My Published Articles for ViewsHound: The Stayman and Jacoby Transfer Bidding Convention in Bridge

Saturday, August 24, 2024

The Stayman and Jacoby Transfer Bidding Convention in Bridge

Warning: If you are not a Bridge Player This will Not Make Sense to YOU!

I am posting this for the benefit of New and Intermediate Bridge Players. If you are an advanced player you probably know all these by heart. My apology and skip reading until the end of the article.

Responses: Yellow-Forcing for One More Round, Blue-Non Forcing and White- Game Forcing

Notice the current trend now is you can open a bid with 12 points minimum instead of 13 specially if you have 5-CARD major. In the past I do not open with only 12 points.

I have been playing bridge since 1960 both party and duplicate. I played Party and Duplicate bridge from 1960 to 1990 both in home as well as in tournament settings. I have accumulated more than 100 junior IMPs playing Duplicate in Tournaments as well as at the El Cerrito, Ca Bridge Club. Then there was HIATUS years from 1990 to 2023. When I moved to THD last year, I started to play bridge again. Needless to say, my knowledge of the Game has not been erased in my memory after a hiatus of over 33 years.

https://theintellectualmigrants.blogspot.com/2017/11/i-started-playing-duplicate-bridge-on.html

Here at THD I play party bridge 4 days per week. We have a number of good players here at THD but also a few beginners and intermediate players. The convention we used is the Standard American Bidding System with its minor variations. The most common conventions we used are the Stayman and Jacoby Transfer.

A lot of confusion to some players is the response after the Jacoby Transfer. To Clarify see the mark statement below.💚

1. Stayman is a bidding convention in the card game contract bridge. It is used by a partnership to find a 4-4 or 5-3 trump fit in a major suit after making a one notrump (1NT) opening bid and it has been adapted for use after a 2NT opening, a 1NT overcall, and many other natural notrump bids.

The convention is named for Sam Stayman, who wrote the first published description in 1945, but its inventors were two other players: the British expert Jack Marx in 1939, who published it only in 1946, and Stayman's regular partner George Rapée in 1944.

The convention is used if the responder ( to INT) has at least 10 points and has a 4-card major.

2. Jacoby Transfer (used whenever Responder has 5 or more of a major):

To use this transfer technique, you must have 5 cards (or more) in a major suit and any number of points, even 0. Yes, even with 0 points you will demand that your partner bid your suit! Usually, it is a better option to insist on a trump suit than to leave your partner in No Trump when you have a 5-card major. Jacoby Transfer is a demand bid. Responder is telling the Opener to bid a major and Opener must do as told!

With 5+ hearts, Responder bids 2♦. Opener immediately says, “Hearts” so everyone knows that this transfer refers to hearts. As soon as the next player bids or passes, Opener must bid 2♥ (one rank up from Diamonds). With 5+ spades, Responder bids 2♥. Opener immediately says, “Spades” and bids 2♠ (one rank up from Hearts) after opponent’s turn.

💚After transferring, Responder rebids as follows: (yes, you should memorize this) Pass with 0-7 points, bid 2NT with 8-9 points, or bid 3NT with 10+ pts.

Explore Small slam - Think of small slam if you have also 15-17 pts ( ask for Aces and Kings- Blackwood( 4NT) or Gerber( 4Clubs) and Grand Slam if you have 22 points. The total deck card points is 40 and distributional points may be added. Distributional Points: Doubleton=1, Singleton=2 and a Void=3.

A single Ace is counted as 4-5 distributional points. Also you may add one point after your 5-card major, that is if you have 6 add one more point and 2 points if you have 7 in one suit.

With the minimum responding hand (0-7 pts), you cannot give your partner any options. You are better off in a trump suit, even if partner has a doubleton in that major. You do not have enough points together for game, so keep the bidding low. With a medium hand (8-9 pts) or a maximum hand (10+ pts), you can give your partner the option of staying in NT or choosing the major suit. You’ve already told your partner you have 5 in a major; now tell the Opener point count.

How does the opener decide? If the opener has only 2 cards in Responder’s suit, a NT contract can be a better choice, so they can pass. If the opener has 3-4 cards in that major suit, they have the choice to bid the suit, since you have shown 5 cards in that suit and they will know there is an 8-card fit.

Also, by bidding 2NT, you are showing 8-9 pts, so opener can bring it to game level if they have 17 points (maybe even 16, though that is a gamble if Responder has just 8 points).

By bidding 3NT, Responder is showing 10+ points and opener can pass or bid 4♥ or 4♠ with 3 or 4 cards in your major suit

https://www.bridgebum.com/jacoby_transfers.php

Meanwhile Here's a List of other Bidding Conventions Worldwide.

https://www.bridgebum.com/bridge_bidding_conventions.php

“One advantage of bad bidding is that you get practice at playing atrocious contracts.”

“The real test of a player isn't in keeping out of trouble, but in escaping once he's in.”

“Bridge is too important to take seriously.”

“Old Bridge players never die; they just lose their finesse.”

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Guest Article from Susan Creamer Joy

In The Silence, by Susan Creamer Joy.

Today's guest article is from Susan Creamer Joy. Susan is one of my favorite authors in the ViewsHound community. Susan writes, draws, paints and cobbles together art from found objects making a variety of creations from jewelry to religious shrines. She frequently sports burns on her fingers from her soldering iron, paint on her palms and ink under her fingernails, but her hair is usually combed. When she is not losing time in the creative vortex of her studio, she is likely to be putting her knowledge of metaphysics and esoteric principles including Tarot, numerology, astrology and graphology to good use in consultations. Her children are grown, her husband still works and her four dogs believe she needs serious help. The title of her article is "A Matter Of Love And Death". Thank you Susan.

