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But Law 71C of Rubber Bridge says that "a concession may be withdrawn ...if a defender concedes one or more tricks and his partner immediately objects". So the other defender is not required to actively consent but should be able to immediately dissent. Sounds to me like the software might as well ask consent. Maurizio di Sacco is working on a proposal for on-line duplicate bridge laws for the WBFLC. I don't know if he has a BBO contact or not, but it might be a good idea to find out what he thinks about claims.

From Kevin Drum at Mother Jones: That’s all I said in that particular piece, but in other posts where I had more space I still mostly failed to grapple with the obvious conclusion of my own reasoning. I figured there was a limit to what Republicans could do. They could pack-and-crack congressional districts. They could squeeze a little more turnout out of evangelicals and older whites. Fox News could run its endless “scary black folks” segments. State legislatures could pass photo ID laws designed to suppress black voter turnout. But they were running out of options. The last item in that list is a good example of what influenced my thinking. The truth is that photo ID laws have only a tiny influence on presidential elections. It turns out that most people who lack photo IDs aren’t likely to vote in the first place, and loud pushback from liberals offset some of the losses anyway. What’s more, photo ID laws were passed only in states with total Republican control, and by definition those are states that are mostly safe Republican havens to start with. The fact that Republicans put so much energy into this project only showed how desperate they were. There just wasn’t much left for them to do in the face of demographic changes that were reducing the size of their white base by a point or two every election cycle. For what it’s worth, this was mostly the conclusion of Republicans themselves, too. The famous post-election autopsy written by the Republican National Committee after Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss, said this: In 1980, exit polls tell us that the electorate was 88 percent white. In 2012, it was 72 percent white….According to the Pew Hispanic Center, in 2050, whites will be 47 percent of the country….The Republican Party must be committed to building a lasting relationship within the African American community year-round, based on mutual respect and with a spirit of caring. But there was always a glaring problem with this strategy, one that everybody was keenly aware of: reaching out to black voters would only work if Republicans also ceased their tolerance of white bigotry. In other words, they’d almost certainly lose votes on a net basis at first, which would mean handing over the presidency—and maybe much more—to Democrats for upwards of a decade or so. That’s just too big a sacrifice for any political party to make. So instead they took another route: they went after the white vote even harder. In Donald Trump they found a candidate who wasn’t afraid to appeal to racist sentiment loudly and bluntly, something that simply hadn’t occurred to other Republicans. They never thought they could get away with something like this in the 21st century, and normally they would have been right: it would have lost them as many votes among educated whites as it won them among working-class whites. But after eight years of a black president in the White House, racial tensions were ratcheted up just enough that Trump could get away with it. Only by a hair, and only with plenty of other help, but he did get away with it, losing 10 points of support among college-educated whites but gaining 14 points among working-class whites. The entire Republican Party is now all-in on this strategy. They mostly stay quiet themselves and let Trump himself do the dirty work, but that’s enough. Nobody talks anymore about reaching out to the black community with a spirit of caring or any other spirit. Nor is there anything the rest of us can do about this. Republicans believe that wrecking the fabric of the country is their only hope of staying in power, and they’re right. If working-class whites abandon them even a little bit, they’re toast. So all we can do is try to crush them. What other options are there? Reactionary American whites, as always, won’t give up their power unless it’s taken from them by either a literal or figurative war. Liberals need to be as Lincolnesque as possible in this endeavor—we don’t have to win the votes of unrepentent bigots, just the fretful fence-sitters—but we also need to be Lincolnesque in our commitment to winning America’s latest race war.

I mean, yeah, absolutely, all us hicks sit around and talk about civil war commanders. what else would we talk about? I guess I'm just not cultured enough to rub elbows with a bunch of racist pieces of *****. You need to talk to Chas about that kind of stuff.

No, you stupid POS. We don't hate our country. We hate you.

This is a "normal" pairs tournament where the tables are located in different restaurants/bars/cafes/ spread over a city. You start playing at one location with maybe 4 tables. Then you make a walk to the next location and play there. Walking around, always meeting different players at different places. Searching your way through a city. All have that little map in their hands to find the next place they have to go to. At one place you make your lunch break before you move to the next. Distances are normally no longer than 10 minutes walk. It is really fun as long as it is not raining and a lot of players here love it. Thanks :) found them

Probably the best treatment for baby blackwood would be to abandon it. Baby Blackwood is like a lot of bad conventions. Somebody somewhere thought it would be a neat idea, since it saves a lot of bidding space, but they didn't think it through: it 'solves' something that should rarely, if ever, need solving. I can't recall seeing any competent pair get into trouble using 4N as keycard when spades are trump. It is theoretically possible to get into some difficulties using 4N as keycard when hearts are trump, but I've not seen it in at least 30 years. Minors are more of a problem, since the 'wrong' response can drive you a doomed slam, but that usually means that the person using keycard should not have used keycard! Anyway, kickback is easy enough to learn, and probably less prone to 'forgets' than is 3N. And of course, and most importantly, using 3N for some other purpose is solving more important and more common issues than one solves by using it as ace-asking. There are several ways one can use 3N in auctions in which one is always going to play a major. Serious or non-serious 3N are the most common but not the only options available. One useful idea, when deciding whether to adopt a convention, is to look at what the top players play, which is not that hard, since one can usually find their convention cards in various on-line locations. This is not to see what they play, since there will be a wide variety, and much of what they play is idiosyncratic or at the least selected to mesh with the rest of their system. However, it is informative to see, for example, than nobody plays baby blackwood or mini-roman or gerber (other than in very clearly defined actions over a notrump call), and so on. If these ideas, which many eager less-experienced players adopt, were effective, don't you think that those who earn their living playing competitive bridge might use them?

"Ace-asking bids at the level of 3NT or below and usages on the first round (other than Blackwood and Gerber as described above), require an Immediate Alert" page 11 of alert procedures link here -> ACBL Alert procedure