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1C 1H 2H 2S 2N Whether responder continues with 3S or passes depends on his hand (K1098xx in spades may well continue. Jxxxxx xx Qxx xx easy pass I suppose you have a magic ability to know to pass your weak jumpshift In any event, you’re doing the typical thing when you personally don’t play a method. You come up with very low frequency holdings on which the treatment you dislike doesn’t shine. I’ve played t-Walsh in serious competition for many years now…I started playing it in 2006. I have yet to encounter your scenario. Now, I don’t play much and took some years off after a dismal BB performance, but I’m not going to worry about a scenario that hasn’t happened in several thousand hands. You Iike WJS? Go ahead…there are hands where they work and ones where they don’t, like any gadget. My experience is that, within the context of a detailed method, I have other uses for the bids, which uses my experience, judgement and biases tell me are net more effective. But criticizing a bid simply by making up hands that don’t fit the method well is not a convincing argument. Show common hand types where problems arise, contrast those to your preferred method and now you’re starting a serious debate.

I don't think that's quite right. Intelligence is not a quality that differentiates humans from apes; or spiders from potatoes. Unsurprisingly there's a vast literature on the topic of what is and isn't 'intelligence'. There's also quite a bit of work done on where 'it' is. Duncan et.al., (A neural basis for general intelligence,  Science (2000) 289: 457-60.) believe it's in the frontal lobe. A simple definition of intelligence might be that it is the quality of any 'thing' that causes it to consciously perform a purposeful task in response to an external stimulus. So an asteroid bending to the force of gravity or a plant turning to the light aren't examples of intelligence. A human responding to a painful stimulus before the signal reaches the cortex to cause conscious decision-making wouldn't be an example of intelligence either. The key is that the response requires consciousness to be aware of the stimulus and then subsequent decision-making to either respond in one way or another. Singing is evidence of intelligence but breathing when you're asleep isn't even though exactly the same muscles are needed for both activities.

In the case of Italian Lungo-Corto, the extent to which it derives from Acol is an interesting question to which I don't know the full answer. Certainly there was English (but also French) influence in the 1930s, when bridge was popular among the ruling classes although regarded with suspicion by Mussolini who renamed it 'ponte'. Post-war, most Italians were playing regional variants of strong club, which evolved into powerful competitive systems in Naples and Rome, remaining more primitive and extremely varied elsewhere. But Milan became (or remained) a cull of natural 4 card majors which evolved to a more rigorous approach than Acol and incorporated some refinements from Italian artificial and US natural systems. During the 80's the federation defined and imposed a national standard of Lungo-Corto which largely supplanted strong club systems except in some diehard areas like Turin. The culmination of the system was Franco di Stefano's version in 1987, which was still the way most club players played until ten years ago. Now it is almost gone and beginners are taught 2/1 GF.

I see FSF somewhat differently. To me FSF says: we’re going to at least game. Please make the cheapest natural bid, over after which I will tell you my preferred strain and we can discuss (through bidding) our degree of fit and each partner’s opinion about level. Sometimes responder is genuinely interested in opener’s suit lengths. Were we 6=3=1=3 we’d become very interested in clubs after the 3C bid, but with this hand we didn’t much care what partner did because we intend to bid 3S not matter what (unless he surprised us with a 2S bid over which we might…not would…bid keycard). So to me, sometimes we use FSF in order to find out about partner’s hand but on other occasions as a prelude to telling him about ours.