Bridge questions

AG said: "With a Take-Out Double, I was playing with someone on Saturday who was using it to indicate that the player to their right had stolen their bid. This would indicate that they have lots of the bid suit, but I understood that the Take-Out Double indicated that you had nothing in the bid suit but an opening hand and cover in the other suits. Surely, both can’t be right ?"

Here we go:

1. In the Laws of (ie rules of) Bridge all doubles are penalty doubles that increase the benefits of making a contract and the costs of undertricks.
2. Because it is rare that you want to double for penalties at low level contracts, bridge players generally choose to use the double bid for more useful purposes particularly at low bidding levels.
3. The main alternate use is what we call the Take-Out double - which we covered in the lesson on 17 May. This generally applies in the context when the opponents have opened the bidding and the doubler wants to show a hand with opening hand strength and support for all the unbid suits to ask their partner to show their best suit (even if they have no strength).
4. However there are other uses made of the double bid in different contexts. 
5. The one you have come across is used my some players when their partner opens 1NT and the next player overcalls at the two level preventing them from making the generally artificial bid they intended to make. These artificial bids include the common Stayman and Transfer conventions over partner's 1NT opening - these artificial 2 level bids are used to show particular shaped hands to help the partnership find a suit contract that might be play better than a NT contract. 
6. When the opponent's overcall bids a 2 level bid that the responder was going to bid, some players use the double "to show that the overcaller stole my bid". So if the bidding would have gone 1NT - 2C which is the Stayman convention, this might become 1NT (2C) X with the double acting as a replacement for the normal 2C Stayman. This is nothing to do with the Take-Out Double as it is a specific different context.
7. There are other uses of the double bid - again based on different contexts that help identify them.

Have a bridge question? Simply email it - with all the relevant information - to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and wait for an answer from bridge ed team volunteers (currently Anne Small & David Farmer)!