[plum_tree]

As a novice I was given SAYC to learn, but some of the notes in this booklet appear to be inconsistent (to me anyway).
Quote 1:
Other responses to 1NT:
1NT — 3♣, 3♦ = a six-card or longer suit and invitational to 3NT.
1NT — 3♥, 3♠ = at least a six-card suit and slam interest (otherwise, responder uses a transfer bid).
Quote 2:
2♣ is “non-forcing” Stayman, meaning that the bidding may stop in two of a suit. Opener rebids 2♥ with 4–4 in the majors. If responder rebids three of either minor, he shows slam interest and at least a five-card suit.
Quote 3:
A 2♠ response requires the 1NT bidder to rebid 3♣, which may be passed with a club bust, or responder may rebid 3♦ with a diamond bust.
Example::
1NT — 2♠
3♣ — Pass = club bust

— 3♦ = diamond bust (notrump opener passes).

Starting with quote 1: Why can’t all 3 level responses to 1NT show a six-card suit and slam interest in the suit? It makes things easier for a novice to remember! In a different thread Antrax suggested a 3NT continuation by opener discourages the slam try. Anything else is encouraging.

On to quote 2:
SAYC puts minor suit slam tries through 2♣ Stayman. If the suggestion in quote 1 is adopted, 3m by responder now becomes the invitational bid to 3NT. Even for a novice this makes more sense.

On to quote 3:
I don’t have any issue with this. It was just included for comparison purposes against quotes 1 and 2.

Can someone shed more light on this? Or was insufficient thought put into the SAYC booklet?

(Hey, maybe I am advancing from novice to beginner)

[hrothgar]

 plum_tree, on 2013-June-23, 04:06, said:

As a novice I was given SAYC to learn, but some of the notes in this booklet appear to be inconsistent (to me anyway).
Quote 1:
Other responses to 1NT:
1NT — 3♣, 3♦ = a six-card or longer suit and invitational to 3NT.
1NT — 3♥, 3♠ = at least a six-card suit and slam interest (otherwise, responder uses a transfer bid).
Quote 2:
2♣ is “non-forcing” Stayman, meaning that the bidding may stop in two of a suit. Opener rebids 2♥ with 4–4 in the majors. If responder rebids three of either minor, he shows slam interest and at least a five-card suit.
Quote 3:
A 2♠ response requires the 1NT bidder to rebid 3♣, which may be passed with a club bust, or responder may rebid 3♦ with a diamond bust.
Example::
1NT — 2♠
3♣ — Pass = club bust

— 3♦ = diamond bust (notrump opener passes).

Starting with quote 1: Why can’t all 3 level responses to 1NT show a six-card suit and slam interest in the suit? It makes things easier for a novice to remember! In a different thread Antrax suggested a 3NT continuation by opener discourages the slam try. Anything else is encouraging.

On to quote 2:
SAYC puts minor suit slam tries through 2♣ Stayman. If the suggestion in quote 1 is adopted, 3m by responder now becomes the invitational bid to 3NT. Even for a novice this makes more sense.

On to quote 3:
I don’t have any issue with this. It was just included for comparison purposes against quotes 1 and 2.

Can someone shed more light on this? Or was insufficient thought put into the SAYC booklet?

(Hey, maybe I am advancing from novice to beginner)

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds...

Does the SAYC one major opening bear any resemblance to a SAYC one minor opening?
If not, why would you expect a 3 minor response to look anything like a three minor response?

In general, if you look at the response structure over a 1NT opening, responder uses transfer bids to show major oriented hand.
Accordingly, there is the option to use auctions like

1N - 2♥
2♠ - 3♠

to show an invitational hand with the majors

This option isn't available in the minors with the SAYC NT response structure, hence the difference in meaning.

In general, you'll find parallelism within the majors or within the minors

With all this said and done, you are quite correct in recognizing that the SAYC response system isn't particularly good.
There are a number of fairly common hand types that can't be shown. You might do better looking at the BBO 2/1 structure.
Its a bit more detailed, but much more effective and logical.

[EarlPurple]

The purpose of the 3♣ and 3[dimaonds] response to 1NT is to show a potentially running suit that will be a source of tricks if partner has a partial fit for it, and enough stoppers elsewhere so the opponents don't get 5 tricks first.

