Getting a bad board isn't the worst thing for me -- what kills me is the embarrassment. I hate looking like a fool at the bridge table, and few things sting worse than when the defense is about to lead and partner announces "There's been a failure to alert..." D'oh. Then I see that we're playing our 4-2 diamond fit when we're cold for 6 of either major.
Lately, McKenzie and I have talked about adding 2-Way New Minor Forcing to our card. I haven't seen it used very much, so aside from my experience playing regular New Minor Forcing, I didn't know anything about this convention. It's fairly simple, but I knew that without getting it into my head right away, I'd miss it the next time it came up in a game. So McKenzie set up a practice room in the Partnership Bidding area of Bridge Base Online
. He set up the room so that he would always hold 11-14 point hands with 2-4 spades, 2-4 hearts, 2-5 diamonds and 2-5 clubs (always looking like a weak notrump, never a hand that would open a major), and all of my hands were 7+ points. This didn't guarantee that we'd have a NMF sequence every time -- it doesn't help if I *know* it's coming -- but it did come up quite frequently, and I was able to get enough practice to drill it into my head before blowing it at our next duplicate game.
You don't get to play out these practice hands in the BBO room, but if it's bidding practice you need, it's bidding practice you'll get. This is a great tool, and I'm sorry I didn't discover it sooner. Did I mention that it's free?
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Though, of course, sometimes within those parameters I'd get a hand that I wouldn't treat like a weak notrump... sometimes I'd get a bad 11 (or 12, or 13) and pass, and sometimes I'd get a 14 that was good enough to open a strong notrump. Then there was this one time when it generated Ax KQT9 Axxxx xx, and I went ahead and opened 1H! Some of the kibitzers were astounded... but really, I think opening 1H and rebidding 2D is best with this hand. I hate rebidding 5-card suits or 1N with a small doubleton in an unbid suit, so I think opening 1H on a strong 4-bagger is the best solution.
You can also access Bridge Base from MSN Game Zone now.
My favorite feature of Bridge Base is Vugraph (for those unfamiliar, it's a way of watching real tournaments from around the world live on your computer. You can see all the hands and an operator watching the whole table will click on each card as they are played while experts on computers comment on the match).
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