[plum_tree]

Extract from the SAYC booklet:
"Notrump openings show a balanced hand and may be made with a five-card major suit or a five-card minor suit."

The booklet is silent on how to find a possible 5-3 fit when the opening bid contains a five-card major?

[Antrax]

You either don't, or play some form of Stayman that caters to it.

[plum_tree]

Was SAYC designed to be played by experts? The booklet has many incomplete auction examples. This must surely be due to the fact that the compilers of the document believe that those playing the system know what the continuation bidding looks like?

[Stephen Tu]

plum_tree, on 2013-June-24, 23:48, said:

Was SAYC designed to be played by experts? The booklet has many incomplete auction examples. This must surely be due to the fact that the compilers of the document believe that those playing the system know what the continuation bidding looks like?

No expert would want to play SAYC without extensive modifications. SAYC is a hodgepodge of vaguely popular treatments thrown together by some now unknown person or people long ago (1980s) with very little thought given to how the treatments mesh together. So the system is a mess. The intent of the card was to create "Yellow card" tournaments where everyone was forced to play the same system. These proved highly unpopular so these "same system" events died out. In the early 1990s though, internet bridge started getting popular, and SAYC was the only system around with a manageably brief text summary that could be easily distributed, so it became the de facto base system for pickup games online. Unfortunately it has persisted till now warts and all. My wish is that BBO BIL instructors would band together and try to kill it.

You mentioned in another post that you were "given the SAYC pamphlet to learn". Whoever did this to you did you a grave disservice. It's impossible to learn how to bid well solely from the SAYC summary. You have to learn how to bid from other sources, then you can kind of understand SAYC and its holes and somewhat figure out how to get around them, and how to bid with pickup partners online. In the long run you will want to find compatible partners, and develop your own system preferences, probably moving toward 2/1 as most better players play these days.

Where to go to figure out how to bid, IMO, if you have no mentor/classes and want to rely on texts (which can be more reliable & thorough than a bad/mediocre teacher anyway):
ordered roughly by experience level:
- Gitelman's "Learn to play bridge" software from www.acbl.org, parts 1 & 2.
Books:
- "Bridge for Dummies" by Kantar
- "Commonsense Bidding" by Root and "Modern Bridge Conventions" by Root/Pavlicek. Possibly skip "commonsense bidding" if have enough experience. If you do get it, keep in mind that it has stone-age treatments in using forcing jump raises, strong opening two bids, penalty doubles of overcalls; the more modern (well 30 years old instead of 50+ but still playable) ways are covered in the conventions book.

2/1:
Lawrence's 2/1 CD or Hardy's "Standard Bidding in the 21st century".
Then for specific topics, and stuff like defensive bidding, if you really want to pick up the advanced fine points you should look at many of Mike Lawrence's books, like his ones on takeout doubles, overcalls, etc. But these are more for when you want to become an advanced bidder. Make sure your card play skill is keeping pace; there are tons of books on cardplay you should be practicing with before you delve too deeply into bidding.

[P_Marlowe]

plum_tree, on 2013-June-24, 23:48, said:

Was SAYC designed to be played by experts? The booklet has many incomplete auction examples. This must surely be due to the fact that the compilers of the document believe that those playing the system know what the continuation bidding looks like?

The yellow card was made up of a set of common conventions, regular played by the expert community, if a expert pair
played together they could take the yellow card, browse over it, eliminate all thinge they did not want to play and
start playing. This was the intention.
Simplified speaking: The Yellow Card was designed to be a template for a convention card, it was not meant to be a
system. Lots of different systems have similar convention cards, since lots of systems start have the same opening
bid, but differ at the answers in the 2nd / 3rd round of bidding.

In short: Yes, if you want to play the Yellow Card you need to have a basic understanding on the things mentioned on
the yellow card.

Regarding your question: How to find a 53 fit, if the NT opening contains a 5 card major?
You cant, at least not with the conventions that are part of the yellow card list.
If you open 1NT with all 5332 shapes, you believe that the occassional miss of the 53 fit is compensated by the
reduced informaion leak to the opponents, the simplification of the bidding in other areas, e.g. the 2nd suit bid by
opener will always be real. You gain something / you loose something.

With kind regards
Marlowe

[Antrax]

One comment about Stephen Tu's post: I think part 2 of "Learn to play Bridge" should be tackled after reading books such as "Bridge for Dummies".
About card play, Gitelman's Bridgemaster 2000 is well worth the investment.

[Stephen Tu]

P_Marlowe, on 2013-June-25, 01:54, said:

The yellow card was made up of a set of common conventions, regular played by the expert community, if a expert pair played together they could take the yellow card, browse over it, eliminate all thinge they did not want to play and start playing. This was the intention.

You have SAYC confused with BWS apparently. SAYC is made up of somewhat-common conventions, some of which were regularly played by the *intermediate+* community. In no way was it intended for use by experts; they were targeting the side events held at NABCs for the people *not* playing in the championship open events, i.e. the *non-experts*, but not beginners/novices. Expert pair would take SAYC, *add* a bunch of stuff until it's really "SA with a bunch of gadgets, a portion of which happen to also be in SAYC", but in reality they'd just start with just SA as the base not SAYC. Actually these days they'd start with 2/1 as the base. SAYC is just missing way too much that no expert pair would be satisfied with SAYC + eliminations (no checkback mechanism after 1nt rebids, no forcing minor raise, no responsive doubles, negative doubles only through the absurdly low level of 2s, only natural defense to 1nt, etc.).

Quote

Simplified speaking: The Yellow Card was designed to be a template for a convention card, it was not meant to be a
system.

No, it was designed to be a system, for those "everyone plays same system" events. It was just poorly designed. Then the fact that it existed in a distributable format made it *become* the de facto CC starting template for online pickup bridge for int- players.

[helene_t]

There are plenty of good pairs that sometimes open 1NT with a 5-card major without having a way for partner to check for it. But if you don't like that, then just open 1M and pretend a minor 3-card suit to be 4 cards.

[plum_tree]

Stephen Tu, on 2013-June-25, 00:49, said:

My wish is that BBO BIL instructors would band together and try to kill it.

Don't you need to kill it at the source, the ACBL? The fact that they revised it as recently as January 2006 shows they still believe it has merit.

[Stephen Tu]

plum_tree, on 2013-June-25, 07:13, said:

Don't you need to kill it at the source, the ACBL? The fact that they revised it as recently as January 2006 shows they still believe it has merit.

I don't think "revise" necessarily means anything other than they changed the publication date. Examining the current document nothing stands out to me as being substantially different from when I originally read it in the 1990s. I think the only thing they changed was wording of the intro, and they specified certain defensive carding instead of allowing a choice of lead from certain combos.

I don't think you have to kill it at the source. If instructors just refused to teach SAYC, then the abomination will die regardless of whether the ACBL still keeps the pub on file.

Larry Cohen thinks we should stop teaching SA and just teach 2/1 since that's what better players play. Just as people used to teach four-card major in US but eventually five-card majors took over. At some point people have to make a stand and stop teaching the old thing.

[blackshoe]

P_Marlowe, on 2013-June-25, 01:54, said:

The yellow card was made up of a set of common conventions, regular played by the expert community, if a expert pair
played together they could take the yellow card, browse over it, eliminate all thinge they did not want to play and
start playing. This was the intention.
Simplified speaking: The Yellow Card was designed to be a template for a convention card, it was not meant to be a
system. Lots of different systems have similar convention cards, since lots of systems start have the same opening
bid, but differ at the answers in the 2nd / 3rd round of bidding.

You have evidence for this history of SAYC? Just curious - it doesn't match what I thought was the basis for SAYC.