The Experiment proceeds. We've played three or four sessions so far, announcing to our bemused opponents that we're playing 4-card majors and a weak no-trump. There's no requirement to pre-alert them, of course, but we do, because the majority of them hardly ever meet anything except some variation of Standard American.
Our results so far haven't been earth-shattering, but they haven't been bad either. (When all's said and done, the quality of your defence probably has a bigger impact on your results than the quality of your bidding). But that's not the point of the exercise. Agent 99 is getting more comfortable with the feeling that most bids are natural, and her approach to a session is definitely more relaxed. We used to spend fifteen or twenty minutes before each game with her going through a little stack of index cards: her crib notes on various bidding sequences and conventions. Now we spend about two minutes talking about lebensohl (that's one zombie of a convention, you can't talk it to death), and that's about it.
So far I've noticed a couple of poor results from using the natural 2NT and 3NT responses to 1 major in a somewhat undisciplined fashion. We've agreed that they should show less than 3-card support, so that should eliminate the issue of missed 5-3 trump fits. The light opening style has caused problems for the opponents a few times, and the willingness to just jump to a reasonable-sounding final contract has engineered a swing or two. I'd say that, on balance, we're at least breaking even on how effectively we're bidding.
So far, so good.
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