dcrc2

At the table I bid 2♣ then 3♥, which was too much. Partner had ♠Qxx ♥x ♦Kxxx ♣Kxxxx.

Final board of a close teams match; neither vul; you hold ♠ AKxx ♥ KT9xxx ♦ x ♣ Ax Partner passes as dealer and RHO opens 1NT (12-14). You play multi-landy, so your options are Dbl (penalties), 2C (both majors) or 2D (one major). What do you do? If you bid 2♣ partner will bid 2♠. Are you worth another bid? If you bid 2♦ partner will bid 2♥. Are you worth another bid?

Dammit, and I looked so carefully! Sorry! :lol: That makes it even more clear there was no MI, in my opinion, as if we're not applying section (a) we don't have to worry about what "subject to proper disclosure" means.

I don't see any evidence that the bid was misdescribed. It seems entirely consistent with an agreement of "23+ or game forcing" and South having taken a bit of a punt. The hand is not the typical dross that falls under 10B4a, after all. Even if it could be shown that N/S have an implicit agreement that such a hand is acceptable for 2♣, the explanation seems borderline OK to me. And the hand is so unusual that it seems highly unlikely that the partnership will have seen enough similar hands for an implicit agreement to have been formed. (It doesn't meet the rule of 25 though. It has 14 HCP + 10 cards in the two longest suits = 24)

It's not easy to score -70 IMPs in a 24-board Butler pairs, but we managed it last night. This was the most amusing of our many disasters: [hv=pc=n&s=sakq975hakqt96dc5&n=sh872daj8cqjt9864&d=s&v=0&b=11&a=2cp2dd2sp3cp3hp4hp4np5cp7hppp]266|200[/hv] Would LHO make the mistake of leading the suit that her partner had doubled? Sadly not - she held ♣AKxx and naturally felt that this might be a better shot. I confess to being opener on this hand, and perhaps my bidding was influenced by already being on about -55 by this point. But still, it all felt a bit unlucky. How would you get this right? You are playing with a good partner but without extensive agreements; cue-bids would generally show either first or second round control. The 2♦ response was an almost-forced relay (maybe not best here but that was the system); 5♣ showed 1 or 4 key-cards. (And yes, I know perfectly well that you don't generally bid Blackwood with a void, so please don't tell me that unless you're going to offer a better idea.)

OK, my apologies: I posted this hand because I thought it was clear to play the ace. I do still think that, playing against typical club opponents, it's a mistake to play the queen. Never mind the singleton ♥9 possibility, you have an excellent chance of a misdefence. If East has the ♣A he's almost bound to go wrong and return a spade. If West has it, I supsect he'll still return a spade some of the time, and even if he plays a second heart there will be some Easts who don't cash their third trick. If you play the ♥Q at trick one, no defenders on earth can go wrong - you'll make +460, and that is a bottom score. But I still totally misanalysed the hand, because even if I'm right about these opponents, a hand which you need to know who the opponents are doesn't belong in this forum. Sorry! Hope it was interesting in some way.

Here's a simple little hand from the club which I got wrong. I'm hoping others will find my mistake instructive. [hv=pc=n&s=sak9ht874dj3ckjt3&n=s4haq6dakq974cq86&d=n&v=0&b=1&a=1dp1hp3dp3nppp]266|200[/hv] LHO leads the ♥9, after some thought. Clearly this contract is going to make, but it's pairs so overtricks are important. How do you play, and why?

If you duck at trick one then they can switch to spades and you've only got eight tricks. GIB's play will make the contract whenever East's diamonds are Qxx or better, on the assumption that West has the remaining five hearts and not the ♠A for his weak two opener. I'm not sure what the right play is, but GIB's line seems very reasonable.

Six tricks, applying Law 64C to the third revoke. Without the third revoke, declarer would have made six tricks (due to the Law 64A penalty for the first revoke). Because of the third revoke, he made nine. Sure the defenders could have held him to six tricks even after the third revoke, but their failure to do so was not SEWoG so this does not deny them redress. Nice construction, though :)

Assuming that the one convention card they had was "substantially" completed, the ruling seems wrong to me. The regs that Ed quoted imply that a second convention card should be produced "in a timely manner", which surely does not mean "immediately". Making everyone wait while a second card was produced seems like a severe overreaction.

