Played in a 2 day Swiss Event recently. This hand came up and my partner, "first to bid", opened 4 . Using Key Card Blackwood, we ended up in 6 , making 7 (Partner used ruffing finance on the K ) (Not the way I would have played it, I would have first tried to ruff out the K ).
Any way, here is the hand. How would this have been bid in OCP? Both the opening bid and following bids. Thanks.
North South
S KJ10987532 AQ64
H A93 876
D A
C 4 AQJ83
First thing to note, Jimmy, is that there is no way that this is a 4
opener in OCP. I would bid 4
without the
A and (unless at adverse) without the 9th
too. It's a NAMYATS 4
opener IMO, 11 times out of 10.
You ask for the full OCP sequence. Sorry, I can't give you a definite sequence, because this hand raises questions which (AFAIK) are not covered in the notes.
So, having said that :-
4
- 4
(Beta)
and now this brings up an interesting question. Which beta scale are we on? A
strict reading of the notes would suggest that we're on the weak scale, but I find it very difficult to construct a NAMYATS opener which doesn't contain at least two controls, so I would argue for using the normal beta scale in this situation.
4NT(3) - ??
And now I'd want some further thought as to whether we cue bid or use Epsilons. I suspect that this might be down to partnership agreement.
If we're using Epsilons, then I would argue for responder just blasting 6
over 4NT. You might look rather silly if opponents cash two or more
tricks, but the suit responder really needs to know about is
, and obviously the response to a 5
Epsilon is very likely to take us past 5
anyway, so why bother asking? So 4NT-6
and it's now just a question of whether opener has the nerve to punt the grand with the unshown void and extra
Cue bidding makes things a little more certain,
4NT-5
5
-5
6
and I don't think we're going to get to 7
. It could all too easily be on a
finesse, and grand slams on a finesse are
not good odds.