EricK

I suppose the thinking is that either you have a weak hand with ♦ in which case you can pass (or perhaps raise), or have an invitational hand which can make a natural bid as you are GF if opener bypasses 2♦. Obviously different interpretations would be needed for the follow-ups if opener's rebid is eg 2♥ (strong 4306?) or 2♠(5xy6?) etc It's probably the sort of thing you agree one day and first appears 6 month's later by which time neither of you can remember what you discussed.

Does 2♣ really force 2♦, or does it say "bid as if I had a weak hand with long ♦"? eg with the strong-ish 4045 hand, can opener rebid 3♦ instead?

It probably doesn't count as a compliment, but this talk of doubleton honours reminds me of the time declarer described me as a "tricky opponent" (or something like that) when I followed with the Jack from QJ doubleton in a restricted choice scenario, and subsequently won a trick with the Queen when she finessed partner for it.

If you suspect some high ♦ raise by advancer then the point about 3♠ burning up bidding room becomes less relevant. That's not to say the rest of the arguments against 3♠ aren't still valid. In a non-competitive auction it's more efficient to keep things low by putting more hand-types into the cheaper bids; but if LHO is going to bid something it becomes most efficient to divide the hand types as equally as possible between all the bids up to his bid (not that you know what it is yet!).

Although my hand is nice, I am not too enamoured of it if partner shows no desire to support my ♠. So I'll bid 2♥ (if it is 4th suit forcing), follow it up with 3♠, and give up if he then bids 3NT.

Judging from the replies, one of the perceived problems with 2/1 non-GF (and hence one of the advantages of 2/1 GF) is that there is sometimes no clear idea as to what level 2/1 is forcing. By judicious use of 4th suit forcing, 3rd suit forcing (Bourke relay?) after opener rebids his suit, opener not rebidding 2NT on a balanced minimum, and playing 2/1 forcing to 2NT or 3m/M, you should be able to get the best (or nearly the best) of both worlds.

The standard approach with the North hand is to transfer to ♠ and then bid a choice-of-games 3NT. I think the South hand qualifies as a super-accept if you play them. 4 good trumps, a side suit to 3 honours, and an outside Ace. You really can't be more maximum than that!

But East has got a slammish hand opposite a reverse - 6 losers and honours in each of partner's suit. He certainly wasn't bidding it as natural!

I don't know what "the" bid is. My bid is 3NT.

If you've agreed "middle of the road" pre-empting style ten this isn't a pre-empt. I can remember 3 very recent hands where my partner's vulnerable pre-empts have not been up to scratch - all of them ended badly!

Here is a hand I saw presented as a problem for, I guess, beginners/Intermediates [hv=pc=n&s=sk42h843dqtck7642&n=sa53hq2dak532ca53&d=n&v=e&b=9&a=1dp1np2np3nppp]266|200[/hv] West leads ♥J and the suit breaks 4/4 with East having ♥AK75. West now switches to ♠J. How do you play the hand? The solution basically said that we need 5 tricks from ♦ and the finesse at 50% is better than the 3-3 break at 36%. It did mention that the finesse is not quite 50% to make the contract because of the possible 5/1 split but this is even less likely than usual after the 4/4 ♥ break. But it seems to me that the two lines are much closer than that. Not only does the 4/4 ♥ break make a 3/3 ♦ break a little more likely, there are various clues that the ♠ are breaking as well (West leads ♥ rather than ♠, East didn't overcall 1♠) which will push the odds of a 3/3 ♦ break higher; restricted choice suggests that West is more likely to be 3/4 in the majors than 4/4, and on hands where East has ♦Jx, he is likely strong enough to have made a take out double. So what do you think the relative chances of the two lines are?

But on half the 4-2 ♥ splits RHO will have to ruff low, you can overruff and still try the ♣.