It is likely we are trying to shoot a game with fewer than 25 combined points.

Typical example would be responder having AQxxxx or KQxxxx in a minor and little outside (extra jack or queen).

If I as opening bidder have this:

♠AKxx
♥QJxx
♦Ax
♣Kxx

and partner bids 3♣ in response to my 1NT opening, I can happily bid game expecting to make it. If partner bids 3♦ I cannot guarantee making it but hope to do so anyway, particularly if I get a club lead and diamonds break 3-2. And you may happen to have the ♠Q as an extra (or ♣Q enabling me to establish my 9th trick there).

If I have no support for your minor I will pass, as it will play best as trumps where the opponents cannot cut off entry to it.

Whilst the same situation could occur in the major, it is more common to seek a major-suit game when you have a running major. There may be occasions when 9 tricks is still the limit, however in a major we won't have to try to make 11 in order to make game which would be the case in the minor suit.

[1eyedjack]

There is some sense to the OP. If you have an invite with 4M and long minor you could start with Stayman to try for the major and then bail out in a safe 3m rather than a risky 2N, but only provided that the 3m followup were nf. Conversely if a direct 3m were forcing you could allow for the possibility of a 4 card major.

I can’t get excited about it. Neither method is optimal but also neither is so much worse than the other as to make it worthwhile spending time debating it. There are other followup continuations affected by the policy, some falling either way in the merits stakes.

[blackshoe]

The question here seems to be "why does SAYC use the bids it does rather than assigning different meanings?" I think the OP hit on the answer when he asked "was insufficient thought put into the SAYC booklet?" I'm not saying the answer to that is yes, but remember that SAYC was designed at least thirty years ago and is not truly a well thought out system. Rather it is a hodge-podge of then common conventions and treatments. It's a dinosaur. Okay, maybe Culbertson and Goren are dinosaurs and SAYC is a wooly mammoth.

[plum_tree]

SAYC may have been designed over 30 years ago as you say. But the copy on the ACBL website says that it was revised in January 2006. That's not too far back. Surely they must have plenty of top class staff/members/players or whatever who can fix it?

What is a "Standard Yellow Card Event" anyway?

[plum_tree]

 hrothgar, on 2013-June-23, 05:48, said:

Does the SAYC one major opening bear any resemblance to a SAYC one minor opening?
If not, why would you expect a 3 minor response to look anything like a three minor response?

Huh? You got me with this?

 hrothgar, on 2013-June-23, 05:48, said:

Does the SAYC one major opening bear any resemblance to a SAYC one minor opening?

This isn't about the 1NT opening bid but about the difference in the major/minor slam try continuations. Standardization/consistency in the continuation bidding will shorten the memory load / learning curve for novices/beginners.

[plum_tree]

 hrothgar, on 2013-June-23, 05:48, said:

This option isn't available in the minors with the SAYC NT response structure, hence the difference in meaning.

All I suggested was to reverse the minor suit invitational sequences and the minor suit slam try sequences. By making all three-level responses over 1NT as slam interest you achieve consistency. Antrax has already made a suggestion for the continuation bidding in a different thread; 3NT discourages the slam try, anything else is encouraging.

[hrothgar]

 plum_tree, on 2013-June-23, 08:49, said:

Huh? You got me with this?

This isn't about the 1NT opening bid but about the difference in the major/minor slam try continuations. Standardization/consistency in the continuation bidding will shorten the memory/learning curve for novices/beginners.

Sorry, typo on the first one...

On a more serious note, as other's have noted SAYC isn't a bidding system per see.
Its a random collection of bidding treatments that happened to be popular 30 odd years ago.

It doesn't fit together very well. There's a lot of very big flaws with the system.

If you seriously want to to decrease memory load, abandon SAYC and focus on a well designed system where you can focus on learning the logic rather than memorizing random treatments.

[plum_tree]

 1eyedjack, on 2013-June-23, 07:03, said:

If you have an invite with 4M and long minor you could start with Stayman to try for the major and then bail out in a safe 3m rather than a risky 2N, but only provided that the 3m followup were nf. Conversely if a direct 3m were forcing you could allow for the possibility of a 4 card major.

