When is a jump bid not forcing?
Wondering why partner passed your jump repsonse? A jump in a suit that has already been bid is not forcing.
This hand caused some confusion for a few players. North made a jump bid but it wasn't forcing. Why not?
I have 13 high card points here with a five card heart suit. So you can see I've opened the bidding 1♥ and North has jumped to 3♥. Is 3♥ a really strong hand or is it a limit bid?
Limit bids
A common way to play that jump to 3♥ these days is a limit bid of showing 10 to 12 points, not a forcing bid. Some people even play it as weak, but I'm not going to get into that. The point here is that it is not a forcing bid. If North had enough to go to game, he would either bid game or change suit. I don't have to bid again if I don't want to.
My hand isn't great! If I had a four card suit on the side or a singleton or a point of two extra I might bid 4♥. But here I'm just going to stop in 3♥.
North's hand was barely worth even a 3♥ bid! It's very balanced and I'm certainly glad I didn't get on to 4♥.
Establish a trick to avoid finessing.
We've got a club to lose and two diamonds to lose. We might lose a heart and we might lose a spade. So it's possible that we could make 4♥, but it's unlikely and I think 3♥ is plenty high enough.
There are two ways to play the hand. I could hope that East has got the ♠Q so I can cross over to the ♠A and finesse on the way back. But the other thing I can do is tackle that diamond suit. Now all I need is West to have at least one of the diamond honors because I'm going to play a low diamond towards the ♦Q and ♦J. If East wins that with the ♦A or ♦K, I'm going to win the return and play another low diamond.
If East started with both the missing diamond honours then too bad! But as long as West has at least one of the missing honours then I'll be able to set up a diamond trick on which I can discard one of my losers.
tags: #constructivebidding #limitbids
