Eddie Kantar wrote four different books trying to describe how to overcome the problems with RKC, and numerous auxiliary conventions such as Kickback, Redwood, Minorwood, etc, have been devised to compensate for the failures inherent in it, but it is still one of the world's most popular conventions. Four books! And yet, two players will sit down to play for the first time and one will ask, "Fourteen thirty or the other?"
"No, I play zero three one four."
And with that they go on to the next item on the card. So much for Eddie's four books.
The Good and the Bad
The idea of making the king of trump equivalent to an ace was a great improvement over the old standard Blackwood, and being able to ask about the queen is almost as valuable. RKC works wonderfully well when your trump suit is spades, but not so well with hearts, and is awful with the minors. (To be fair, standard Blackwood is no better when your trump suit is a minor, especially clubs!) Let me show you a disaster caused by the misuse of RKC. This hand occurred on BBO, BridgeBase Online.
One of the response to 4NT is the 5
bid... It shows two keycards with the queen of trump. That's
a terrible agreement unless your suit is spades!
Look at the hand above, and I'm pretty sure you can see the problem without me pointing out the obvious... Declarer was committed to slam off two aces because the trump suit was hearts and not spades. If the trump suit was spades, the 5
call could have been passed, but you cannot pass with any other suit! However, the convention
works great when you have the master suit.
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Three Suggestions
- Read Kantar's four books and then tell your partners what you learned, because they won't read them
- Give up the 5 agreement
- Give up RKC - but keep the idea of the king of trump being a keycard and use a modified standard Blackwood
- Take a look at MSK, Major Suit Keycard, which is not as complicated as RKC, but solves this problem
The Warts
Are you really comfortable with the idea of zero or three keycards or the other one, one or four? Experts will say a resounding Yes!, but many lesser players often get it wrong and either pass when they shouldn't, or they continue when they shouldn't. Both mistakes end in a disaster.
That's one of the bidding problems addressed by Kantar and others when they sugggest ways of avoiding the RKCB problems. Sorry, but I have no advice for you. However, if you persevere and suffer the bad results, you will eventually learn how to evaluate those difficulties.
The Solution
Okay, this is personal... After years of suffering with RKCB I asked my partners for suggestions on how to improve Roman Keycard, and how to avoid its problems. We came up with Major Suit Keycard. MSK has been optimized for the majors simply because there is no way in hell that any form of Blackwood that starts with a 4NT bid will ever be useable with a minor suit... Thank you, my friends!
If you would like a more complete explanation of Roman Keycard try:
Roy Wilson