Opener's Rebid: Just Bid Your Suits

In bridge, one of the major guiding principles is to simply bid your suits — it sounds easy, but it seems to cause a lot of confusion. One key situation is when we open 1♠ or 1♥ and partner responds 1NT. It should be routine to bid your 4-card minor now if you have it — always bid your suits naturally. Many people incorrectly pass 1NT in these situations.

Let's jump straight into some examples.

We simply bid our suits. We started by opening spades; it is time now to show our diamonds with a simple 2♦ bid.

One thing I see a lot is that people are in a rush to show their strength. It is a very good idea to be aware of your strength, and to be ready to do the minimum with a minimum hand and more with stronger hands. However, there is often no rush to show that strength — the focus should be on bidding our suits. Let's change the hand slightly.

Here you have a 17-point hand. People often think, "I must show my strength." Typically there is no rush to show strength, but it is very important to show your suits. Keep the bidding low with a simple 2♦ bid.

The key idea of this auction has been that the first two bids have mostly described the shape of our hand — which suits we have. We will still make a third bid, unless partner passes. A lot of people worry that partner will pass here. Don't worry about that — you are allowed a maximum hand, and partner should know it is not a good idea to pass with about 9+ points, because you could easily have game on!

Here partner has simply taken us back to 2♠. Partner's range is about 6-10 points, with probably only two spades. We could have enough for 3NT, or partner could even have five hearts, so 4♥ might be a good game. We make another natural bid — natural bids that show suits are always desirable (here we bid a 3-card suit, because we have already shown our 5-card and 4-card suits). Partner should now know our shape, and also know that we have a strong hand.

Important: Why can't we bid like that with a weak hand? With a weak hand we should always try to do the minimum. It is absolutely fine to rebid 2♦ with a minimum hand — that just shows the basic nature of our hand. But after we have done that, we should not be trying to drive the auction up unless partner forces us to bid; we have no more to say.

Summary

The main idea is that we should always bid our suits. If we open 1♠ or 1♥ and we have a 4-card minor, we should bid it over partner's 1NT response.