A Suggestion for Weak Notrumps

[rod]

I've never liked weak notrumps very much.

Proponents of weak and super-weak 1NT openings will tell you that while you often preempt yourself out of a superior suit partscore, you will also often do the same to the opponents. So, say they, the bid does not place you at a disadvantage.

However the problem is that when you play the weak notrump, you can no longer open a strong notrump. And stronger hands are where the 1NT opening achieves its greatest tactical benefit. When you pick up about 16-17 HCP, this is the tipping point where your side has about a 50% chance of holding game values. Here the 1NT opening reaches its full obstructive potential, because your side usually has the balance of power to find its best fit and level, while the opponents enter the auction only at great peril.

Having said all that, I've also noticed that I don't like playing against a weak notrump! It makes life more difficult for everybody. And that gets us to the key point of this article. Which is that we'd like bridge to be a more difficult game when the opponents are vulnerable than when we are.

What I propose is to play weak notrumps only in first and second seat when the opponents are vulnerable and we are not, and strong notrumps in all other cases. There's some comfort here in that if the opponents have 9 tricks in notrumps, they will earn 600 from bidding 3NT but only 500 from defending 1NT doubled. On top of that there's the practicality that defending a notrump contract is usually more difficult than declaring one.

The range I suggest is 10-13 HCP, which will come up often. A 5-card major is permitted with 5-3-3-2 pattern. Thus a suit opening is either unbalanced, or 14+ balanced. Your bidding methods can otherwise remain pretty much unchanged. However you might want to employ some system of runouts if the weak 1NT opening is doubled. Brozel Escapes and Meckwell Escapes are two examples of this.

[Cthulhu Dreams]

We did this a lot - playing a 14-16 NT or a 11-13 NT. The only problem is it has such a huge impact through the rest of your system it is a huge amount of memory load for a pretty minimal advantage.

The range I suggest is 10-13 HCP, which will come up often. A 5-card major is permitted with 5-3-3-2 pattern. Thus a suit opening is either unbalanced, or 14+ balanced. Your bidding methods can otherwise remain pretty much unchanged.

The problem is that after a very common auction 1C-1H! (spades), 1S (3 card support unbalanced or the 14-16 NT in this example), the situation is very different from 1C-1H! (spades), 1S (3 card support unbalanced or the 11-13 NT in this example)

If you're playing a weak NT I think you really need a rebid structure that benefits from the fact that opener is much more likely to have an unbalanced hand now, whereas if you're playing a 14-16 NT always the rebid structure is pretty fixed.

All this goes into the bin if you're playing some sort of strong club system though. Every strong club system I tried loves the weak NT NV because its still easy to cater for openers stronger balanced hands.