Convention in Spades

Video Transcript

Conventions, it has nothing to do with large meetings of people, although a tournament is a convention of sort. A convention is a partnership agreement or understanding. Now, in the game of bridge there are many conventions, and if you look up on the internet, and this seems to be a familiarly recurring motif. Look on the internet, look on the internet. While the internet has a great wealth of resource, and if you take the time to research a lot of these things on the internet. There's many many good sites. Wikipedia comes to mind, Google comes to mind. Where you can do a search and learn all these terms. But, a convention is an understanding or agreement with your partner, that your bid has meaning. For example, if you bid seven you're probably telling your partner that you have an unbelievable spade suit. I mean what else could seven possibly be? But, I want to cover a useful bid created by a pair named De Carne and Nino in Indianapolis in the late ninety's in one of the early tournaments. A system that is so neat and so helpful that I adapted it to my game, or adopted it to my game, shortly thereafter, and it's called "The big five bid." The purpose of "The big five bid" is not only to tell your partner that you have four to six tricks, not always five. You have to give a little range, but also your partner is encouraged to bid nil. Now let's look at an example right here, on "The big five bid" and then we'll cover that with the other half of this segment called nil reverse. Here we have four spades, most likely to produce two tricks. Four diamonds, most likely to produce two tricks, certainly one I would expect, borrowing some crazy distribution, and a club trick. So we're certainly within range of one, two, three, four, or five. You might be able to produce three spade tricks on this by trumping a club, but let's just say it fulfills the requirement of four to six tricks. So in first to second seat, again, "The big five" only works when you're bidding in front of your partner, you bid five. And, that tells your partner you've got the ace or king of spades. Why is that? Because, now if your partner happens to be holding a spade you that may look something like this.

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