About Keith
I'm Keith Schwols.
I started playing bridge in college, but didn't really take to it until I retired in 2016. I'm currently a Gold Life Master with the ACBL. I have a passion for 'tweaking' bridge bidding. The result was a system I call Modern American. Contract Bridge is over a century old. It developed bidding organically into a common base (in America) called Standard American. Standard American is still a very commonly used and understood bidding system. In the 70s and 80s, bridge experts began looking at ways to improve auctions so they could bid their contracts better. This system uses a 2-level bid response over an opener's 1-level open as game forcing. This preserves bidding room to explore the best contracts when both sides have strong (opening strength) hands. However, the penalty was to collect a large number of responses into a single 1NT response bid (Forcing). Forcing because, with such a wide variety of hands (6-12 HCP, may or may not have support for the opening suit, etc.), opener cannot (or should not) pass the 1NT bid.
The weakness of forcing 1NT has kept 2/1 Game Forcing bidding from replacing Standard American. Per recent ACBL statistics, roughly 45% of tournament bridge players play 2/1, and almost as many still play Standard American. The small remaining percentage play other systems based on European bridge, such as ACOL, and various Precision (strong Club)- based systems.
My partners and I are addressing the weakness of 2/1 by defining a Modern American bridge system. This system takes back the 1NT bid as the more useful and descriptive: 6-9 HCP with at most 2 cards in partner's opening major. We like the concept of the game-forcing bid that 2/1 defines, but felt there was little use in having so many game-forcing bids (6 such bids available to use all 2-level responses over opener's opening bid). You can find an article on improving your major suit opening and response in the Modern American Majors section.
In Modern American bidding, we also address the forgotten (or overlooked) importance of the opening 1 of a minor bids and responses. We defined a 1-club opening system to make bidding easier and made our 1-diamond openings more descriptive. You can read articles/blogs on minor-suit bidding by looking in the tags for Taco Club and Unbalanced Diamond.
Finally, we extend Modern bidding to include opening Strong hands, Pre-emptive (weak) hands, and Competitive bidding (interference with opponents). Articles on this bidding are tagged with the SPC tag.