Every deal in Bridge can be categorized in one of the following 4 ways.
1. It is your hand.
When this is the case, your bidding must be as accurate as possible in order to get to the best contract - which you expect to make. All bids are geared toward getting to high percentage games and slams, and conversely staying out of low percentage games and slams. All constructive bidding tools are available. The terms conservative and aggressive bidding have no place in these auctions - accuracy is the key.
2. It is their hand.
When this is the case, your plan must be to make their bidding and subsequent play of the hand as difficult as you can. Tools available include pre-empts, overcalls (lead directing or for a possible sacrifice), lead directing doubles, and sacrifice bidding where the penalty is not prohibitive. In this context, the terms conservative and aggressive bidding are relevant since there is some guesswork involved - and the most effective interference bidding is usually to take your best shot before the opponents know what they can make. Sometimes this can result in a big minus - this will happen more often to aggressive bidders than to conservative bidders.
3. The strength is relatively evenly divided between the two pairs.
When this is the case, there will most often be competitive bidding. I suggest that the Law of Total Tricks is the best tool to use here. Conservative and aggressive are not relevant terms - just apply the Law correctly and you will most often arrive at the best contract possible. This doesn't guarantee a good result, but the odds will be in your favor.
4. The hands are extremely distributional - singletons and voids are likely.
When this is the case, quite often both sides can make high level contracts, and it is very difficult to know when to quit bidding and whether or not to double. It is not easy to know whose hand it is. My suggestion for these situations is to bid one more and hope to make it, and double only when you feel sure that one more bid will get doubled and result in a bad score. You can sometimes get a feeling for whether they can make their bid by the speed and confidence shown in their bidding.
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