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INTRO4CM.4CA
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1995-09-06
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INTRODUCTION
In the days of auction bridge, the predecessor to contract bridge,
it was a general rule that one did not open the bidding in a major
suit without five or more cards in the suit. Partners tended to
pass a major suit opening, even with a good hand and poor support
for opener's suit, making it unwise to opener a four-card major.
The result was often an inferior contract in notrump or a minor
suit when a good 4-4 major suit fit was overlooked.
Toward the end of the auction bridge era, a number of young experts
began to violate that general rule by opening with a four-card
major when the hand seemed to call for it (e.g., a 4-4-4-1
distribution). That tendency carried on into contract bridge,
helped by the fact that the game of contract required the bidding
of games or slams in order to get credit for them. In auction
bridge a declarer playing a one spade contract, making seven, was
awarded the premium for a grand slam. In order to bid games and
slams one had to bid more scientifically, not overlooking 4-4 fits.
The bidding of four-card majors therefore became the standard
approach. Only old fuddie-duddies retained the five-card major
requirement.
Then the wheel came full-circle, and five-card majors had a
resurgence. The idea arose that starting the bidding with a minor
suit more frequently would lead to more efficient exchange of
information. As expressed by Richard A. Epstein in his book The
Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic:
From an information-theoretic viewpoint, the information
conveyed per bid is maximized if the probability of any
particular bid's occurring (as dictated by the measure
applied to the hand) is twice the probability of the next
highest bid; thus an opening bid of one club would occur
twice as frequently as an opening of one diamond, which
in turn would exhibity twice the frequencey of one heart,
etc. A bidding system conforming to this principle is not
feasible, owing to the artificial scale of scoring
established for Bridge and the agreed-upon game ob-
jectives. However, certain restrictions or conventions
in the bidding format can approximate this system. For
example, not opening with a bid of a major suit unless
that suit is composed of five or more cards tends to
augment the frequency of one club and one diamond
openings.
Thus, the motivation for reverting to five-card majors was to
provide more room for the exchange of information, not, as is
popularly supposed, to avoid 4-3 trump fits. Another reason was to
reduce the frequency of two-over-one responses, which proved to be
very troublesome.
The first chapter of this book, FIVE VS FOUR, debates the pros and
cons of both approaches, and the rest of the book documents the
author's four-card major bidding system. The system owes much to
the writings of Terence Reese, Marshall Miles, and Eddie Kantar
(although they might not like to have their names associated with
what I have put together).