System Overview

Anyone who has seriously used a Big Club system will know that giving up the natural One Club opening comes with a price.* Hands with club suits, even when clubs is not the best suit, become more difficult to handle. We believe that the system described here breaks new ground by resolving most of these difficulties to a degree never before thought possible, and does it without undue complexity.

This system may be considered a variant of Precision Club. It is designed to be "street legal" under the ACBL General Convention Chart, which at the time of this writing was found at http://web2.acbl.org/documentLibrary/play/convchart2005.pdf.

Building blocks of the system are as follows:

• The Big Club. All unbalanced hands of 16 or more HCP, as well as balanced hands of 17-19 or 23 or more HCP, are opened one club. This gives us the considerable advantage of immediately limiting the other one-level suit openings to 11-15 HCP, and provides maximum room for exploration when opener is strong.
• The Meaningful Diamond. While artificial, our one diamond opening is not the catchall found in many big club systems. This bid shows either 11-13 HCP balanced, or 11-15 HCP with (usually) a six-card or longer minor.
• The "medium" notrump, 14-16 HCP. Standard treatments are used.
• The Mini-Roman Two Clubs. The range is 11-15 HCP, and the hand pattern may be any 4-4-4-1, 5-4-4-0 with a five-card minor, or 5-4-3-1 with a five-card minor and a four-card major.
• The Unusual Two Diamonds. Shows 11-15 HCP with at least 5-4 (or 4-5) in the minors.

Other opening bids are standard, with 1 and 1 limited to 11-15 HCP. The 2NT opening is 20-21 balanced.

Adopting this system should be especially easy for partnerships already familiar with another Precison variant. In this case the bidding structure and all special agreements after openings of 1, 1, 1, 1NT, 2 and everything higher may remain unchanged.

Pronouns

Rather than using masculine pronouns in the old-fashioned generic sense, we assume in our discussions that the person who opens the bidding is female, and that her partner is male. We hope this will not only add clarity to our discussions, but also present a tasteful writing style.

* Quoting Eric Rodwell: "One thing I have found playing Precision is that I much prefer requiring six clubs for a Precision type 2C opener. The Achilles heel of the strong club system, in my opinion, is having to open 2C. That's because responder ... is left guessing whether or not to look for a 4-4 major suit fit at the two level. In standard, he would have been able to bid his major to see if opener could raise or bid 1S over a 1H response. It is bad enough when it promises six, but it just becomes a complete nightmare when opener could have only five clubs."