wyman, on 2011-August-25, 11:15, said:
The other consideration, Simon, is that you are not in the passout seat here; if you decide to pass (which I'm not necessarily advocating), partner still gets to act, and presumably he's read Matchpoints, too.
omg please stop with this.
Obviously the set of hands where we pass, and partner bids, compared to we bid are irrelevant.
Just like analyzing a suit combination just ignore scenarios that are a wash. So the bidders are saying: of the hands that partner passes it out, bidding will probably work better. The passers are saying that passing will work out worse.
Arguments like "my partner always bids!" are not related to this problem on a forum imo, if you are adjusting based on your partners strange/bad tendencies that's fine. You also might not cuebid with automatic cuebids if your partner always drives to slam when you cuebid, etc. That doesn't make not cuebidding the right bridge bid in a vacuum.
Partner will pass it out when it's wrong a lot of the time because he doesn't know about a key feature of our hand...our stiff diamond! Yes LOTT is pretty dumb but having a stiff vs not having one is still a huge factor in competing to 3 over 3. Having good trumps and a good side suit are another factor. Partner will not magically always bid when it's right, he will assume we don't have a stiff diamond if he has 3 diamonds (a very likely scenario) because we didn't bid. He will play us for 4324 or whatever and bid accordingly. If we have a stiff diamond it's usually with bad trumps or a stiff K or stiff Q or something, it's not with this hand. So partner will definitely misevaluate a lot of the time.