Which, I guess, is why in original Acol a 2/1 could be made on quite a weak hand - so no need for opener to stretch on 15/16 in an auction which starts 1M 1NT. Of course, this approach is not without problems of its own! But then Acol seems to have been designed to give the opponents major problems in competitive auctions (light openings, often starting with 1M or 1NT) at the expense of a few problems in purely constructive auctions

Surely the laws are not purely arbitrary but are an attempt to codify a certain view of what sorts of things are right and wrong (from a purely bridge perspective). It is notoriously difficult to capture everything you might want to in a codified set of laws, which is why some also refer to the "spirit of the game" - i.e. whatever it is that the laws are an attempt to codify.

But even that doesn't eliminate the problem as the people who are better at it would also be the people who tend to practice more. If you found you were "good at chess" (which is not too far from saying you are good at this sort of pattern recognition) you would likely practice it more and get even better. If you found that despite playing a lot you never quite "got it", you are more likely to get bored and give it up. Could those of you who can visualise a bridge position, and analyze it mentally, answer this: After you started trying to do this, how long did it take you to be able to do it quite well? After that, how long did it take you to get really good at it?

What does this extract from the Tangerine Book mean then? If people are allowed to draw conclusions "at their own risk" this implies that sometimes they will have been misled. So sometimes it is OK to ask questions which may mislead your opponents. When is it OK and when isn't it?

This conclusion seems somewhat overstated based on the evidence. Consider 3 potential types of people (using the chess example): 1. People with the natural ability to memorise a boardful of pieces, however randomly those are arranged 2. People with the ability to remember particular types of patterns given years of training in those patterns, but with no particular ability to memorise random arrangements 3. People without much ability to memorise particular patterns of chess pieces even if they played chess for many years. People in group 1 are probably very rare. All chessmasters will appear in group 2 (or rarely in group 1) because this is a necessary skill in order to play chess well. Chess novices might appear in any group (again rarely in group 1) - however their would be no immediate way of telling if they were group 2 or group 3. Assuming no participants were in group 1, we would see the results as in the experiment, even if the ability to memorise particular patterns after much practice was a quite rare innate talent - because chessmasters would be a self-selected group of people with that talent. So the years of experience would be necessary but not sufficient to hone that skill - because the potential ability might not be there.

On the same lines, maybe 1♥ will work. What happens then?!

Unless I misunderstand something this all seems heavily weighted in favour of the pairs who use alertable conventions: If a player doesn't ask the meaning it is his own fault if he gets it wrong; if he asks the meaning when he has a genuine bridge reason, the opps are allowed to use that fact to their advantage; if he asks without a genuine bridge reason then he might be ruled against if the opps guess wrong. Surely the spirit of the game is that one shouldn't be able to get an advantage by using methods the opponents don't understand?

Just a couple of hours ago this happened: [hv=pc=n&s=sajt5hkqt7dakt72c&e=s92haj8d5ckqt9642&d=w&v=n&b=12&a=pp4cdp4dp5ddpprppp]266|200[/hv] Obviously LHO liked his hand a little too much after my pre-empt. His partner had ♦Jxxx and not much else . But 3 off redoubled was a top for us (3 off doubled would have been joint top with another pair). I think he reckoned the redouble was "free" (i.e. if 5♦X goes off it's a bad result anyway) - although by the same reasoning there's not much upside as far as I can see.

So I am sitting in 4th seat with a great hand, when this happens: [hv=pc=n&e=shaqt98753daj84c3&d=s&v=b&b=7&a=1h1sp]133|200[/hv] It's MPs, opps are playing Acol (weak NT, 4 card majors). What would you do if playing with your usual partner? What would you do with mine - he's on the weak side of average without much ability to apply logic in unusual bidding situations.

