About Keith
I'm Keith Schwols.
I started playing bridge in college, but didn't really take to bridge until I retired in 2016. I'm currently a Gold Life Master with the ACBL. I have a passion for 'tweaking' bridge bidding. The result was developing a system I'm calling Modern American. Contract Bridge is over a century old. It developed bidding organically into a common base (in America) called Standard American. Standard American is still a very commonly used and understood bidding system. Sometime in the 70s and 80s, the bridge experts started looking at improving auctions to better bid their contracts. This system uses the responses of a 2-level bid over opener's 1-level open as game forcing. This preserves bidding room to explore the best contracts when both sides have strong (opening strength) hands. However, the penalty for this was to collect a large number of responses into a single response bid of 1NT (Forcing). Forcing because since it is such a wide variety of hands (6-12 HCP, may or may not have support for the opening suit, etc.), opener cannot (or should not) pass the 1NT bid.
It is the weakness of the forcing 1NT that has kept 2/1 Game Forcing bidding from replacing Standard American. Per recent ACBL statistics, roughly 45% of tournament bridge players play 2/1 and almost equal number still play Standard American. The small remaining percentage play other systems based on European bridge such as ACOL and various Precision (strong Club) based systems.
My partners and I are address the weakness of 2/1 to define a system of Modern American bridge. This system takes back the 1NT bid as the more useful and descriptive: 6-9 HCP with at most 2 cards in partner's opening major. We like the concept of the game forcing bid that 2/1 defines, but felt there was little use in having so many game forcing bids (6 such bids available to use all 2-level responses over opener's opening bid). You can find article on improving your major suit opening and response as the Modern American Majors section.
In Modern American bidding, we also address the forgotten (or overlooked) importance of the opening 1 of a minor bids and responses. We defined a 1 club opening system to vastly improve the ease of bidding and limited our 1 diamond opening bids to be more descriptive. You can read articles/blogs on the minor suit bidding looking in the tags for Toucan Club and Macaw Diamond.
Finally, we extend Modern bidding to the use of opening Strong hands, Pre-emptive (weak) hands and Competitive bidding (interference with opponents). Articles on this bidding are tagged with the SPC tag.