[relknes]

I have a quick question about the choice between 2/1 and SAYC.
Is one of the other better for people who open light/undiscipled, vs players who open with sound values? It would seem to me that 2/1 would favor sound openings while SAYC would favor lighter openings. However, this seems to go against the trend of modern bidding, which is opening with lighter and lighter values, but with more and more players going to 2/1.
Do I have the corelation backwards, or are those trends simply due to other things, and not interrelated at all?
2/1 "GF except for re-bid" would seem to split the difference... perhaps this is becoming more common as a reaction to players opening lighter? All speculation on my part, but I was wondering what people thought.

[CSGibson]

relknes, on 2011-February-18, 00:43, said:

I have a quick question about the choice between 2/1 and SAYC.
Is one of the other better for people who open light/undiscipled, vs players who open with sound values? It would seem to me that 2/1 would favor sound openings while SAYC would favor lighter openings. However, this seems to go against the trend of modern bidding, which is opening with lighter and lighter values, but with more and more players going to 2/1.
Do I have the corelation backwards, or are those trends simply due to other things, and not interrelated at all?
2/1 "GF except for re-bid" would seem to split the difference... perhaps this is becoming more common as a reaction to players opening lighter? All speculation on my part, but I was wondering what people thought.

I don't agree that sayc is more forgiving of light openers than 2/1. I also don't see a correlation between people switching to 2/1 and people opening lighter and lighter.

[awm]

It's not "more forgiving" per se, even though it's true that you don't have to always decide whether to GF right away. The more important observation would be that SA is better for invitational (or worse) hands, whereas 2/1 is better for game forcing hands. The lighter you open, the less likely partner is to have a game force...

However, I don't think this really has much to do with why people play 2/1 rather than SA. The issues are more that playing an effective version of 2/1 is simpler (i.e. you need less discussion/agreements), that more work has been put into conventional treatments to be played on top of 2/1, and that a lot of bridge teachers don't actually know SA very well and teach virtually unplayable variants, leading their students to switch to 2/1 as soon as they are able.

[CSGibson]

awm, on 2011-February-18, 00:59, said:

It's not "more forgiving" per se, even though it's true that you don't have to always decide whether to GF right away. The more important observation would be that SA is better for invitational (or worse) hands, whereas 2/1 is better for game forcing hands. The lighter you open, the less likely partner is to have a game force...

However, I don't think this really has much to do with why people play 2/1 rather than SA. The issues are more that playing an effective version of 2/1 is simpler (i.e. you need less discussion/agreements), that more work has been put into conventional treatments to be played on top of 2/1, and that a lot of bridge teachers don't actually know SA very well and teach virtually unplayable variants, leading their students to switch to 2/1 as soon as they are able.

I dispute the statement that SA is better for hands that are worse than invitational (at my own peril, I know; Adam definitely has thought this through more than I have. Most of my advanced SAYC knowledge has come from Adam's expert posts). Specifically, the hand with a long, weak minor opposite the major suit opener often gets to play their suit at the 2 level in 2/1 instead of having to bid 1N. 2/1 players also can distinguish between very weak raises of major suits, vs more constructive raises very easily through the advent of the forcing NT.

[relknes]

CSGibson, on 2011-February-18, 01:07, said:

I dispute the statement that SA is better for hands that are worse than invitational (at my own peril, I know; Adam definitely has thought this through more than I have. Most of my advanced SAYC knowledge has come from Adam's expert posts). Specifically, the hand with a long, weak minor opposite the major suit opener often gets to play their suit at the 2 level in 2/1 instead of having to bid 1N. 2/1 players also can distinguish between very weak raises of major suits, vs more constructive raises very easily through the advent of the forcing NT.