This is good. You are opening the door for further improvements to SAYC. It is highly unlikely that the ACBL will discard it.
Are you suggesting a possible 4M/6m option for both slam tries/non-slam tries in a minor suit i.e.
1. 1NT-2♣-2M-3m as the invitational sequence, may or may not include four cards in the other major.
2. 1NT-3m as the slam try sequence, may or may not include a four card major.

[aguahombre]

If you want to improve on SAYC, start with it as a base, and then make your improvements...then don't call it SAYC when you do this.

It is what it is, and I don't see the point in changing what is available with it. Use it, tweak it, whatever. It is still there for when required in an Individual.

[Vampyr]

 plum_tree, on 2013-June-23, 09:53, said:

1. 1NT-2♣-2M-3m as the invitational sequence, may or may not include four cards in the other major.
2. 1NT-3m as the slam try sequence, may or may not include a four card major.

The problem is that in (1), if the opponents bid partner may not be able to discover which minor (if any) you are interested in, while in (2), the possibility of a major-suit fit may be hard to untangle below the level of 3NT.

[blackshoe]

 plum_tree, on 2013-June-23, 08:30, said:

SAYC may have been designed over 30 years ago as you say. But the copy on the ACBL website says that it was revised in January 2006. That's not too far back. Surely they must have plenty of top class staff/members/players or whatever who can fix it?

What is a "Standard Yellow Card Event" anyway?

SAYC is no more "broken" than any other hodgepodge of agreements masquerading as a bidding system. Apparently it serves its current purpose, so there would seem to be nothing to fix. As for the 2006 "revision," to be honest I have no idea what, if anything, was revised.

A "Standard Yellow Card Event" is an event at an ACBL Tournament at which everyone is required to use the Standard American Yellow Card system. Such events are no longer held because they were unpopular.

[Zelandakh]

You can indeed play all 3 of a suit responses as showing a one-suited slam try, indeed this is even (relatively) standard in Acol. Of all the options available for 3 level responses, it is also the one I have played most often. That said, there are a few reasons why your suggestion is flawed. The key one is that Responder has the option to transfer with a 5 card major. This is not available for a minor so you would lose all of the 5 card minor slam tries. One option here would be to have an initial 3m response show a 6+ suit with slam interest and then the 3m after Stayman sequences show a 5 card suit with slam interest. That loses the invitational hands completely but they are arguably not so important. I suspect that the main reason SAYC includes them is that they were simply in vogue at the time of writing. A better option is to switch to some form of 4 suit transfer system. That gets some of these minor suit slam hands out of Stayman. Yet another option that I am quite partial to is to play direct transfers for clubs and the majors but keep diamond hands within Stayman. That has certain advantages but tends to end up being a little more complicated.

[TylerE]

Frankly, I would give up on SAYC, and fine someone local to play 2/1 (or really anything else). Or even a non-terrible Std. American system would be fine. The SAYC "agreements" are terminally brain-damaged, and by playing them you are only learning poor habits that you would be better off not acquiring.

[plum_tree]

 TylerE, on 2013-June-24, 12:28, said:

Frankly, I would give up on SAYC, and fine someone local to play 2/1 (or really anything else). Or even a non-terrible Std. American system would be fine. The SAYC "agreements" are terminally brain-damaged, and by playing them you are only learning poor habits that you would be better off not acquiring.

I got a reeeaaaallll problem here. I was given SAYC to learn...and...no one wants to play with a N/B. Also BBOs default system is SAYC. So if I can understand SAYC maybe my random BBO partners won't keep fleeing after 2 boards. Upgrading my profile to intermediate doesn't help when none of the bids I make comply with SAYC.

[TylerE]

BBO doesn't have a default system. Most who claim to play SAYC on BBO don't. (Try quizing them on what 1m-p-2N means, or 1♣-p-2♠ or 1NT-p-2♠).

[Zelandakh]

BBO does have a default system, which is based on Standard American and is not SAYC (it is a stock FD CC, called BBO Basic I think). As Tyler points out (and I mentioned in another thread) the majority of players with SAYC in their profiles have little idea about that system and really just mean "the version of Standard American that I know". You will be very frustrated if you learn SAYC very well and try to play it as written with pick-up partners.