I guess this is my fault, since the wording for OB 11C2-5 was adapted from one of my suggestions, and 11C5 in particular is almost word-for-word. You can probably still find the original post in the rgb archives somewhere. For reference, here is the section on 1♦ from the 2005 Orange Book. (The 1♣ opening was exactly analogous at Level 3; but only (a)-(c ) applied at Level 2 so it's easier to understand the 1♦ opening where everything was in one place.) I didn't like this old regulation - partly because it seemed that (a)-(f) weren't really distinct choices and ought to be combined into a single possibility; and partly because it relied on knowing exactly what "natural" meant. For example a MIDMAC 1♣ opening denies a 5-card major but shows at least one 4-card major. All such hands are either balanced, natural clubs or natural diamonds. But if a "natural" option always has a second suit, is that really natural? I wasn't sure. Hence OB 11C2/4, which attempts to explain exactly what shapes you can and can't include in your minor openings - any subset of the allowed hands is permitted. That rewrite excluded canape openings, which would therefore have to be dealt with separately. But that didn't seem so bad, because it would be a chance to clear up the rather convoluted paragraph at the end of the old section 12.2.3. The new OB 11C5 was meant to be a direct translation of that paragraph. OK, so what happened to the "natural opening in the other minor" possibility? Well, initially it was just an oversight. In fact the original version didn't have option (d). But then I played against a pair opening 1♦ with both minors either way round and realised I'd forgotten about that. By this time the new version was already in a draft and I had to rather sheepishly go back and ask for my suggestion to be changed. Obviously the whole "natural opening in the other minor" option could have been added back in but I don't think anyone believed that anyone would be playing such a thing. To be honest I wouldn't have thought that canape in one suit and non-canape in the other suit was playable; that might have been part of the reason I'd overlooked the possibility originally. (Perhaps if it's always single-suited it's not so bad, but I think it would be more normal (and better) to open 2m with that.) Also, arguably, the only reason it had been allowed in the first place was because of the rather awkward merging of the canape and non-canape regulations for 1-of-a-minor, and if a regulation for canape openings had been written from scratch the possibility of having a non-canape hand with the other minor would never have been in there in the first place. So, with no-one likely to be playing it, it seemed reasonable to tidy things up by leaving it out. I suspect that if anyone had complained when the draft OB was produced that this change would make their system illegal, then it might have been added back in; certainly this happened in a couple of other places in the regulations at that time.

I think adjusting the score is a serious mistake. While technically an infraction, comments like these are normal for a club game, and for the good of the game it is important that they should not be punished. Sure you can tell North, "It's probably better not to answer," but that is all. I would happily discuss with East why this ruling is legal (see other posts in this thread for a reasonable legal basis for no adjustment), but not at the table. If the TD allows East to get as far as reciting the Laws, then he has already failed in my opinion. It is unfortunate that the director was called, as this may itself lead to ill-feeling due to N/S not believing they'd done anything wrong. But the director can limit the damage so long as he ensures N/S go away with the message, "East is right, but he's being a pedant." If he makes the mistake of even appearing to consider an adjustment, they are likely to take away instead, "East is right - you're not allowed to have fun at this club." I'm not surprised about the ill-feeling reported in the original post, and it's all the director's fault.

Personally I like to play 1♦ and 1♥ as unlimited (or 11-21) even in a "natural" multi-way club system. But that's a matter of taste; you could play them as 11-16.

New two-way club system for you. The idea is to have bids available showing unbalanced hands in all four suits, while (unlike the 2♣ bid in Swedish Club) still being able to sort out most of your major-suits fits below 2 of your main suit. To do this you have to give up the 5-card heart opening, but this structure allows you to continue to play 5-card spades: 1♣ = 11-13 balanced/4144 or 17+. 1♦ = 11+ with 4+ hearts, unbalanced or 5-3-3-2, possibly with a longer minor if minimum. 1♥ = 11+ with 5+ clubs, unbalanced, not 4 hearts if minimum. 1♠ = 11-16 with 5+ spades. 1NT = 14-16(17) balanced/4144. 2♣ = 11-16 with 5+ diamonds, unbalanced, no 4-card major unless intending to bid again over a 2♦ response. 2♦ = 11-16, 5+ diamonds and precisely 4 spades. I haven't worked out all the responses, merely proved that they exist :) Still, I thought the structure was interesting enough to share with you. There's also a slightly more natural version where 1♦ = 5+ clubs or (41)44 1♥ = 5+ hearts or 4H-5D or 44(14)

I guess you could get around these issues by leading the second card from honour sequences when not asking for count, ie. A from AK K from AK or KQ asks for count Q from KQ J from QJ T from JT No idea whether this is sensible, it just occurred to me before I fell asleep last night ...

