EricK

If partner wanted us to ruff the third ♥ wouldn't he have lead a low one?

I don't care if it is "cheating" or not. It is more fun to play against people who don't have bidding misunderstandings but explain all their auctions properly than it is to play against people who can't tell you what half the bids that are going on mean.

OK thanks for all the responses. But I am not asking what style of opening is better than others or anything like that. Let me give an example: Compare ♠AQxxx ♥AJxx ♦xxx ♣x with ♠x ♥xxx ♦AJxx ♣AQxxx. These hands have exactly the same trick taking power on average, so in that sense they are as strong as each other. But because of the way bridge bidding and scoring work the former is a much more useful hand than the latter - in a bridge sense it is a stronger hand. Now this difference in strength actually relates to things like the probability that your side can make the highest contract (because majors can outbid minors) or the probability that the par contract is your way (for the same reason), or the probability that your side can make game (because ten tricks in a major happens more often than eleven tricks in a minor). So the actual strength of a hand should be fundamentally linked to these sorts of statistics. eg Take a system such as Moscito. This divides opening hands into four types - "strong" hands (which open 1♣), slightly weaker hands (which open with 1♦ - 2♣), still weaker hands with distribution (which open with a pre-empt) and finally all the other hands (which pass). For simplicity's sake the borders between these groups are expressed in terms of various HCP and distribution Points. But a hand is strong because it has a certain number of points, it is strong because it is more likely to make various sorts of contracts. So theoretically the dividing line between these groups could (should?) be expressed in terms of the sorts of things I listed. And I suppose I was really just wondering what those dividing lines are (for various systems).

Yes it is system dependant, but given any system I still think there must be an underlying reason why some hands should be opened and some not. An underlying reason relating to how likely you are to reach various sorts of contract. A reason why opening a hand leads to a higher average score than passing it.

Various "authorities" will give different opinions as to what constitutes an opening bid - 12 HCP, rule of 20, 26 Zars etc etc. But what is the reasoning which underlies any of these rules of thumb? I suspect it is something like one of these: a) you should open the bidding if the chance that you can make game is above some probability, g :rolleyes: you should open the bidding if the chance that the highest making contract is your way is above some probability, c c) you should open the bidding if the chance that the par score is your way is above some probability, p The reason I think this is that it tries to relate whether to open or not to some concrete bridge related statistic rather than to some arbitrary scale. Do you think I am on the right track here? And if so, what is the approximate value of these probabilities?

He doesn't necessarily need a little more, he needs stuff in different places. AQxxx Qx Axxx xx, for instance, or even AQxxx KQ xxxx Jx massively improve chances for game and I doubt your system can differentiate between these - and by many counts these hands are actually slightly weaker than the one you quoted. 2C can also gain in finding the low point count slams with two running 5 card suits. But this is perhaps of minor significance. This is of course one of the major flaws with many incarnations of 2/1 - on invitational strength hands, there is often no way to tell your partner which cards are useful for game.

A few people are calling this hand a limit raise. Vulnerable at IMPS opposite a 5 card major opening, is anybody seriously not driving this hand (7 losers, 3 card support, a singleton, two good suits) to game?

True. But 1H opening shows 12-21 HCP, while 1H overcall promises 8-16 only. But this is no longer true. The upper level for the strength of overcalls is now generally much higher than in the past, especially on two suited hands.

If you are going to play overcalls as strong as this, surely it makes sense to also reply on hands like the one North had. I don't see how it can be right to keep the same style for 4th hand's responses to overcalls as in "the old days" but massively change the sort of hands which make a simple overcall (rather than a double) in the first place.

Do you happen to know what proportion of Physics PhDs claim this, and what proportion claim the opposite?

A bloody good idea. Even if it just had one question on it, "When is double penalty and when is it take out?", it would be worth introducing.

