Four Suit Transfers

If your partner bids 1NT, we have methods to tell your partner about 4 and/or 5 card majors.  With one or more 4 card majors, bid 2C Stayman.  With a single 5 card major you can bid 2D or 2H as a transfer bid, asking partner to bid the next suit.  Then you can set the contract while letting partner be declarer.

This is great.  But, what about those poor minor suits.  What if you have a very weak hand with 7 or 8 clubs?  Is there a way to play 3C?  What if you are really strong, with a good minor suit and are interested in a minor suit slam?  How do you bid these hands?

Four Suit Transfers help to solve this problem.  We use 2S with a long club suit to ask partner to bid 3C.  Similarly, we use 2NT with a long diamond suit to ask partner to bid 3D.  There are a variety of possible ways to play this system after these transfers, but that is not the goal of this article.

If we change 2NT into a transfer to diamonds, we can't use 2NT for its usual purpose.  All of a sudden we no longer have a way to invite to game in NT.

How do we invite to 3NT over 1NT?

Counting the Hand on Defense

While playing defense, it is often useful to try and count the suit distribution of the unseen hands.  You'd be surprised how often you can do this fairly successfully.  For example, take a look at the following hand 8-NT played on BBO last night.

I opted to lead a heart.  Click next to see the play to the first trick, and then make what deductions you can.

8-NT Convention Card: No Trump Opening Bids

In this series we systematically discuss the various sections of the ACBL convention card, and what I consider to be 8-NT standard bidding.

Precision Auctions

In order to give 8-NT a taste of some other systems that people play, occasionally I'll post some examples of bidding from another system.  Before we talk about how Oliver and I might bid this hand in the "Precision Club" system that we play, think about how the bidding would go in your system.