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mike777, on 2025-October-20, 07:59, said:
DavidKok, on 2025-October-20, 03:18, said:
Personally I loathe lead-directing bids, and view them to a great extent as excuse in the post mortem. Yes, they can definitely work. Yes, they are popular and widespread. Yes, there are even situations where I will play them. But there is so much bad in with the good. They often don't work even when they come up, and the opportunity cost is tremendous. I draw parallels to stopper based bidding, or suit quality requirements. I am convinced that my lifetime return on these notions is soundly negative. If only nobody had ever taught me of these concepts I would be a stronger player.
Wow please elaborate. If I understand your post, stopper-based bidding or suit quality requirements are soundly negative concepts?
I need to be precise here, as it's a nuanced topic. The bottom line is correct though. Of all the lead-directing bids I've seen (both literally and in system notes), I think the net gains of them is negative. The same goes for all stopper-showing and stopper-asking bids. And the same goes for all bids that come with suit quality requirements.
Now this is obviously a very general statement. There are situations where it makes sense to include any of these. But it always comes with an opportunity cost. If an overcall or light third seat action is lead-directing, it is less informative about shape (either because we now have to pass hands with the same shape that aren't as suitable for having partner lead into, or because we might cheat on a shape requirement to get a good suit in). And less informative about ODR - do I want partner to compete?1
If I allocate part of my bidding system to stopper showing - say, after a 4SGF auction, or an inverted minor auction - I don't have as much space to resolve shape. This makes it more difficult to find slams, find winning 5m contracts, or even just to evaluate the hand.
With suit quality requirements on a bid, I now need a second option for a hand with the same shape and the same strength but with different honour concentration. My systems can't support this, there's no space. My favourite example is opening 1M with 5M332 in range with a good suit (which, ironically, might be exactly backwards? You only score the weak cards if they are trumps, but the strong suit will run in NT. But I digress). I don't have a sensible rebid if I cheat on the shape on many sequences, including most competitive ones. And I don't want to design my system to show the hand that way either - the cost is too high.
For now I'll keep it brief and leave it here. I think the costs of making a bid have multiple purposes - show shape but also request a lead, for example - are often overlooked. Currently I'm trying to bid my hand type and shape, and assist partner as much as I can on the competitive auctions. I find that this task alone locks in basically all of my sequences. I can't afford the luxury of doing something else - what the system is already doing is too important.
1I'm particularly harsh on bidding for the lead as it's such a parlay bet: we need partner to be on lead, we need the announced lead to actually be best, we need partner to not have found the lead naturally without our bid and we need the opponents to bid to a poor spot despite us just announcing the lead to the world. I find it more important to bid for the contract - I want to compete and I want to put on the pressure. And when the dust settles, partner leads what they think is best - taking my bidding into account, but not giving it significant weight as a command.