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blackshoe, on 2019-April-19, 11:50, said:
What Max Hardy (or Grant Baze, who wrote the article for Hardy's book) called "Modified Two-way Stayman" (mwts) is very similar, as Max points out, to XYZ, but they are, or were originally, two different conventions. MWTS predates XYZ, though I don't know by how long.
According to The Bridge World a puppet and a marionette differ in that the reply to the latter can break the relay, while the former cannot. 2♣ in MTWS is a puppet; 2♣ in XYZ is a marionette. For this reason, I don't like that people conflate the two, calling both XYZ. Particularly since the folks I've seen do this don't seem to understand the difference between "puppet" and "marionette".
Like all conventions, you need to thoroughly understand how the convention works, and when to use it and when not to use it, and when it's on and when it's off, before you start using it at the table. Most players seem to want to skip that part.
In the main, though, I agree with Vampyr: Two-way Checkback Stayman is a better approach than MTWS. For one thing, the former has an easy way for responder to show 4-4 in the majors after 1m-1♥-1NT when he has invitational or game forcing values; the latter has no way to show these holdings unless opener's priority is to show 4 spades before showing 3 hearts.
AFAICS, the main advantage to playing MTWS is that if you're going to also play XYZ at least the structures look very similar, even if that obscures the fact that the two situations are very different because 1NT limits opener's hand, while 1M does not.
According to The Bridge World a puppet and a marionette differ in that the reply to the latter can break the relay, while the former cannot. 2♣ in MTWS is a puppet; 2♣ in XYZ is a marionette. For this reason, I don't like that people conflate the two, calling both XYZ. Particularly since the folks I've seen do this don't seem to understand the difference between "puppet" and "marionette".
Like all conventions, you need to thoroughly understand how the convention works, and when to use it and when not to use it, and when it's on and when it's off, before you start using it at the table. Most players seem to want to skip that part.
In the main, though, I agree with Vampyr: Two-way Checkback Stayman is a better approach than MTWS. For one thing, the former has an easy way for responder to show 4-4 in the majors after 1m-1♥-1NT when he has invitational or game forcing values; the latter has no way to show these holdings unless opener's priority is to show 4 spades before showing 3 hearts.
AFAICS, the main advantage to playing MTWS is that if you're going to also play XYZ at least the structures look very similar, even if that obscures the fact that the two situations are very different because 1NT limits opener's hand, while 1M does not.
The way I learned XYZ (from a Granovetter's book), opener assumes responder has a diamond signoff and bids accordingly, so in any sequence where Z is not 1NT, 2♣ is a puppet, not a marionette. And in the sequence 1x-1y-1NT-2♣, I have bid 3♦ with a max 1NT and very good diamonds.