By the time they reached my bedroom door, I was already sitting up – my stomach ratcheted in the tense grip of an unnamed anxiety; my pillow, unburdened of my drowsy head.

To this day I cannot explain how I heard them coming up those stairs in their bare feet or how I knew that my father struggled to hold his composure as my mother unnaturally clutched at the folds of her dressing gown and followed him through the dark just a little too closely.

As the wooden groan of those old stairs tore into my bones that morning like a hacksaw, all I could see between the predawn shadows was the letter I’d written just hours earlier to my boyfriend, Chris, propped against the lamp on my desk across the room awaiting an envelope.

I had not slept well. It was late November and there had been so many changes since the middle of August when he left for the Air Force in Texas to begin basic training and I began my third new school in as many years.

The conspiracy between fate and the last surge of the Vietnam draft had broken apart the every-waking-minutes of our two-year union with unceremonious indifference. All that night my sleep had been infested by difficult dreams and by the illogical fear that truth and reality were merging into a darkness only a martyr could grasp; and at sixteen, martyrdom seemed reasonable only for the nuns among the poor in Bangladesh

I tried to remind myself that he would be home on leave for Thanksgiving in another few days. It was the only tether to calm I could find, but reviewing the facts offered little relief from my baseless fears.

Chris had been girding his pacifist sensibilities preparing to fight in an unpopular war that had not yet slaughtered its last innocent. I was hovering just over the line of inclusion at an exclusive girl’s school – missing him – and finding myself at odds with these young women and their attachment to propriety and with the prep-school veneer that blinded them to the fact that they were no better than anyone else.

Neither one of us was coping well with the worlds into which we were respectively summoned, and although we both knew that the best hope for any future together depended upon our individual successes apart, it was far from comforting most days.

But in spite of our discomfort, we each did our best; and, of course, there were the letters: Thin, plain-paper sheets with row after row after row of inky blue words penned with the intensity and awkward locutions of a love learned too soon. It had come down to just that little, but without them, I would have had nothing.

Chris was learning to fly. I was learning to drive, and both of us were aching to transport our souls to an earlier time through the hallowed intercourse of memories and dreams. Of course, as with all progress, there was the positive element: We were both clean and drug-free for the first time in years.

Now, without pretense, both healthy cognition and sincere motivation surfaced regularly in my psychology and prompted me to care about myself and to arbitrate against all temptation for a better standing in the world, in school and in my own eyes. I even did my homework.

No longer was I escaping today but, instead, living for my day of escape. Lying still in the dark of my room, I listened to the slow, padded footfall of my parents approaching and looked to the floor and to my history book half hidden beneath the nightstand where I’d tossed it the night before. Even in this early morning dark I could make out the swirls and stars in colored marker and the bubble-formed letters that spelled C H R I S in soft, juvenile curves on the torn book cover I’d fashioned out of a brown paper grocery bag.

I vaguely remembered throwing it there somewhat hastily. I had been doing my homework when a sense of urgency struck and I realized I had not written him as I promised I would and glancing at the clock, I noted it was nine-twenty-three. Why that mattered I had no way of knowing in that strange moment, but within hours, it would be one I would never forget; and although I was becoming drowsy and still needed to finish my work, I felt beyond reason that my letter to him could not wait.

So, I wrote. I would always write. I would always be there. He would always be there.“Suzi."It was my name spoken in the smooth and familiar voice of my mother, although weighted and slow, her head bowed to her chest almost as though she were speaking only to herself.

"Suzi.” She said it again, this time with sharp gravity, like a chisel against stone.

As if on cue, I leaned forward, flanked now by my parents who were sitting on either side of my bed.

I had been waiting for them. I don’t know how. I didn’t know why. The lights in my room remained off, but it seemed that the darkness clung more to them than to me, as though they were holding it there – away from me to give me enough light to see through the next moment. They were crying. My father was crying. My father. “Suzi. We have something very, very bad to tell you." Chris has been in a car accident." And he was killed."

If the world moved forward from that moment, I could not know it. f there were air around me worth breathing, I could not take it in. And if there were another sound beyond the leaden bellow of my own raw grief, I could not hear it.

"Who am I going to talk to? Who am I going to love?” I wailed. Who will love me? In that sodden moment violated by the intrusion of a predawn light that had no business rising, everything I ever believed about happiness, hoped for in life, trusted in or held as my own was annihilated.

After that – there was no after that. After that came months of hollow redundancies that would inform my way of being in the world for years to come. A serial commitment to waking up each morning, remembering he was gone and dedicating the remaining hours to forgetting. To that end I would try anything, drink anything, ingest anything, inject anything. It was a slow and arbitrary suicide by indifference.

Many years later, at 25 years-old and in the midst of a pharmaceutical free-fall leaning dangerously close to terminal, I discovered that I was expecting a child, and after a decade of forgetting, I remembered. I named him Griffin after the legendary winged lion, a symbol of the divine because what he inspired and the miracle that he was, were nothing less. I remembered and I loved again, and I went on to marry and to the gift of two beautiful daughters.

Today my son is struggling not to drown in the same well of drug abuse and apathy that almost swallowed me – his great, divine wings clipped by his own hand; and while it is up to him to restore his place in the sky, I will do my best to help provide an open runway.

In the meantime, I will continue soaring for both of us; bequeathed as I have been, with a determination to fly from a boy whose ragged fate precluded that dream.

Death took one young man from me once upon a dark time. If it has any intention of coming for this one, it will have to go through me. And trust me, it will be in for one hell of a fight.

Note: If you enjoy this article, please let me know.

Saturday, August 24, 2024

The Stayman and Jacoby Transfer Bidding Convention in Bridge

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