Standard American is a bidding system for the game of bridge widely used in North America and elsewhere. Owing to the popularization of the game by Charles Goren in the 1940s and 1950s, its early versions were sometimes referred to simply as 'Goren'. With the addition and evolution of various treatments and conventions, it is now more generally referred to as Standard American. It is a bidding system based on five-card majors and a strong notrump; players may add conventions and refine the meanings of bids through partnership agreements summarized in their convention card. One standardised version, SAYC (Standard American Yellow Card), is widely used by casual partnerships and in online bridge.
The purpose of bidding during the auction phase of each deal is to disclose information which one's partner may employ in order to arrive at an optimal contract while concurrently contending with the opponents' attempts to do likewise. A bidding system is a set of agreements about the meanings of the different bids that the players use. Each bid provides information about the hand's high-card strength and suit distribution based on hand evaluation techniques.
"Standard American" was the label given to the bridge bidding system developed by Charles Goren and his contemporaries in the 1940s. This system employed the 1915 point-count method to evaluate the strength of a bridge hand. Most bids had fairly specific requirements regarding hand strength and suit distribution. This point-count system became so popular that most bridge players, social and tournament players alike, used it. American bridge teams in the late 1930s and 1940s won world championships using Standard American.
Modifications began to appear from the 1950s forward. Before the year 2000, new bidding systems evolved, including "2/1 Game Forcing" which are otherwise substantial departures from early Standard American methods. Most tournament pairs now assemble their own system from a variety of new treatments and conventions that have evolved. The nearest thing to a common system in tournament play is the "Standard American Yellow Card" (SAYC) promulgated by the American Contract Bridge League. SAYC is widely used in internet bridge play, but only rarely in on-site tournament play.
The essential common elements of modern Standard American systems are:
The Standard American Yellow Card (SAYC) is a set of partnership agreements summarized in a convention card created by the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL) to be used as the required bidding system in specified events or as a base for a casual or online partnerships. Some of the specific agreements in Standard American Yellow Card (SAYC) that elaborate on or depart from more current Standard American bidding are:
