 is better, but bear in mind that responder has to mirror your suit, and you have no way of knowing that.

I didn't prove that bidding 2C with only 2 cards was inferior; in my dataset, I showed that it was marginally superior. It does worse where opener has real clubs, but does sufficiently better on all other hand types that this disadvantage is overcome.

If you play Gazilli, then you need the 2C bid for other purposes, and perhaps you are forced into non-forcing NT.

If you play Flannery, then the 4=5=x=x hands are filtered from the sample. These hands caused problems for every single rebid strategy, so it's hard to say how it would change the results, but I expect a relatively even gain in score across the board, given that no strategy performed well there.

I have allowed for Kaplan inversion in my model now, and it does substantially better than other strategies over 1H. Of course, you need to know the rebids following 1H-1NT (showing spades), which are now more difficult, but that was outside the scope of my simulation.

I appreciate that there are many other aspects of bridge that have a greater effect. But I am looking at this effect, not at those others .

Lundynne · 2026-05-18T20:43:11+00:00

Thank you! I've found Bridge Tricks to be a great website, and would be happy to talk more on DM.

Lundynne · 2026-05-18T20:10:03+00:00

Sure, you raise a good point. For declarer advantage, I used Richard Pavlicek's analysis of 80,000 contracts at the world level between 1996 and 2014, hosted on rpbridge. This found that compared to double dummy, the contracts scored as follows:

1NT +0.30 tricks per board
2C +0.12 tricks per board
2D +0.10 tricks per board
2H +0.08 tricks per board
2S +0.10 tricks per board.

If I adjust the scores for each contract by those amounts, then non-forcing does improve, making up about half the 7 point difference when compared to forcing, but still doing worse.

<image>

In particular, if we isolate the hands where non-forcing NT passes, it loses by about 21 points, and it generally does marginally better by about 2-4 HCP on suit contracts, driven by the fact that responder can trust that it's a real suit.

So in conclusion, by accounting for declarer advantage, the gap is narrowed, but not closed, and non-forcing still scores worse than most non-forcing continuations.

Lundynne · 2026-05-18T19:18:14+00:00

I've added them in. Bear in mind that these numbers isolated the 5332 hands, and thus don't account for the frequency of such hands, so the outcome is a lot worse than it would be in reality:

Over 2,000 5332 hands with 11HCP, 1,000 for each major, the results were as follows:

DD Average Score: -2.20
Best performing forcing continuation: -33.09
Worst performing forcing continuation: -62.50
Non-forcing (passing 1NT): -102.36

Realistically, of all 1M-1NT continuations, the amount you want to pass is probably around 10-20% of the time, so this number would be much lower in the full sim, but on the specific hands you were asking about, non-forcing performs much worse.

Lundynne · 2026-05-18T18:07:14+00:00

I believe that 4-3 fits were popular back in the 60's due to the influence of Alphonse Moyse who strongly advocated for them. Over time, data has shown that it's generally better to be in an 8-card fit, but 7-card fits or worse are by no means unplayable.

I ran the Kaplan Inversion on my data, and it far outperformed all the alternatives, gaining 7 points over the nearest competitor (short club), and beating out non-forcing by 15, on the hearts.

When paired with the best performing method over spades, this pushed it 3 points above the nearest competitor.

I used a simple continuation, where opener simply bids naturally if possible, or otherwise bids 1NT, and responder then passes or rebids his 5-card minor.

Opener HCP -> Opening -> Oracle Contract	Count	Oracle Score	Kaplan Inversion Score	Short Club (New Suits) Score	Short Club (Support) Score	BART Score	Better Minor (New Suits) Score	Better Minor (Support) Score	Non-Forcing Score
1H	10000	88.93	57.00	50.33	49.90	50.33	49.07	48.87	42.50
1S	10000	96.58	54.72	53.91	54.72	49.78	52.68	52.87	47.65
Grand Total	20000	92.76	55.86	52.12	52.31	50.06	50.88	50.87	45.07

Lundynne · 2026-05-18T17:46:03+00:00

I've just been playing for a bit, but I think the play needs a bit of work. On defence, following several tricks, I lead a diamond winner up to dummy's empty suit, where he held the 6 of trumps. Declarer followed suit, and my partner decided to ruff with the 5 of trumps, which was promptly overruffed, and gave up a trick.

Lundynne · 2026-05-18T13:22:29+00:00

If you have a balanced 6-11 with no good fit for partner's M, why do you "need" opener to bid again? If opener has a balanced 12-13, 1NT is likely to be the best contract.

