Fourth Suit Forcing

 

Unless either partner has bid NT earlier, every time a new suit is introduced, it is forcing.

After three suits have been bid, the fourth suit may or may not be "real". Sometimes, you get those hands where it is real and you can't support partner, so you bid the fourth suit "real". But other times, you don't know which suit to support partner or whether you should be in NT or you think any other bid wouldn't "show" your hand (ie a raise would show too many trumps). So, the 4th suit is a bid of convenience.

4SF can be either:

    1. forcing to game or
    2. inviting to game

For our purposes, 4SF is (2) inviting game. Thus, a direct jump is used to show a game-forcing hand.

After this sequence:

Partner You

1H 1S

2C ??

With each of these hands:

1) S: AKxx 2) S: KJxx 3) S: Kxxx 4) S: xxxxx

H: Ax H: H: xx H: KQ

D: Txxx D: AJxxxxx D: Qxxx D: xxx

C: Qxx C: Kx C: AQx C: AKx

You could bid 2D.

    1. The hand could be played at NT, Clubs or Hearts. You don't know. Your 2D doesn't really need to show a stopper. If you had one, wouldn't you have bid 2 or 3NT?
    2. This is pretty obvious--- just showing where your points are
    3. (3&4) You could have raised, but a raise shows 4+ support, so you bide time and bid 2D.

Partner responds to 4SF by:

    1. bidding NT with a stopper in the 4th suit
    2. supporting a previous suit of partner's
    3. re-bidding the second suit to show extra length
    4. re-bidding the first suit to show none of the above
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