For Newer Players: Standard American, Part 1 by Bill Segraves 

If you play at a club or in a tournament, you’ll be expected to have a convention card that describes your partnership agreements. But even if you only play with friends at home, you’ll still want to have a way of establishing a mutual understanding of your bidding “system” and any specific agreements. 

In the U.S., the most common bidding system among newer players is “Standard American,” which includes 5 card majors, a strong 1NT opening, a strong forcing artificial 2C opening, and weak 2-level opening bids in the other three suits. 

For players who are learning Standard American bidding, it may often be useful to consult a bidding guide as a way of reviewing your system or during the auction when playing in a bridge class or informal game. Popular guides include the Audrey Grant Bridge at a Glance reference guide, available through book-sellers, and the “No Fear” bidding guide available online. 

In this article, I’ll focus on the No Fear guide and next time we’ll talk about some of the additional things that are part of the ACBL’s Standard American Yellow Card system. 

Even if you play very few conventions (special partnership agreements that often have nothing to do with the suit actually named or with interest in playing in notrump), I urge you to go through the No Fear guide or something similar with your partner to confirm that you’re on the same page as to what your calls mean.  No Fear is dense - it packs a huge amount of information into two pages - and can be a little intimidating, but if you work your way through it systematically, it’s accessible even to players in the early learning stages. 

I do recommend some changes to the system as it’s described, though it would be perfectly natural if you or your teacher prefer to do some things just as they're shown in the No Fear guide. 

• In response to partner’s strong 2C opening, I recommend reserving a “positive” response for a hand with a good 5 card suit and ~ 8 or more high card points. With any other hand you’ll make a “waiting” bid of 2D to allow opener to continue to describe their hand. 
• In responding to jump overcalls, what you need to introduce a new suit or to look for a notrump game will depend on a lot of factors, but without a fit, looking for a notrump game requires substantially more than the recommended point count. There are some significant differences when you get into detailed agreements, but you’re basically going to respond to jump overcalls similarly to the way you’d respond to a preemptive opening bid at the same level. 
• There is a rare but important option that’s not mentioned when your partner makes a takeout double, and that’s pass!  When partner makes a takeout double of an opening bid by the opponents, partner is saying they have support for the other three suits with a good hand and they're asking us to bid one of those other suits. Partner’s expecting us to bid and we’ll bid a 3 card suit with a zero-count if we have to; the alternative is to have the opponents play in a doubled contract that they're going to make! But if we have a long, strong holding in the opponent’s suit and a good enough hand to know that the opening bidder is actually in trouble, we can pass and let them play in the doubled contract. 
• The bottom left paragraph of p. 2 describes a method for transferring to clubs or diamonds after a 1NT opening bid. I’ll talk more about this in the context of the Standard American Yellow Card, but if you want to keep things a bit simpler for now, this is a fine thing to remove. 

I will have more to say about major suit raises, reverses (what No Fear calls “above the barrier” rebids by opener), and what No Fear means by “the level of the fit” (in responding to overcalls) in future articles in this series. 

If you are playing No Fear or something close to it, a useful convention card may be found here. Most of the card is already filled out to match your agreements, and you’ll only need to check a few more boxes. First, vs opening preempts, through what level do you play takeout doubles? Is a double of 2S for takeout? What about 3S? Most experts play takeout doubles through at least 4H, but if you and your partner prefer a lower level as you’re learning, that’s perfectly fine. The other boxes you should check are for standard carding (we’ll talk about carding in a future article). There is one additional thing you'll want to edit if you're going to use this simple convention card. The normal range for an overcall is not 6 and up (this has to have been a typo!) but more like the 8 or 10 to 16 high card points as described in No Fear. (My own preference is to make a simple overcall even with some 17-18 point hands unless I have a really good suit.) 

Next time, we’ll talk about the Standard American Yellow Card and the valuable bidding tools that the Yellow Card adds to No Fear. 

If you have any questions or if you'd like to receive a preview version of the next article in advance of publication, please feel free to email our Teacher’s Corner or email Bill directly at bridgewithbill@gmail.com.