I was watching the BBC breakfast programme when, during an interview with an expert on nuclear power, the footage of the first explosion came through. Stunned, the presenter came up with a remarkably insightful question: "Presumably, an explosion like this is something you want to avoid?"

Many otherwise-excellent Vugraph presentations are spoilt by having a bad internet connection at the venue. I realise that the main responsibility is on the event organisers to ensure a good connection is available, and if the connection is sufficiently bad there is nothing you can do. However, it seems to me that the BBO software makes this problem much worse than it ought to be. The standard Windows client used by Vugraph operators is very unforgiving to intermittent connections. In particular, if your connection drops you are unable to continue playing cards, and eventually you are expelled from the table. That makes perfect sense for playing in the main bridge club, where the table needs to "move on" if one of its players disappears; but it doesn't make sense for a Vugraph operator, where you are the table. My suggestion is a separate client designed purely for use by Vugraph operators. The key feature would be the ability to enter bids and plays irrespective of whether your connection was currently alive. Then the relevant messages would be sent to the server as and when a connection could be made. Obviously the operator would still have to be notified when the connection drops, but not in such a way as to prevent him from following the play. The server should also not close the table as soon as it loses connection to the operator, but wait until either the connection returns or the broadcast is manually aborted. The current situation, where all of the kibitzers are chucked out when the operator's connection dies, is really unfortunate. Ideally, send a message to the table, like "The operator has lost connection". Much better if the commentators can continue to talk, even if they know there is a problem, rather than everyone being kicked out and having to come back in again. I would imagine that this can all be done without affecting the existing clients. From the current client's point of view, a Vugraph operator would still appear to be a normal Yellow user, but in fact this just be a proxy created by the server. Obviously I appreciate there would be substantial work involved in creating a new client, and the new protocol it would use, but since it only needs to perform a single function it would be much less work than creating a complete reimplementation of BBO. A separate client for Vugraph operators would have other benefits: - A simpler interface, so that the operator can be presented with the options for starting a broadcast directly, rather than having to navigate through the existing client. Amongst other things, this would help to make restarting quicker in case of problems. The fact that you use the same UI for playing bridge as for running Vugraph broadcasts makes many things a little counterintuitive at the moment (like the way you use "redeal" to start a new board). - Ability to add new functionality that would be useful to operators. For example, being able to make corrections to calls in an auction without having to "undo" all the way back to the relevant place. e.g. to insert the pass that you forgot right back at the start. (The server could easily translate this into the series of undos and replacements needed for the existing clients.) - Currently (or at least, when I last did it) operators are still using the old Windows client which is not being updated. A dedicated client for operators would allow for future updates to improve Vugraph, without having to roll out a new version of the old client.

I don't think this is a valid analysis: 1♠ and 1NT are almost equivalent in terms of the amount of room they take up, because of the high probability that you want to stop in 1NT. While you do have an extra step available over 1♠, responder can only use it for hands which want to play in 1NT, which is something he could achieve by passing if the rebid had been 1NT. So the extra step is no use to responder at all. (It may be of use to opener, as it means he'll likely get a third bid, but that would show a completely different hand type to the one under discussion.) Surely if bidding 1♠ on balanced hands is superior, it is simply because you have more information (you've shown whether opener has spades), not more space. I prefer bypassing spades because I feel it simplifies the auction. If you're destined for 1NT or 3NT then a 1NT rebid will get you there quicker; whereas if responder has something more complex to say then it's generally easier to proceed after a limited, balanced rebid than after a wide-ranging 1♠. Also my methods after a 1NT rebid are better than those after a 1♠ rebid; and my methods after 1♠ are better than they would be if it could be balanced.