I'll play a bit of devil's advocate here, recognizing as I do so that you know a lot more than I do.
The necesity of a forcing 1NT is actually the weak point of 2/1, imho. Weak openers loose their chance to play a 1NT final contract oposite a weak responding hand. Also, hands are often left with a re-bid problem after 1NT forcing.
Now, in exchange for these two weaknesses, players get much more acurate bidding on their strong hands. They can distinguish between weak raises of the opener's suit and more constructive raises, as you pointed out, and when they can raise the opener this is indeed an advantage, but it is when they can't support the opener that they run into issues because they often have to force the opener to bid at the 2 level anyways. Most players today seem to think that the more acurate bidding of the GF and slam interested hands is worth the occasional mishap with total misfit hands, but it seems to me like, since all of the drawbacks are through the forcing 1NT, and most of the benefits come through the GF hands, that the more often you can force to game and the less often you have to bid 1NT forcing with a weak hand, the more efficient the system becomes compared to SAYC.
Now, it may still be better for a player who opens weak to use 2/1 than SAYC, but if a player only opens with solid values, it seems like 2/1 is a clear cut choice... or at least that was what I was thinking.

[xxhong]

Well, the tendency to open light is to open those distributional hands with good controls in modern bridge. I would open 1S with Axxxxx Axxxx x x and
I wouldn't open 1S with Kxxxx Kxx QJx Qx. That basically means that I hope to find a fit in the first hand to play a game or slam facing a hand also has opening value or more. And the second hand, there is much smaller chance to make a game facing a minimum opening value hand. In that sense, I think
modern bridge of course open light hands with a calculated risk and with a high potential reward. Therefore, I don't see any need to adjust responding style too much to cope with those light openings. Basically, if you find a fit, those light opening hands play well and you should just treat them as a normal hand. If you don't find a fit, you just bid 3NT and hope you don't get doubled and make it. After a 2/1 gf sequence, it is not an easy task to double 3NT even if you can defeat it for a few tricks.
For bidding systems, SAYC is just an ancient system. It is still quite focused on finding the best partial and inviting too much. It may have some values in match point (not always, because game and slam bidding can also be very important in MP, and 2/1 can usually offer reasonable spots in partials as well), but the efficiency in game and slam bidding is much lower than 2/1, which is just against the score format of this game. So it is just a matter of time that people will eventually play a system that fits well with the score format.
Also, one can play 2/1 without forcing 1NT. 2/1 principle just forms a gameforcing situation with game value. Therefore, if you have more ways to invite using bids other than 1NT or 3M, you really don't have to play a forcing 1NT IMO.

relknes, on 2011-February-18, 00:43, said:

I have a quick question about the choice between 2/1 and SAYC.
Is one of the other better for people who open light/undiscipled, vs players who open with sound values? It would seem to me that 2/1 would favor sound openings while SAYC would favor lighter openings. However, this seems to go against the trend of modern bidding, which is opening with lighter and lighter values, but with more and more players going to 2/1.
Do I have the corelation backwards, or are those trends simply due to other things, and not interrelated at all?
2/1 "GF except for re-bid" would seem to split the difference... perhaps this is becoming more common as a reaction to players opening lighter? All speculation on my part, but I was wondering what people thought.

[awm]

Some of the ways SA is better at bidding weak hands:

(1) You can play in 1NT after 1M-1NT, which is often the best partial.
(2) After 1M-1NT-2m, you know opener has a 4-card minor. So you can pass and play in your 4-4 minor fits (instead of 5-2 major fit).
(3) After 1M-1NT-2X, if you have a really nice fit for X you can raise. Partner will know you are weak with a fit, not some flat 11.
(4) After 1M-1NT-2X, if you rebid your own suit partner knows you have about 6-9 points. In 2/1 this has a wider range...
(5) After 1M-1NT-3X, you have a lot fewer hand types to sort out, making continuations a lot easier.
(6) After 1M-1NT-2X, responder's 2NT rebid has no natural meaning. Elianna and I use this to show an extreme two suiter.
(7) After 1M-1NT-2X, responder's 3M has no natural meaning. This can be used to show a super-fit for suit X (by agreement).
(8) After 1M-1NT-2X, responder's jump-new-suit has no natural meaning....
(9) Opener can bid 1M-1NT-4M without risk of missing slam (since 1NT is NF); this reduces info to opponents.

