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If you do the normal thing and pass with the West cards, do you imagine that partner will just fold up the cards and put them back in the bidding box?

I now feel guilty for having often stated that getting to 1N is often a winning move. However, let me remind you of the qualifier that always accompanies that statement…..when the hcp between the two sides are roughly equal. That means, here, that partner holds between 8-11 hcp. If he were a passed hand, that might seem like a reasonable gamble (imo, it isn’t) but here partner is passed! Thus his range is not 0-17 as it would be had RHO been dealer….it’s 0-11. One need not be a statistician to know that this means that his median or mean point count holdings will be lower than had he been unpassed. With a range of 0-17 he will hold 8-17 a trifle more than half the time. When his range is 0-11, he’ll all too often hold 0-5 and, of course, the 12-17 hcp hands, which serve to generate an expectancy of around 8.5 hcp on average are simply not there. Note that even this relies upon the flawed assumption that RHO has no more than 12 hcp. I’ve played enough…and so have you…to know that it’s silly to assume that RHO has exactly 12 hcp…his average count will be higher. They probably don’t even need to double you when partner holds even 6 hcp. You have no source of tricks while they have the advantage not only of more values but also likely of being able to play on the suit or suits in which they do have length or good spot card winners. So you will often fail by more than their partscore But, of course, there are very good odds that you will be doubled. Of course, if you’re playing extremely weak players that may not happen as often as it should but in my experience competent players beat up on extremely weak players without the need to gamble by terrible bidding. Think about it this way…..name one expert pair in the entire world who use a weak 1N overcall….to show 11-14 or so in a balanced hand. Obviously I don’t know the methods of anything like all expert pairs but I’ve played quite a bit of high level bridge, have watched more, and read about even more and I’m confident that you won’t find any. Btw, a direct 1N overcall is an entirely different animal than is a balancing 1N after (1x) P (P)….where responder is known to be weak and partner may well have decent values (such as this hand) and been unable to bid. Why don’t expert players use a weak 1N direct overcall? Because they don’t play 1N as well as you do? Or maybe because they know that the occasional good result doesn’t begin to offset the deluge of horrible to catastrophic results that the method is guaranteed to generate, absent abysmally weak opps. Finally, I earlier asked you about the upsides and downsides. You replied citing only upsides. That’s how players prevent themselves from improving. They get hold of a dubious idea and, when told by more experienced players that the idea is poor, look only at the upsides, thus ignoring whatever advice was being given. One fundamental rule of bidding theory, which imo has no exception, is that every meaning we assign to an action, either as a stand-alone action or as part of a detailed set of agreements, has a downside. There is no free lunch in bidding theory. Even something as simple and basic as stayman has a downside. Pick up 3=2=2=6 with 2 hcp and you’d love, on that hand, to be able to bid a natural, weak 2C after partner opens 15-17 That’s a downside to stayman. We all (well, most of us) play some version of stayman because the numerous upsides far outweigh the downsides, to the point that beginners usually aren’t even told of the downside. I asked you to consider both the upsides and downsides because that’s one should always do when considering assigning meanings to actions. When one focuses only on one or the other, one is doomed to end up playing poor methods.

The 'race to 1NT' is that when values are roughly equally divided between the sides, you'd rather be declaring 1NT than defending it. It doesn't apply at all if the values aren't equally divided. With your hand there's about a 38% chance you have 17 or less points combined, and 53% chance that you have 18 or less points combined, and these alone are going to be very poor scores for you. (You won't only be punished when LHO has invitational values - if you had agreed to play such a system, the opponents surely aren't going to play the same defense as to a strong 1NT overcall; I'd expect RHO would double with extras too, after which LHO could run out if needed.) And that's not including other cases when 1N undoubled is poor too.

(and here is where my biases show up. They are - Zealot level. I do realize this.) I have no idea if you can run ACBLScorW on your mac. If you have a windows emulator that runs more windows programs than not, go ahead and try it. It should be immediately obvious if it works or not. I know nothing from Apple - I don't understand why people would want to run a computer system based on Linux BSD and then ignore all those tools and power to cover their screen with untranslatable pictures instead of actual words, and use unfathomable, unreadable, and constantly changing Apple "helper applications". From what jwz tells me, I am right to not understand. Frankly, if I need to live with "we know how best you should work", I'll stick with GatesWare - at least I have decades of experience with the ways they confuse their users. Oh, and at least there is support for Ignore their latest attempt to "help", make it work the way you're used to. I haven't seen ACBLDOS running (even on my computers, even with DOSEMU on my linux box) since Steve retired. I know of no clubs running ACBLscor DOS - and I would be scared if they did, if they post to Live4Clubs - because it means a pre-Windows 7 computer is internet-connected, and therefore almost certainly internet-infected (or, you know, DOSEMU or sneakernet).