M J Bridge

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♣

Bidding

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Conventions

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M J Bridge

♦

♠

♥

♣

Bidding

Home

Conventions

Hands

Theory

Ace-showing responses

Cheapest Ace

Bidding your cheapest ace is in effect an advance cue-bid.

You may be tempted to include voids but this can lead to problems - particularly if, as is all too likely, your void happens to lie in partner’s long suit.

The question arises as to just how forcing such a response should be.

Clearly one trick is not sufficient to guarantee game facing a hand of even eight and a half playing tricks, and a sequence such as 2♦, 3♣ when the opening bid is not game-forcing gets far too high far too fast.

I suppose you could limit the convention to positive responses at the two-level, but it probably makes more sense to reserve this method for game-forcing opening bids.

Opener’s first bid

Opener’s rebid

This page last revised 15th Mar 2019

Context  -  Responder’s first bid - partner opened an artificial strong two - RHO passed - positive responses.

CAB

Rather more common is the CAB system of responses.

Originally CAB responses were part of the CAB system - a system which I have not encountered in many years.

CAB responses, however, live on, albeit with differences of detail in the implementation.

The basic idea is tell partner all about your ace holding with your first response.  Bids such as 4NT and 5NT can then be used to locate Kings and Queens.

In a basic implementation, in response to a game-forcing artificial opening bid of 2♣:-

2♦ will deny an ace;

two of a suit (2♥ to 3♦) will show just one ace in the bid suit;

and 2NT will promise two aces.

(This is probably the version which you are most likely to meet.)

In a fuller version (and closer to the original) the responses can also be made to show how many kings are held.  In this extended version the two ace response will probably be moved to 3NT, although the 2NT and 3NT responses which follow can be interchanged.

Thus:-

2♦ will show less than eight points, no aces, and no more than two kings;

2NT will promise at least eight points, no aces, and at least two kings;

3NT will promise two aces.

The eagle-eyed will have seen that this scheme does not allow for the hand of eight or more points with at most one king.

To cover this possibility the earliest versions of the convention used the 2♥ response to show such a hand (Bridge Guys show this as an idle bid which is quite probably true in practice, but I can only imagine that the reason for this idle bid was to show the hand described above).  Single ace responses would then go from 2♠ to 3♥.

Evaluation

As explained on the page on ‘laddering’, in the present context I am not a fan of any system of responses based around point-count - too frequently it will put opener in charge of the auction when holding a balanced hand - it should be responder.

The basic implementation above is certainly playable and straightforward.

Most of the added extras (a count of kings) tend to take the bidding too high before either partner knows much about the shape of partner’s hand.

For me, though, if you want a control-showing set of responses consider AK positives, or alternatively consider some sort of natural ‘source of tricks’ positive.