Yes, 2/1 gets you "constructive raises" but a lot of people (including me) think that this treatment is generally poor and it is better to support with support. You can bid 1NT (forcing) on a horrible hand with 3-card support of course, but you can actually bid 1NT (non-forcing) on this hand also, and in some ways it is more effective at keeping opponents out of the bidding. I understand that some people play 1M-3X as invitational and natural in 2/1, and this helps somewhat with point 4, but there are still issues when the suit is not so good and so forth, plus you have lost the jump shifts that could have a different meaning.

[FrancesHinden]

The lightness of your opener shouldn't affect the choice of 2/1 or not; you just need to keep the strength of your game forcing response sufficiently strong that you want to force to game (obvious, isn't it!)
If you are going to open on a wider range of hands, and still want to respond on a wide range of hands, then you probably want to play some system after 1M - 1NT to sort out hand strengths. There are various flavours around, pick one of them (or write your own).

[Mbodell]

FrancesHinden, on 2011-February-19, 12:53, said:

The lightness of your opener shouldn't affect the choice of 2/1 or not; you just need to keep the strength of your game forcing response sufficiently strong that you want to force to game (obvious, isn't it!)
If you are going to open on a wider range of hands, and still want to respond on a wide range of hands, then you probably want to play some system after 1M - 1NT to sort out hand strengths. There are various flavours around, pick one of them (or write your own).

Agree. We play 2/1 in a strong club system with 10-15 openers. Our 2/1 responses generally need the equivalent of a good 14 points. We play Gazilli over 1M-1n and 1♥-1♠ and it works out, even though our openers are limited to 15. If you played 10-21 or 11-21 I'd think you'd need something like Gazilli.

[awm]

FrancesHinden, on 2011-February-19, 12:53, said:

The lightness of your opener shouldn't affect the choice of 2/1 or not; you just need to keep the strength of your game forcing response sufficiently strong that you want to force to game (obvious, isn't it!)
If you are going to open on a wider range of hands, and still want to respond on a wide range of hands, then you probably want to play some system after 1M - 1NT to sort out hand strengths. There are various flavours around, pick one of them (or write your own).

While this is true on some level, I don't think it's actually quite right. Bridge is, after all, a game of frequencies. A system where all 2/1 responses are forcing to game will tend to do better when responder has a game force (with so many descriptive bids available for GF'ing hands), and will struggle somewhat when responder has less than a game force because so many hand types have been squished into 1NT. Certainly you can try to fix this somewhat by playing Gazilli or Bart or whatever after 1M-1NT, but you will never do as well on these hands as a system where some of them can be unloaded into the 2/1 bids.

So we have to ask, is it worthwhile to have better bidding on our GF'ing responder hands in exchange for worse results on at least some of our less than GF responder hands? This simply must depend on frequencies (and to some extent also form of scoring). The lighter my opening can be, the stronger my partner's GF'ing response will need to be. This means the frequency of having a 2/1 GF auction is going down, while the frequency of the 1NT forcing response is going up. It seems pretty obvious to me (for example) that if I opened all 8-counts with a spade suit 1♠, it would be silly to play that each of 2♣, 2♦, and 2♥ responses requires a good 16-count from partner, whereas every responder hand in the 6-15 hcp range bids 1NT! Most real systems are not that extreme, but there must be a point where diminishing frequency of 2/1 auctions makes a different approach superior. Some of us think this point has already been reached (or passed)!

[mike777]

FWIW

I was taught a 2/1 litish opening, 2/1=14+, Walsh style. We also try and throw many 14+ offshape hands bal/semibal into a nt type opening.
The main advantage is too get in the first bid. The goal is to get in and get out fast and first.
It is important to be disciplined as responder in your gf and invitational bids.
---


This throws alot of hands into 1nt semiforcing.Bart can be helpful on some of these problem deals.

The system is biased towards majors and nt. Yes this means weak responder hands with a long minor are not handled best.

Since you assume pard has junk, you need to be alot more careful with your penalty x's compared to roth stone.