What is a Bidding System?

For starters, it surely is not a few conventions you scribbled on a convention card. True, with a pick-up partner you incidentally meet in a club, there is little else to do. For the serious, however, and by serious I mean partnerships, more than a framework of gadgets built on a, say natural system is required.

I have three regular partners and because of Madame Fortune's evil curse at the time I was born, I play three different systems with each of them. This, of course does not make me or them better players but it does make us better partnerships. What I hate most at the table is crafting an unnecessary bid for the fear of being misunderstood when there is a perfectly logical bid available. If the puritan in me forces me to make the right bid, I hate the result. And when I choose the safe option I hate myself. For what it's worth, I do not like to play bridge with a pick-up partner.

I can write hundreds of essays on bidding theory and conventions, and I plan to write a few here, though, lower than the hundreds range, the best article that sums up what constitutes a bidding system is written by John Montgomery, in his foreword to Revision Club[1]:

Perhaps surprisingly, the basic framework, or outline, or convention-card-level description of the methods you play is not overwhelmingly important. A competent pair could probably pick up the convention card of another competent pair and, using that as a starting point, devise a true system that is just about as good as whatever would be arrived at by starting with their own personal preferences. How can I say this? How, for example, can it not make a difference what notrump range you play? Or whether or not your strong bid is 1♣ or 2♣ or something else? Well, it does make a difference, but not that big a difference. We know this because of the remarkable variety of basic approaches that have been successful in actual play. Notrump openings of the preemptive variety (10-12 or, where allowable, 9-11 or 9-12) have been used successfully. So have weak and strong notrumps of various ranges, and even super-strong notrumps (17-19, 17-20, even 18-20). "Standard" methods have won national and world championships, and so have big clubs, forcing-but-not-necessarily-strong clubs, and methods even farther out than that. People who don't even bid their longest suit first (canapé) have won at the highest level. What is really important is not the basic framework you play on the first round of bidding, but that you know what your bids mean after that. And this is where most players fall down. For various reasons, they do not put in the work to develop a true system, one that is internally self-consistent and sufficiently detailed to make their framework function optimally.

We will be analyzing more than several bidding systems here. Some will be a few paragraphs that I especially liked about the system under consideration. What I do not want is you making a soup out of them and thinking you now have a cool system. Changing a bit here, plugging a bit there does not make it a system. Think of this post as a reminder.

[1] I will write a post about it separately and Montgomery does not have a web page as far as I know.