EricK

Did I understand the OP correctly that you were "bought" by another competing player?

I bid 1NT. The hand looks to me like a balanced hand with 12-14 points. more than it looks like a hand with ♦ and ♣.

I would have bid 3♦ on the second round, but I'm fine with 3♣. Partner doesn't have the right hand to be sacrificing red v white.

The Mile High Club would be a good name for a bidding system.

This looks like a 1♥ opener to me.

The main benefit of old-fashioned Acol is that it makes it much harder for the opponents to intervene. In an uncostested auction, it probably does very slightly worse than a more modern system, and in a contested auction it possibly does worse too. But by opening 1M or 1NT so often, it makes it much harder for 2nd hand to intervene than over the very common 1m openings in 5CM/Strong NT systems, and by playing relatively light 2/1s it makes it very much harder for 4th hand to safely intervene as well. So you end up with more uncotested auctions; or, if the oponenets do intervene, more opportunities for penalties because their intervention is forced to be a level or two higher. And that is where it gains - the Acol pair having an uncotested auction while the other table has to contend with a competitive auction.

Partner has suggested Hearts as a trump suit. I am happy with hearts as a trump suit. 2♥ sends this message. If partner is interested in game, he can find out more about my hand before committing to a heart contract if he so wishes. WTP?

This may not be a very helpful answer, but really it depends on how you would bid other sorts of hands. If, for example, you play Smolen (so that you use Stayman on hands which are 54 in the majors), then transferring to ♠ and bidding 3♥ would show 55 in the majors.

Naively, one would have thought that 2NT, being the cheapest lie, would leave you more room to sort this mess out. But what do opener's 3rd round bids mean after 2NT? Does 3♣ shows a hand with 5♠ 4♣ and no extras? If so are there any further inferences because responder bid 2NT rather than 3♣? Does 3♦ show any hand with 3 card support? What about 3♥ given that opener and has denied 4 of them (or would he bid this way with 6-4 in the majors)? And does 3♠ just show 6♠ (and perhaps) <3♦) or is it a statement of suit quality? And what of 3NT? Does it show specifically a minimum balanced hand, or is opener meant to bid 3NT on lots of hands to avoid giving too much information to the opposition?

How exactly would you test it? Most people, I imagine, would stick their hand in, little imagining that the water would be coming out at 180 degrees. And so they would get burnt anyway.

In this modern age where we are constantly bombarded with more and more bits of information each of which, in effect, is vying for our attention, there is one bit of knowledge which is invaluable if you are interested in separating truth from falsehood: Any bit of information which seems designed to elicit outrage in the recipient is almost certainly at best a biased or "spun" version of the truth, and at worst an outright lie. And a corrolary is that the more distant and anonymous the originator of the information, the more likely it is to be false. So for example, if somebody tells you how outrageously badly they were treated by a shop assistant, it is likely that they have exaggerated events slightly; if you read a headline in a newspaper that says a certain additive doubles the risk of cancer, they will have omitted to tell you that data was gathered from experiments on mice, it is based on feeding them huge quantities of the additive, it is linked to a single type of cancer, and doubling the chances of this type of cancer in humans would take it from 1 in a million to 2 in a million; and finally, if you receive a many-times-forwarded e-mail which claims that the leader of one of the main political parties is a terrorist sympathiser, or that a local council has banned the use of the word "blackboard" for fear of offending minorities, or that KFC changed had to change its name from Kentucky Fried Chicken because they don't actually use chicken in any of their meals etc then that e-mail won't be worth the paper it's printed on.

I bid 1NT. I'm more worried that partner might raise one of my 3 card suits if I bid that than I am that he might raise 1NT. I would like to be a little stronger for the bid, and if you swap my ♣ and ♠ I might very well bid 1♠ instead.

Just to clarify, that should read 19,249 × 2^13,018,586 + 1

If I have understood you correctly, you can do that in Jack as well. Yes, with the deal profiler... I haven't tested BB, but I'm very happy about Jack 4.0! You can also play over the internet to practice with your partner. I don't see where Profile is going to let someone learn how to play Lebensohl, for instance, without actually typing in some hands. Whereas with BB you just choose the convention and tell the program how many hands you want to generate while learning to play that convention. It looks like profile is just setting the system for the computer. Am I missing something? You can enter a bidding sequence and it will generate hands which comform to that. But that's not quite the same thing.

The numbers used in cryptography are many orders of magnitude smaller than these giants. The primes are find by picking large numbers of the size you want and running "primality tests" on them until you find a prime. Note that primality testing is much faster than factorization (at least wih current methods!) Please note however that I only know slightly more than zip about this.

I'd probably get to 2♠ - which is no thing of beauty. After either 1C 1S 2C 2S or 1C 1S 2C 2D 2H 2S

More. See http://www.mersenne.org/history.htm The one mentioned in the OP was the one discovered on August 23. The next one they found (on September 6) had fewer digits!

2♣ for me. One point which i don't think anybody has mentioned is that if this hand is a double fit and partner's hearts are fairly weak, then 6♣ might be a better contract (eg ♠x ♥Axxxx ♦AKQ ♣Qxxx). Not that it is easy to find in any case, but practically impossible over a splinter.

If I have understood you correctly, you can do that in Jack as well.

[Put's Sherlock Holmes' hat on] "E" or "B" must surely represent an Ace else he hasn't got anything like an opening bid. If "B" is the Ace then "E" must be a king (for similar reasons). This seems unlikely for both linguistic reasons and because I think the title implies the hands was a very borderline opening bid which an Ace and two Kings and a six card suit is not. So making "E" the Ace, "B" must be either a Queen ("Bella"?) or a Jack ("Bauer"?). My guess is the Jack. [/takes Sherlock Holmes' hat off]

This is the "Duke of Cumberland" hand by means of which he was fleeced out of £20,000 (at a time when £20,000 was a lot of money). The bet was that he wouldn't take a single trick with the West hand with clubs as trump.

Maybe if you treat everything as purely random variables it will work out this way. But the point is that in bridge the weaker team, if they know they are weaker can and should adopt a high variance strategy. Now this will almost certainly make their losses bigger in terms of how many IMPs they lose each match by, but it will also mean that they win more matches than they would otherwise. My feeling is that a high variance strategy is more likely to win one medium size match than a majority of shorter matches. Since that is just my intuition, it may very well be wrong, but your figures don't really cover this scenario. For one thing, it doesn't model the fact that some individual board wins are worth more IMPS than others, nor does it give any scope for high-variance strategy.

Does it? Suppose in a single match the weak team bids a specualtive grand slam which makes. Now it is hard for the stronger team to catch up. But if the match is divided up into segments then the weak team need to do enough things to win the majority of segments.

It's not just becuase of this hand that I think 3♠ should be forcing. If the NT rebid shows a strong NT, playing 3♠ as NF is a very small target when you already have 2♠ available to show your minimum hands.

Perhaps 3♠ should be forcing here.