Robert (Bob) Crosby, who died in 2012, was a bridge player of Edmonton, as well as being a coach and a prolific bridge writer. In this series of articles we pay our tribute for his fruitful and generous work, in which he shared his knowledge of bridge with everyone. Source: The Bob Crosby Memorial Library
Monday, September 19, 2005 9:53 PM
Hand Evaluation – Single Handed Bidding
PITBULLS:
The examples of single handed bad bidding in Bridge are endless. These are the bids that exclude partner from the decision making process. Overbidding , underbidding , failing to invite , bad opening bids , overcalls , pre-empts are a few examples. Another example of bad single-handed bidding is the trump stack penalty double in competitive auctions. This bid is quite often very single handed as the doubler has no idea if partners opening bid , overcall or balance is minimum or maximum or if it is a defensive/offensive hand. The doubler is giving information to the opponents to allow them to run to another suit/NT or how to play the hand. The trump stack doubler is playing with fire as the contract making gets rewarded quite nicely in the IMP scale. Quite often the doubler puts a lot of stress on partner to run possibly getting into trouble herself as duplication of value in their suit is useless offensively. The penalty double is quite often pre-mature as if the doubler just passes, partner would have doubled anyway to show a good defensive hand . The contract gets converted for penalty so all ends well for your side.
This “style” of converting for penalty by partner re-opening with a double was made popular by negative doubles. What this treatment does is …Click Here to continue reading
