Cautious Bidding

In the Swiss Teams at Newport we were playing for the first time in a team with Sue Ingham and Gwynn Davis. Gwynn writes a blog entitled 'Cautious Bidder', which you can find on the East Wales web site. In the first match we took this caution to extremes, playing two potential grand slams in game and missing another small slam. The grands are too embarrassing to report, but the small slam was more interesting.

I think the bidding up to 3NT was fairly automatic, but my 4♠  was over cautious. I ran a quick simulation with the North hand opposite a hand with 15 to 17 points and at least six good clubs, and slam was making most of the time. On reflection a jump to 5♠  over 3NT would have been a better description of the power of my hand. The board was flat, and only seven pairs out of 36 bid and made slam, so maybe it was not that easy.

After an inauspicious start - not necessarily a bad thing at Swiss teams - we played rather better and finished a respectable fourth. Gwynn describes one of the later hands, where my partner's bidding is described as 'feisty' rather than cautious, in Cautious Bidder article 108.