Wide Canape Openings

Happy New Decade everybody - this year will be the tenth anniversary of BridgeMatters, though this blog itself is just a few years old. For a New Year's resolution, this year will see many mini-posts appearing on the blog, following the Twitter approach (not yet that many bridge folk tweeting) of short bursts of ideas, news, and updates. Now there will still be long posts for slow blog loading and rapid skim reading, such as a resumption of the Bread N' Butter series, but sometimes instead of the meat n' potatoes, or bread, there will be just a small biscuit of a post.

Say for your one spade opening, currently 5+ spades, 11-21 high card points, you switch to a canape approach where the opening shows 4 or 6+ spades, 11-21 high card points. Still the same point range, but now there's a problem. In standard, opener's rebid after responder's 1NT is wide ranging (e.g. 1S-1NT;-2C), about 11 to a bad 18. This can be troublesome, but responder with a doubleton (or longer) in opener's major can bid two of opener's major, which gives opener the opportunity to bid again, and if responder passes opener's second suit with a singleton/void, sometimes even if there were sufficient points for game the contract would just be marginal due to living in the land of misfits.

In a Canape approach with standard point ranges, opener's rebid of two of a new suit (e.g. 1S-1NT;-2C) shows the longer suit, but the range still needs to be about 11 to a bad 18 to avoid jump rebids without sufficient points and no known fit. However unlike Standard responder can't bid again without taking opener beyond two of his/her longest suit, yet passing risks missing good games. For this reason, most Canape implementations are big club based, in order to limit opener's two level rebid to 11 to 15 points. The other approach is to use transfer openings, such as opening 1D or 1H to show 4Ss, or 4+Ss. I don't believe that natural wide ranging Canape major suit openings will ever be workable, although they would be fun to play for a new decade.