Opening 2C And Responses

The opening bid of 2C is the big opening of Acol and Standard American, played as artificial and forcing to game in most sequences. The requirements are open to some debate, and can depend on exactly what system you are playing, in particular, what other strong bids you have available. But overly distributional hands, with great playing strength but relatively low point count, generally should be bid some other way. Opening 2C is for genuine rock-crushers.

Since we play the opening 2NT as 21-22, for a balanced hand to qualify for 2C it has to be 23+hcp. Unbalanced hands are typically 3 losers or less on the Losing Trick Count, and 18+hcp. With 22+hcp unbalanced, I would probably open 2C even if the hand somehow managed 4 losers, but that's not a decision you have to make too often. The bigger issue is when you have pretty much game in your own hand but fewer points, probably because of holding a solid suit. If you hold too few points, people will get upset if you open 2C.

Responding to 2C is troublesome for many pairs. Following common (modern) practice, we play that 2D is an artificial negative or waiting bid. Other suit responses are positive, and require a suit of at least five cards that includes two of the top honors, and generally 8+hcp. A response of 2NT is a balanced positive, showing 10+hcp. Bidding after any positive response is natural and forcing to game. In actual practice, experience gained from hundreds of computer-dealt hands indicates that any positive response should press on to slam almost all of the time. This means that the relative crudeness of just bidding naturally after a positive response is in practice not so much of a handicap, since there is plenty of room if the auction isn't stopping anytime soon.

After the 2D response, opener's first rebid is generally natural, but with a couple of important exceptions.

A rebid of 2NT indicates a balanced hand of 23-24hcp, and responder can proceed as if opener had started with 2NT (Stayman, transfers, etc). Obviously, very little indeed is needed in responder's hand to justify bidding game.

A rebid of 2H by opener is Kokish, indicating either a game-forcing hand with hearts, or a game-forcing balanced hand. Usually, responder will bid 2S as a relay, awaiting clarification. Opener rebids NT holding a balanced hand, or makes some other (natural) bid to indicate that the original 2H did in fact mean hearts. We play that 2H followed by 2NT shows 25-26hcp, a direct 3NT rebid shows 27-28hcp, and 2H followed by 3NT shows 29-30hcp. The idea is that a common responding scheme can be used after 2NT, allowing us to explore suit contracts sensibly, and we can apply that scheme for balanced openers between 21 and 26 points. Over opener's 3NT rebids, 4C is Stayman, 4D and 4H are transfers, and 4NT after a Stayman or transfer sequence is natural and not forcing. That is a little unwieldy, but only comes up some of the time when opener has 27-30hcp - we can live with it.

The only hands where responder can break the relay (bidding something other than 2S over 2H) are very weak (0-3hcp) minor suit hands without heart tolerance. Bidding 3C or 3D shows a suit of at least seven cards headed by at best the queen.

A rebid of 2S, 3C or 3D by opener is natural (at least 5 cards) and game-forcing. If it's available, the cheapest rebid in a minor at the 3 level is a second negative, showing 0-3hcp.

A jump rebid of 3H or 3S by opener is a specialty bid. It shows a 4-card suit, together with a longer diamond suit. This is a device to make sure that a 4-4 major fit doesn't get lost when opener's longest suit is diamonds. That can happen because 2C-2D;3D eats up a lot of room, and 3H or 3S by responder at this point should show a 5-card suit. In that case, nobody has room to mention a 4-card major before 3NT is reached.

There are numerous alternative responding schemes, most of them inferior. For example, artificial step responses don't work so well, whether you are showing high card points or (better) controls a la Blue Club. Such ideas are well playable over 1C, but you run out of space fast when you start at the two level, and the information conveyed is often not as useful as you might think. Some people play more or less as we do, except that the 2D response guarantees at least some minimal values, while a 2H response is an immediate "double negative". I can sympathize with that idea. But if I were to suggest a good alternative scheme, I would go with an artificial positive set-up, perhaps similar to that played by Armstrong-Holland. (They are a British international pair, and John Armstrong is a contemporary of mine: we were at Cambridge University at the same time, although in different colleges.) Their responses are (very briefly):
2D: any 0-3, or 4-7 with a 5-card or longer major
2H: any 8+ unbalanced or 10+ balanced
2S: 4-6 balanced, or 4-7 with a 5-card or longer minor
2NT: 7-9 balanced
The reason why I consider this sort of scheme playable is in a comment I made earlier. While it seems harmful or perhaps just not useful to condense all positive replies into 2H, I have looked at hundreds of deals where a 2C opening is faced by a positive response. In virtually every case, the final contract should be a slam. So it actually makes sense to use only one bid for those hands, and use two or three responses to categorize the "semi-positive" hands. At the same time, I should say that this sort of thing only works well if you have thought about and worked through the many different continuations. A virtue of the system we are playing is that much of it is natural, and can be played reasonably well without too too much discussion. I'm sure Armstrong and Holland have spent many hours deciding what further bids mean after the initial responses.