Jump-shift responses

I'm at a bit of a down-spike at the moment. Real life is interfering with Agent 99's availability for playing bridge, and Elwood actually has a real job, so his availability is always limited. I don't care to fill my days with meaningless games as a house player or whatever, so the end result is I'm not playing so often myself. Bummer.

My usual pastime in this sort of situation is to trawl the internet for interesting bridge ideas. Sartaj Hans (The Imp Chimp) is looking for best practices to do with training, and related stuff. Having no great ideas myself, I'm waiting to see what everybody else comes up with, so I can steal it. Cathy Chua seems to be taking a few days off. So I'm reduced to either working on class notes to give to beginners, finding material for lectures to give near-beginners (which is way too much like work), or digging for the odd bidding convention that I might be able to persuade Agent 99 or Elwood to play.

An area that has some scope for Agent 99 and myself is the jump-shift response. We don't play 2/1 responses as game-forcing, so there is an argument for using strong jump-shift responses to identify certain strong hand types immediately and facilitate slam investigation. (I don't believe that the old-fashioned approach of using a jump-shift on any hand past a certain point-count is productive. If you are going to use them at all, restrict them to one of two sorts of hands: either a self-sufficient suit or a sort of fit-jump with good support for opener's suit. Which of the two it is gets clarified very quickly and you can proceed with the slam investigation without feeling the effects of the lost round of bidding.) But the truth is, neither of us is greatly enamored of strong jump-shifts, and so mostly we play pre-emptive.

After minor suit openings, we play inverted raises, where the simple raise is 10+hcp and the jump raise is 4-6hcp with 4+ (probably 5+) card support. The criss-cross raises (1D-3C and 1C-2D) are used for pre-emptive raises in the 7-9hcp range. This seems to be a slightly unusual use of the criss-cross raises - I made it up one day when I became dissatisfied with the wide (possibly) range of the pre-emptive raise. Since we play a weak no-trump, opener may be looking at a decent balanced hand (a strong no-trump opening), and he really would like to know if a pre-emptive raise is on the kamikaze edge or is maybe close to a forcing raise.

At the moment, all other jump-shift responses are simple pre-empts, showing 6+cards and 0-5hcp. (I don't believe in pre-empting partner unless my hand is really, really bad.)

An idea that might work is Reverse Flannery. After a minor suit opening, if responder has 5+cards in spades and 4+cards in hearts, he is not well placed for getting his distribution described accurately, especially when he is not too strong. Reverse Flannery uses the jump-shift responses of 2H and 2S to cover these hands, 2H being (say) 6-9hcp and 2S being 10-12 (or maybe just 10+) . 2NT can be used as a relay/distribution inquiry, similarly as in the original Flannery convention, if opener wants the details of what responder has. I have no experience with this, and I don't know anyone who plays it, but it sounds like a very reasonable idea, and a solution to a genuine (if not all that common) problem. Of course weak responding hands frequently cannot describe their distribution, but when they hold both majors, we should try and find a way for them to manage it. There are some details to be worked out before we try and play this. Maybe we should make the ranges 6-8 and 9-11, and make both bids non-forcing, on the grounds that if you're 12+hcp you'll manage anyway.

Adopting some version of that would take care of all the jump-shifts after minor-suit openings. There's still the question of what to do after major-suit openings. I can't believe simple pre-empts are such a great idea - I can't even remember ever bidding one, or hearing one from Agent 99.

At the moment, my plan is to talk her into using them as fit-jumps - essentially, limit raises with a decent side-suit. That's not too sexy, but I'm not interested in Bergen raises (or variations thereof)  because I don't believe in the Law (I'm an LTC fan, myself). Elwood persuaded me that mini-splinters weren't a good idea in practice (although they have some attraction in theory). And I haven't come across any other particularly great ideas yet. Maybe strong jump-shifts by unpassed hands and fit-jumps by passed hands? That might work.