My question is whether anyone has any "safer" suggestions for bidding at the 2 (or 3) level, where you must bid with all hand types. For example, one could use certain 2 bids to show 2-suiters, 3-suiters, or other special hand types. These methods would presumably leads to better fits when they come up, although there might be tradeoffs treating other hand types. I enjoyed reading the discussion here on designing a preempt structure, although of course that focused on only bidding certain distributional hand types rather than bidding all hand types. Frequency isn't an issue here, since all hands must find a bid.
Here are a few ideas for comparison:
- Longest suit, just bid it
- all show 4+ (prefer majors to minors and otherwise cheaper of equal lengths)
- 2♥/♠ 4+, could have a longer minor, prefer cheaper of equal length majors
- 2♣/♦ 4+, no 4 card major, prefer cheaper of equal length minors
- 2♣ = 1 suiter, may be 4333 (2♦ asks)
- 2♦/♥/♠ shows 44+ in the suit bid and a higher suit (possibly clubs)
- 2♥/♠ promises 5+
- 2♣/♦ promises 3+
- 2♣ single suiter in a minor
- 2♦ 2 or 3 suiter without spades
- 2♥ single suiter in a major
- 2♠ 2 or 3 suiter with spades