Leaderboard

No. Just no. As David says, I’d expect 4 card support for 3S. I think the LOTT, if used simplistically, is not as good as a lot of people think it is, but it’s justification for bidding with 4 card support, since then our ‘total’ trumps are at least 9 cards Of course, the LOTT requires that we also estimate the opps’ total trump length. If we have 9 but they have only 7, the total ‘tricks’ predicted/suggested by the Law is 16…if we make 3S, we’re better off doubling. Of course, we don’t know much about their fit…so we’d need to look at our clubs as a start. I’d definitely bid with 4 spades and two clubs, because I can infer 8 or 9 clubs for them most of the time. Meanwhile, how strong is partner’s hand? One of our partnership knows, but it’s not us. What’s his club holding? He knows, we don’t. Do we trust our partner? If we pass and he doubles, do we think that’s pure penalty or card showing, asking us to look at our hand and decide what to do, given that he shows invitational or better values? My money is on the latter. So I can pass in tempo with two or three spades or an ugly hand with four, trusting partner to reopen. Sure, once in a while he won’t have the values to reopen or swings a little conservative and we get a bad board. So what? Players who feel that they always have to be the decision maker for their partnership rarely have long term success. Otoh, players who let their partner contribute equally usually do quite well. Chasing perfection on every board….that’s a great way to play losing bridge I know…most non-experts screw up. If partner is a weak(ish) player, he or she may timidly pass out 3C when the hand belongs to us. That sort of result, if it happens with some frequency, is frustrating and often engenders the desire to act ahead of partner In the not so long run that desire merely reinforces partner’s tendencies, since partner learns, even if unconsciously, that you overbid, so when you pass, he or she places you with a minimum and/or two card support and that reinforces the tendency to be timid. If you’re in a casual partnership, you can often get away with taking control when you shouldn’t, but if you’re hoping to build a partnership, stay disciplined. If partner should have reopened, but didn’t, then you’ve got a teaching/learning discussion point for later. Partnership discipline isn’t about being conservative or aggressive. It’s about staying within your methods, not worrying that every now and then one gets a poor result despite or because of staying within one’s methods, and letting partner be an equal partner. Here, you can bid with 4 card support….if your style is aggressive, you don’t need a max. If your style is conservative, you may (depending on what the hand looks like). But bidding with three card support is neither aggressive nor conservative…it’s just masterminding (I suppose something like AKx AQxx Axxx xx would be possible, tho I’d dither over bidding 3S)

I don't know anybody who plays 2/1 F2N here in the home of Acol, 1♥-2♣-2♥ is droppable with the understanding that if you're not prepared to bid 2♠ over this you should have responded 1♠ not 2♣ with 4-5.

Looks like one glaring mistake in the ruleset. For passed hands, its rules about 4 level bids are: 1) jump to 4 of opened suit with 11+, 4+ card support, no support for second suit, 3+ controls, describe it as a slam try 2) jump to 4 of opened suit with 9+, 4+ card support, any outside singleton/void, 3+ controls, describe it as a slam try 3,4) same as 1,2) but jumping to 4 of opener's second suit 5) jump to 4♦ if opener's second suit was hearts with 9+, 4+ card support, 0-1 diamonds, 3+ controls, describe it as splinter 5 was presumably meant to only apply in the 1♣ - 1♠ - 2♥ - 4♦ case, but they forgot to check that opener's first suit wasn't diamonds, so the two rules overlapped. The result is that it bids 4♦ in both the splinter and non-splinter case, but alerts it as a splinter for both (it can't show two text alerts at the same time, and the splinter one came last, but the suit length part uses the first rule). Trivial fix to implement. Talking of reverses and splinters reminds me of my favourite bid description of all time. I should look into why that happened, since I posted that before I had debugging capabilities.. [edit] OK, it just defines 4x as a splinter over 3M for any x except the three suits bid previously, forgetting to exclude x=N, so it tried searching for N in the suit list, and overflowed into another part of the data.

2♥ is basically forcing in most modern forms of Acol where the 2/1 is a little stronger than it is in old fashiond Acol. You can bid 1♠-2♣-2N (ostensibly balanced and GF) and see what partner does, we actually have the explicit agreement that this 2N bid doesn't have to be balanced, so 1♠-2♣-2N-3m-3♥ shows this hand type 18+ 5+♠, 4+♥ with the wrinkle that big 5-5s we open 1♥.

Yes, you can substitute X for 1♥ if X contains all the hands that would have bid 1♥. Whether X also contains other hands (i.e. without hands) is not an issue. The logic is that the insufficient 1♥ bid doesn't give any UI if it only contains a subset of the hands that would make the sufficient X call. And then apparently WBF also allows some substitutions where 1♥ isn't quite a subset of X. Edit: lol sorry I have it upside down, Mycroft explains it