Have the opponents been given correct and complete information? -

Problem 2: Misinformation

"Special partnership agreements must be fully and freely available to opponents." So says Law 75. Consider a hand - you have opening values and a decent 5- or 6-card Heart suit, but it is LHO to speak first. He opens 1NT, partner passes and RHO bids 2, which LHO alerts. You ask about 2and are told "transfer". Gosh - RHO has hearts, unexpected but perfectly possible. Perhaps the opponents will get to play in 2 where your trumps will be a considerable nuisance. So you pass and await developments. LHO duly bids 2 partner passes again and RHO bids 3.

Whatever this means you have nothing to say at this point, although it looks as though RHO has a decent hand with Hearts and Diamonds (which leaves partner with precious few points and no more than a singleton heart . The opponents seem to be about to play in 3NT or a Diamond contract, where the bad heart break may still prove to be an embarrassment to them, and they still might (just) end up in hearts . So you pass again and the next thing you know is that you are on lead to 3, and of course it transpires that LHO has a weak hand with long diamonds , partner has a few scattered values, and you could have made anything between 2 and 5 your way.

If you had known that RHO could have had just diamonds and not hearts at all, you would have overcalled 2 If the opponents had an agreement that 2 was a two-way bid, the they should have told you about the possibility when you asked about 2 . If you had had the full information, you would have concluded on the evidence of your hand that it was unlikely that RHO held hearts , and you would have got your hearts into the game and achieved a much better result.

In particular it is misleading to describe the 2 bid as merely being a "transfer". The use of the word "transfer" implies that the bidder always holds the next suit up, here hearts , and gives no clue to the possibility that he might hold diamonds and not hearts at all.

If a pair has agreed to play the two-way method in case 1, then the correct explanation is along the following lines "It asks me to bid 2 - if he follows with 3 he has a weak take-out into diamonds and the sequence says nothing about hearts; if he does anything else next, he has a normal transfer to hearts "." A prominent reference to the two possibilities for 2 should also be included on the convention card. (A bid which asks partner to do something specific without guaranteeing any particular holding in the bidder's hand is technically known as a "puppet", but what is important is not so much the terminology used as the completeness and accuracy of the underlying information).