Conventions

What are Conventions?

A bid is "natural" if its meaning is related to the strain of the bid. For example, 1 showing spades, or 2NT showing a balanced hand. In contrast, a conventional bid is one that has a special meaning, unrelated to its strain.

There are a very large number of conventions out there, and I'm only going to present a few of them here. Mainly I will focus on the ones I like to play, or ones that people I know have invented. For starters, I have simple collections of beginning, intermediate, and advanced conventions. The menu to the left contains a list of other conventions described within this site.

In addition, I have collected conventional methods that work together to provide larger-scale modifications to any system into which they are incorporated. These can be found in the System Modifications section.