No Right Answer

By: Larry Cohen

No Right Answer

Possibly, you were directed to this article as a result of a question you submitted to Larry's website.


Of the thousands of questions I receive yearly (electronically and in person), more than half can be answered by either PA (click the link) or "No Right Answer" (this article).

Here are a few examples of questions with "no right answer:"

Q1: Larry--I dealt and opened 2 (both vulnerable) with J4 KJ9864 K2 Q54. My partner said this was wrong. Was it?

Q2: Larry--Someone at the club opened 1 holding: Q AQ98653 J1032 10. They quoted the Rule of 20. I think this is too extreme--right?

In both cases (and thousands more), there is no right answer. It is a matter of style.

Some players like to preempt aggressively, others are conservative. Some like to open all 12-point hands and many distributional hands with 11 or even fewer HCP. Others are sound opening bidders.

There are many areas in bridge (don't even get me started on opening-lead guesses) where there simply is no right or wrong. If you posed the question to 100 experts, you'd get votes for different actions -- sometimes even a 50-50 (or 33-33-34) split.

To each their own.