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In this issue, we continue our exploration of forcing bids. As we learned in Part I, categorically we have three types of bids: forcing, invitational, and signoff calls. We learned that when responder bids a new suit, it’s forcing for one round. In this issue, we will explore bidding in competitive auctions, balancing bidding and other challenging auctions. We should caution you that this newsletter may be too advanced for our newcomers. In fact, many of our novice players will be challenged with some of these bidding scenarios. No worry – you can profit from those auctions that meet your comfort level and save the tough ones for later in your Bridge career. We have underlined the bids we believe are the most challenging, including bids that likely require a partnership agreement before you begin playing. But as long as you are up to speed with Part I of our Forcing Bids newsletter, you should have a sound bidding foundation. And hopefully you’ll take solace knowing from time to time we will ponder forcing/non-forcing bids in our fair game.
Quiz yourself here on forcing bids.
Also in this newsletter, we’re up to the Rule of 13 in our “Rules of” tips. Oops, we are not aware of such a rule but fear not, we’ll wing it and come up with our own variation of how to use the number 13. Sometimes 13 is a “lucky” number after all.
Quiz yourself here on forcing bids.
All of this seems reasonable enough. Getting my partner to follow forcing bid agreements, that’s another matter. As an example, my partner freely passes my revese bids.