Notional club is a bit like John Lennon's classic piece of pretentious, cobbled together C-nineties tat... sorry — song, Imagine: this system is based around imagining that opponents have opened a strong club ahead of you and then bidding accordingly. Thus you play your usual defense to a strong club opening every time you deal or right hand opponent deals and passes.

Clearly the way you play this system will depend on your regular defence over a strong club, but presented here are some agreements that we have actually piloted(!), when playing bar bridge.

As everyone knows, it's very important to bid aggressively when your opponents open the bidding with 1 (strong). It's also good to make your bids unusual looking to make it as hard as possible for the strong club pair to have a sensible auction. With this in mind I tend to play Truscott over opposition's 1 (strong) opening, so my defensive agreements over oppo's precision 1 or Blue club 1 openings look like this:

OK, so let's say you're playing notional club. You dealt, so it's your bid — what do you do? Well, first imagine that your opponents have opened a strong 1 ahead of you and bid accordingly! Obviously you can't actually double 1, but you can bid 1 yourself to show the same hand. In our scheme this would show clubs and hearts, with a weak hand. Otherwise the bids are as above: an opening bid of 1, say, would show spades and clubs with a weak hand.

There is, of course, one further complication: given that your opponents have not actually made a strong opening, there is every chance that you hold a good hand yourself. What should you bid? Well the answer is simple — you pass with all genuine opening hands! Your opening bids can be summarized thus:

Note that with a weak hand you absolutely MUST bid. That means that when 4-3-3-3 you have to make something up. There are two schools of thought on this subject: make the lowest bid that includes the four card suit and hope partner doesn't go nuts, or, make the highest bid that includes the four card suit: after all, it's more pre-emptive! Note also that bidding in 2nd seat after a pass from your RHO is exactly the same situation as bidding as dealer.

So what does one bid with a good hand after partner has shown a weak two (probably) suiter? Well, bidding one of the suits shown is always preemptive. Generally, we believe the best method is to bid the lowest suit that has NOT been implied by the opening bid as an artificial force that asks partner to describe his hand further (An alternative is to use a minimum no-trump bid for this purpose). After such a force, bidding either of the suits you've already shown at the minimum level is negative, though not necessarily showing extra length. All other bids are positive and descriptive.

Apart from these very simple agreements we very much believe in 'winging it'. Make an intelligent guess. Use the force. Offer to buy lefty a beer and when he drops his hand on the floor in suprise, look at his cards.

You can obviously play any responses you like to the forcing pass. I've outlined some basic agreements that are far from optimal, but make some sort of sense:

The 1 response is generally used to show hands that are either minor suit dominated or are game forcing without a 4 or 5 card major (that is to say, a later jump in a major is 12+ points and 6+ cards). For example, with a balanced hand and 11/12 points and a 4-card major, responder bids his major and then No-trumps. With a similar hand without a four card major, partner bids 1 and then no-trumps. The 1, 1 and 1 responses to the pass (technically, opening bids) are the only bids that are absolutely forcing.

After a 1 response, the opener (i.e. the guy who passed) can force the bidding with 2 (about 18+ points, any hand), try 1NT with 15-17 and bid naturally with other hands.

Should oppo intervene after the forcing pass then basically you pass with a rubbish hand and otherwise bid as though your partner had opened a particularly wide ranging prepared club. A suit bid is natural and forcing a 1NT bid would look like stops and 8-10 points or something. Basically, this will involve a lot of judgment and guess work. But that's the beauty of the system really. Once you've learned the defense to the imaginary strong 1 opening (and you should know it already!), and one or two standard bids over the forcing pass, you're ready to play fun, punty bridge. You wouldn't really want to spoil it by having lots of agreements, and trying to make it work well: apart from anything else, the forcing pass is illegal pretty much everywhere anyway.