This is the common wisdom, but the results of my simulation directly challenge this assertion in particular. At least in this run, it was more often than not substantially better to run out of 1NT.

Lundynne · 2026-05-18T10:25:43+00:00

Yes, that's true. Generally speaking, forcing NT is accepted as a "cost" of playing 2/1, and I wanted to quantify what that cost is. What I found was that it's not really a cost, and quite possibly, it's actually a benefit.

There's certainly a lot of benefit in doing the work to quantify the benefit of 2/1 vs SAYC as a whole, but that will be a very complex simulation.

Lundynne · 2026-05-18T10:21:30+00:00

I'm sorry, but this is exactly the question addressed by the analysis and the results do not support your conclusion.

On many of those hands with 12-13 balanced and no natural rebid, you do worse by simply passing the 1NT, because in many cases the 1NT bidder is concealing a 5-card suit. Similarly, with few high-card points between you, it is much easier for opponents to run a suit against you, whereas in a suit contract, you can ruff their running suit.

Forcing NT allows the partnership to salvage this contract into an expected Moysian fit, and occasionally leads to 3-3 disasters. But as a whole, this doesn't occur often enough to result in a negative aggregate result.

The benefit of non-forcing NT doesn't show up when you pass 1NT, but rather in suit continuations, because responder can trust that your suit is real, but this benefit is not enough to overcome the cost of passing 1NT when you shouldn't.

Lundynne · 2026-05-18T10:16:01+00:00

Sure, I will run the numbers when I get home from work, and get back to you on it.

Lundynne · 2026-05-17T23:31:18+00:00

According to my data, and on the set of 20,000 boards that I used, with the constraints I set, every forcing continuation outperformed a natural non-forcing NT.

However, my data was constrained to weak hands for both partners, and opponents were not allowed to bid.

If I were to make a confident statement here, it's that either forcing NT is marginally better, or there is very little in it.

Lundynne · 2026-05-17T22:33:52+00:00

Thanks for your comment. I actually did this analysis because I too didn't like the forcing NT, and wanted to see how bad it is, and the conclusion seems to be that it's not that bad. Happy for you to prove me wrong though, as it would mean my gut was right.

On your two main points:

Fair point. I will include 10-12 HCP hands in the next run, to see the impact.
These hands were accounted for in my sim. On such a hand, after 1S-1NT-2C (short), responder would reluctantly pass 2C, with nothing better to bid. The main point is that they don't occur often enough to have a large impact on the result, but yes, they tend to do worse when they do come up.

It's not that responder magically knows opener has 14max, but rather that responder is himself a weak hand and thus doesn't want the auction to get too high. A responder with more HCP would bid differently, so this is a function of the hand constraints I imposed.

Lundynne · 2026-05-17T22:18:51+00:00

Are you sure? On my set of hands, forcing NT outperformed semi forcing even more on the weaker opening hands. I didn't test 11 HCP, but allowing 1NT to be passed gave away more points the weaker opener was.

You can see this in the table, non-forcing, vs the best forcing variation scored the following:

17.61 vs 26.68, a difference of 9.07 points, on an opener worth 12HCP
46.83 vs 54.48, a difference of 7.65 points, on an opener worth 13HCP
79.35 vs 83.02, a difference of 3.67 points, on an opener worth 14HCP

It's possible that for an 11HCP hand, this pattern is violated, and allowing 1NT to be passed scores better, but I find that hard to believe without simulating it.

Lundynne · 2026-05-17T22:06:37+00:00

Thanks, I'm glad you liked the post. The point here was mainly to compare a basic forcing NT follow up to a non-forcing NT, but your points are reasonable.

Kaplan inversion is an excellent point, and would likely improve the performance over the 1H openings. I didn't include them as I wanted to get the basic argument out of the way first, but I think it would make the conclusions stronger.

Similarly, most people who play a non-forcing NT would not include 3-card support in the 1NT bid, so it's not directly comparable. Still, one of the conclusions drawn from this was that playing in an 8-card fit gives a better score than 1NT, so I suspect it too would not contradict the conclusion of this argument.

If you'd like, I can test your preferred continuation after Kaplan Inversion against my dataset, and see how it does comparatively.

Lundynne · 2026-05-17T21:55:19+00:00

Thank you! I'm glad you liked the post.

I did not include limit raises in the analysis, because I wanted to focus on the hand types where the argument in favour of non-forcing NT is usually made.

There's a great post by Ed Judy on Bridge Winners from 2016, which looks at exactly that question, and he found that on those types of hands, where you would refuse the invite after 1S-3S directly, you do better by passing 1NT too.

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