Jinksy, on 2014-December-29, 10:59, said:
Presumably you mean 0.77IMPs per board on which a suitable hand comes up?
Yes. The study I have ripped off compared when a weak 2D was opened at one table and not at the other.
Jinksy, on 2014-December-29, 10:59, said:
Also, the more frequent the artificial bid, the lower the memory load, since seeing it more often will habituate you. Benji is terrible in this respect, too - many of the people who play it have really rudimentary continuations that waste its initial descriptive power (such as it is), because they'd forget anything more detailed every time it came up.
This is very true - despite being relatively complex, playing transfer responses to 1C is so frequent that it is drilled into your brain, even the weirder auctions.
StevenG, on 2014-December-29, 11:11, said:
I fail to see anyone getting rich playing 3 weak twos in a Benji environment. OK, you're not going to win the Bermuda Bowl playing Benji - but, then, you're not going to win the Bermuda Bowl anyway. (If you think you might someday, this post is not for you
![:)](http://www.bridgebase.com/forums/public/style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)
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Personally, I think Benji works pretty well for club players, if that's what they're used to. Having two strong bids might seem like a waste of a bid, but in practice people who change to three weak twos seem to find their 2
♣ opener overloaded, and mess up a lot of previously straight-forward auctions.
0.77 imps on 2.5% of boards is not very much. It's worth ~0.5 imps per session vs top level competition then, roughly, and that's well within noise so it's going to be hard to see the effect in any one session. This is a good argument against playing basically any 2nd or 3rd round gadgets btw - how often do they actually happen? Very rarely. This is how you survive without cue bids - they very rarely come up, and some % of the time you can just punt instead because you have overwhelming power.
What you're used to is definitely a good reason to keep playing something - c.f. memory load.
paulg, on 2014-December-29, 11:39, said:
At the British Home Internationals (Camrose Trophy) next month, you will see one pair playing Benji Acol so clearly it is not the worst of conventions. For the non-Benji players in the event, weak 2♦ and multi-2♦ are the popular options.
helene_t, on 2014-December-29, 13:24, said:
I am sure that the pair Paulg refers to, along with many French top players who also play Benjamin, have found an efficient way to split the strong hands between 2♣ and 2♦. And I also think the omnibus 2♣ opening is overloaded. Those who play multi sometimes have strong variants in them, and while there is certainly a case for playing weak-only multi (especially if playing without screens so that there is a risk of being able to "feel" when p has the strong variant and not being sure if it is UI or not), I also think that it really helps a lot to take some of the strong hands out of the 2♣ opening. With Shogi I play the strong variant of 2♦ as single-suited with diamonds or 23-24 bal or diamonds+major, and I find that very helpful.
But the way most people pay Benji at our local club it is really one of those conventions that work badly even when you do get the hand for it. They seem to play that 2♦ is any gf hand. Opening all gf hands with 2♣ is already cramped so 2♦ is worse. Reverse Benji is better since you can open most semi-gf hands at the 1-level, thereby restricting the 2♦ opening to some specific shapes.
Yeah, look, you can definitely make a reasonable argument to play it. Splitting the strong hands between the two bids is definately a win, and the 2C bid is often quite overloaded which has secondary impacts. As someone who routinely squeezes his weak 2D (and sometimes a weak 2S) into 2C, I feel this pain approximately once a session. You have to decide what the cost/benefit analysis looks like for you, and for my regular partnership we've decided that strong hands lose when a new preempt can be played, but this is by no means clear cut.
Michael000, on 2014-December-29, 16:53, said:
Cthulhu D, on 2014-December-29, 09:43, said:
Thank you for a constructive and helpful post.
I am not sure if I agree with everything you've said but it was a well constructed balanced post which I have difficulty in arguing against. Well done and thank you.
No problem. My argument isn't iron clad - it may be plausible that you do find the extra slams via Benji, or can stay out of more bad games OR you're fine opening some weak 2D openers 3D. But conventions should be analysed from a cost and benefit perspective. If I was starting a new partnership, I would play the following:
Because I think all these things pass my test. But that's just *my* laundry list - you should consider that critically and ask do these bids solve problems for *you* in the context *your partnership* plays. Playing ACOL it is plausible that xfer responses to 1C are less effective than they are for me who plays 5cM.