Optimal Precision Relay: 21st Century Bidding
Card-playing technique at Bridge has reached, for quite some time now, a very advanced and scientific level. That is not the case when it comes to bidding!
Much of the work devoted to bidding over the years has mostly focused on trying to find specific remedies to specific deficiencies. But just tweaking traditional bidding is not the solution, as it cannot and never will achieve satisfactory results, as it is based on a "dialogue" by which each partner describes part of his hand to the other, and that partial description is hopelessly inadequate and insufficient to reach the optimal contract.
The solution is elsewhere and requires rethinking the way partners communicate. The dialogue needs to be replaced by a "monologue," by which one partner asks the other to fully describe his hand through successive, economical relay bids. In this book, the author presents a new bidding methodology which fully integrates the relay process into a bidding method.
Based on the Optimal Hand Evaluation point count, it counts opening hands in HLD points and opens 1 strong Club hands of 18+ HLD points, which limits every other opening to 17 HLD points.
The method reverses the traditional process of using jumps to describe maximum hands by using "braking" bids to describe minimum hands. This enables a much more economical description of the hand and 12 of its 13 cards at the level of three!
It extends the use of transfer responses to all openings of one, allowing them to precisely describe responding hands through economical rebids in various point zones.
Optimal Precision Relay is a fully developed relay bidding method, proposing novel solutions that will be of interest to many readers.