30 The dreaded 4-3-3-3

This is not usually dreaded but it ought to be. Having used it so many times you are unaware of how often it has dragged you down. It is the flat hand, the only shape meriting the title (the others that allow opening 1NT are balanced hands) Why? Because it lacks length: long suits can often produce more tricks than all the points in your hand. It also lacks something else which I’ll soon get to. The first situation is No Trumps, where people say you need a balanced hand, so surely the flat hand (hereinafter FH) is ideal? Not really, what we want for NT is not four mostly equal suits but four safe suits, i.e. the shorter they are the more they need stoppers. But a long suit somewhere (often in dummy) is a source of the extra tricks in NT. The FH has only one 4-card suit and unless partner’s hand has at least four there, it is unlikely to be useful.  The 4-4-3-2 shape has two 4-card suits and so twice as many chances of a fit with long cards, and the 5-3-3-2 shape has one very good chance. See why the FH is the worst shape? Lacking the long suit factor, you’ll need extra points to make up for this. Mentally deduct a point or two from every flat hand to avoid trouble.

The second situation is trump contracts. In these we can look for long suits also, but there is a powerful source of extra tricks in dummy ruffs. Clearly a FH dummy has no short suits to ruff so these extra tricks are not available from the start. The FH shape in declarer’s hand is not so bad (we don’t want to ruff there) but the long suit problem remains.

I hope you can see that shape always matters, and that a varied shape is better than an even one. The balanced hands practically belong in NT, and trump contracts need the unbalanced shapes. God knows RealBridge provides plenty of those.