Some of those coincidence are fictional though. John Wilkes Booth was born in 1838 and I don't think Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy

What Free did was unethical, but somebody needs to take a stand against pairs who don't know their own methods, especially in contested auctions. Let's face it, his opponents placed him in a virtually impossible situation: If his LHO was going to take the double as penalty he wants to pass, but if his LHO was going to take it as take out he wants to raise. Most examples of opponents not knowing their system are bad enough, but when it is a double that they don't know the meaning of it is particularly pernicious because the two likely meanings are directly opposite to each other.

But how is it a con? By the answers LHO gave to the questions it seems he really did think they were playing penalty doubles. he just didn't realise he thought that. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if RHO would have given the same answers to the questions and so come to realise that he shouldn't have doubled.

Suppose you plan to commit a robbery, and do so by checking who has left their front doors open. You find some sucker and his front door is open, what an idiot. You go take his sh*t. Is what you did any less reprehensible because you did it to someone who was negligent? In your example, the fact that there may be a robbery is the fault of the robber. The fact that this particular person was the victim was his own fault. So however reprehensible Free's action was, I still maintain that it is his opponents' fault that they got a bad score.

LBW law is quite easy if you think in terms of when the batsman is not out. If it is a no-ball it is not out. If the ball wouldn't have hit the stumps it's not out. If the ball hits the bat first it's not out. If the ball pitches outside leg stump it's not out. If the ball hits the batsman outside the offstump and the batsman is playing a shot it is not out. I think that covers it.

Whatever the ethics of it, I think it is an incredibly ingenious idea. And I note that the fact that it worked was entirely the fault of the opposition. I mean who would play an opening bid and not discuss what a double meant after the cheapest possible overcall? Really they deserve to get a bad board for that alone. And it's not even the case that the plan was risk free. Suppose RHO did have a penalty double and LHO was thinking of taking it out?

I dont know, just a lucky guess. Let's see. Assuming 1NT is 15-17, you have 18, the maximum of combination is 35. It is very possible you missed an ace. Sometimes 7NT makes even if you are missing an Ace!

My idea is that there is no Undo to accept or reject. The Undo button just doesn't exist in my scenario. Each player has the option to have a safeguard in place which allows them to check that the bid/card they clicked on is the one they actually wanted. On the other hand, if they want to risk misclicks then they can play without that option, but they still don't have an Undo button to rescue themselves. Since, as you pointed out in another post, the actual results aren't important, why bother having an undo button at all? Just accept the loss of "12 or 20 IMPS" and move on.

If this were to be implemented, the clicks would have to be in different parts of the screen so that a double click on a bid or card would do nothing more than a single click would. You could even make it optional and still do away with the Undo functionality. Want to save all those unnecessary clicks? Just turn the option off and take your medicine if you click on the wrong bid/card. Want to guard against misclicking? Turn the option on and make sure that the bid/card you clicked on was what you meant. In an ideal world, people would only ask for undos if they genuinely misclicked, and their partners would not take advantage of any UI which arose from a misclick. But this isn't an ideal world. I take your point about none of this being really important, but why even bother keeping score then? It isn't important in the grand scheme of things, but so what? Nothing is important if you look at it like that!

It is quite amusing. Tell us what country you're from and we'll add another line to the joke.

If no bid or play could be made with a single click, then that would all but eliminate misclicks and hence the need for an Undo button. eg You click on a bid in the bidding box part of the screen and then that bid appears by itself in the centre of the screen and you must click on that to actually make the bid or click on a Cancel button to go back to the bidding box.

This would not be a delayed jump though.

It makes no sense to me to play a jump rebid as weaker than a reverse (since the jump rebid gives you less room to stop at a lower level), so I would never choose 3♦ before 2♥. Either the hand is strong enough for a reverse in your methods or it isn't. In SA and its derviatives, it isn't The later bidding seems to be a series of misunderstandings with cue-bids being mistaken for genuine suits and vice versa.

This is all a bit silly. If you were to play 25 hands, on how many would you not make any mistake at all? For most people the answer is very close to zero. Of course, many of the errors don't cost as the cards lie or go unpunished due to errors by the other side, but they are errors nonetheless. If we were to only say wdp when the opps played perfectly then we might as well never say it at all.