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Wilkosz under the 2022 Blue Book

Wilkosz is a weak opening 2!d bid that shows a 5-card major plus a 5-card side suit (typically played as 6–10). I have some confusion as to whether this bid is allowed under the new (2022) Blue Book rules at level 4.

The argument for "banned": it shows a two-suiter, one of those suits could be diamonds but it might be that neither suit is diamonds, thus it's banned under BB 7C1c(ii).

The argument for "allowed": it shows a 5-card major, and thus is allowed under 7C1c(i) (because diamonds is not a major). The fact that it guarantees a 5-card side suit is irrelevant, because BB 5E permits varying an understanding by making it more restrictive, and this basically just varies a "5-card weak multi" arrangement by restricting it to hands that have a side suit.

Which of these arguments is correct (i.e. is Wilkosz legal or not)? And was it intended to be legal or not, when drafting the new rules?

Comments

  • edited August 2022

    I think the intention is that it is not allowed

    (i) Any hand that shows 5+ cards in at least one suit, specified or not, but which must not be the suit opened, or
    (ii) Any hand that shows at least 4-4 in two specified suits, neither of which is the suit opened, or

    In (i), the restriction "which must not be the suit opened" applies to any of the 5+ card suits, so 5 diamonds is not allowed.

    in (ii), the restriction "neither of which is the suit" precludes a two-suiter with diamonds as a possible suit.

  • That argument doesn't seem to match the current wording of the rules – by that reasoning, a 2!d bid that shows 5-3 in two suits would be legal as long as the 5-card suit wasn't diamonds (even if the 3-card suit was diamonds), so it would be surprising if increasing the length of the side suit from 3 to 5 mattered (especially as there's explicit permission to do that in BB 5E).

    I suspect that this is most likely a problem with the wording, though, and it might be possible to fix it before the drafts are finalized (which is why I wanted to point it out, in the hope that there'd still be time for a correction).

  • Is the 2022 blue book available yet?

    Note 4 in the 2021 book is singularly unhelpful.

    "Players are permitted to open (say) 2 diamonds showing a weak 2 in either major while coincidentally also holding diamond length as long as they have no specific understanding to do so."

  • A very similar debate (but concerning WBF rules, not EBU rules) has now arisen on Bridge Winners – again, it's about whether restricting a legal Multi by requiring it to contain a side suit is itself legal (the only real difference is that it allows "extra length in the major" as a separate option to holding a side suit).

    The point has been made there that "we don't bid a weak multi with a 5332 hand or 5-4 majors" is common expert practice (when seeing a weak multi as a combination of two weak twos), and yet it's equivalent to "we bid a weak multi only when we have 6M or 5M4m"! Apparently, the former is legal in the WBF and the latter illegal, despite being the same agreement (i.e. covering exactly the same hands).

    The EBU's rules seem to have exactly the same issue, and it's unclear about what the correct way to fix it would be. (The fact that the EBU rules explicitly allow subsetting of bids – BB 5E – effectively means that there's a contradiction in the legal agreements rules at the moment.)

  • Well as I mentioned on BW - you can have 4 clubs as your four card suit - so that solves half the problem, But 5 hearts and 4 diamonds is not a subset of 'six hearts'.

    Maybe some players should go back to bidding six-card multi's - as they were originally intended to be bid.

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