As you all probably know, chess is normally played in full sight of the board, so that at any time both players know the location of all the pieces. "Blindfold chess" is a variant where one or both players play without sight of the board so have to keep track of the position in their head. Grandmasters occasionally give exhibitions where they play a number of blindfold games simultaneously - and their standard of play is generally not that far short of what it is in normal play. Most chess amateurs, on the other hand, are completely incapable of playing blindfold chess. Not only can they not keep track of the current position, but even if they could, they are not able to analyse that position nearly as well as they could if they were looking at it. When you start a hand of bridge, you are in a worse position than the "sighted" chess player. You only know the location of some of the cards. However, as the experts always tell us, the key to success at bridge is to develop the ability to place the outstanding cards - by counting, drawing inferences from the bidding and so on. But even when you have done that, that only puts you in the position of the blindfold chess player. You theoretically know where all the cards are, but still have to hold all that information in your head and do the analysis purely mentally - without the constant visual reminder of the position which the sighted chess player has. Now whereas I have seen a number of books and articles which explain how to go about placing the unseen cards, I have never seen anyone explain how to do the analysis of this purely imagined position. Is this because it is a skill which you either have or you haven't got? As far as I know, chess grandmasters never train themselves to be able to play blindfold - it's just something they discover they can do. And no doubt that ability helps them in their normal games (as deep analysis of a position will take you to positions where nearly all the pieces have moved). I used to be a reasonably good chess player - although that was generally more via intuition and "feel" rather than concrete analysis - but if I tried to play blindfold I was pathetically bad. I just didn't have any sort of picture of where the pieces were. When playing with sight of the board I instinctively see what pieces are undefended; what is attacking what etc. But blindfolded I had nothing. And it's just the same when I play bridge. I know what I should be doing, but even when I make the deductions about how many cards people have in a suit, and who must have the ♦A etc, I don't have a sort of image in my mind which I can use to form a plan. If I could write it down and look at it, I'd be able to, but my mind doesn't seem to store the information in a way which is actually usable. Does anybody else have this problem? Am I doomed to always be like this, or is there something I can do? If you don't have this problem have you always been able to do it - at least to some degree? Also, if you do have this skill, what form does the mental image you have take? Do you see it like a pack of cards, or an image on a screen, or a printed article - or is it nothing like that at all? And what happens to that image as you imagine a hypothetical line of play?

Before I go on I must make it clear that I am not a director, nor do I claim to know all the laws of the game. But I do think I understand the "spirit". And my posts are purely with regard to that. I think we should separate 3 things: 1. Being entitled to know agreements 2. Making calls based on opponent's desire/need to know 3. Badgering opposition 1. We both agree, I think, that the opposition are entitled to know our agreements and it is our duty to not hide any details etc. 2. If the opponents don't know and have to ask, then what conclusions are we allowed to draw from their asking, and the manner of their asking? Here, I believe that it is wrong to make a call other than the one you would have made had they not asked. To do so is to take advantage, indirectly perhaps, of the opponent's ignorance of our agreements. Things get more complicated when it comes to the play of the hand. You will, almost certainly, have a better idea of what that player holds than if they hadn't needed to ask, and it is almost impossible to ignore that in the play (and almost impossible to rule against you if you don't). But very often that won't matter as the rest of the auction will often reveal that information anyway. But I think the sort of situation we have been discussing - passing a forcing bid because RHO checked it was forcing is awful behaviour (unless you would have passed anyway because eg you had completely psyched on an earlier round). And that is independent of how they checked. 3. Badgering the opposition is wrong. I don't want to say how I would rule and under which laws because I don't know the laws. But I would like to give a warning (or penalty) to the badgerer, and I would ask opener if he really wanted to pass a forcing bid just because 4th hand didn't know his agreements and had to ask (however rudely).

There is a difference, IMO, between these situations and the ones in this thread. You are not meant to get an advantage from having agreements which your opponents don't know. If, in order to find out your agreements, the opponents are forced to, or even just happen to, make a revealing tell, then it does not seem fair to take advantage of that. If they are completely familiar with your agreements then you are, of course, at liberty to take advantage of any "reads" you get.