The second aspect of knowing your hand is identifying its shape.

There are four suits. If your hand contains roughly the same number of cards from each of the four suits, your hand is described at Balanced. If your hand is made of cards from only one, two or three suits or has a lot of cards from one or two suits, then it is Unbalanced. Let's look at some examples

This hand is a BALANCED hand.

If you look at the hand, you can see that it is made up of the following card distribution: 4 Spades, 4 Hearts, 3 Clubs and 2 Diamonds, or 4/4/3/2 to simplify it.

The Diamond suit with only 2 cards is called a Doubleton (two cards). Look at the next hand.

This hand is a UNBALANCED hand.

If you look at the hand, you can see that it is made up of the following card distribution: 6 Spades, 2 Hearts, 1 Clubs and 4 Diamonds, or 6/2/1/4 to simplify it.

The Heart suit with only 2 cards is a Doubleton (two cards).

The Club suit with only 1 card is a Singleton (only one card).

And now another example.

This hand is a UNBALANCED hand.

If you look at the hand, you can see that it is made up of the following card distribution: 6 Spades, 2 Hearts, 0 Clubs and 5 Diamonds, or 6/2/0/5 to simplify it.

The Heart suit with only 2 cards is a Doubleton (two cards).

The Club suit has no cards, This is called a Void.

A simple rule is that a BALANCED hand can ONLY contain a maximum of 1 Doubleton and it can't contain ANY Singletons or Voids.

This means that there are a limited number of shape distributions that can be BALANCED; namely 5/3/3/2 or 4/4/3/2 or 4/3/3/3 and any variations of those 3.

All other distributions are UNBALANCED.

It is important that you are able to quickly analyse your hand and determine its shape as this will influence how you will bid.

You can practise your shape identification by clicking the button below.

Shape Training
Lesson 3 : Simple Opening Bids