EricK

Try out as many systems as you can. But try to learn them thoroughly first, try to understand the reasoning behind the methods, and try to understand the particular strengths and weaknesses and trade-offs involved in each one. Most methods are as good as each other, so if you get bad results with one it could be because it doesn't suit your style, or because you didn't really understand the method, or because you happened to get a selection of hands which didn't actually suit the methods chosen. Also remember that bridge is a partnership game. It is no use playing a system which is right for you and wrong for your partner! Eric

I am not saying you are wrong about the 2♥ bid, but your argument seems to be along the lines of "Missing game is much worse than overbidding to bad games". That is only true when the number of overbid games is small enough. But you haven't touched upon that at all. Eric

Suppose I sit down against two Bulgarians (to pick a country at random). All they agree is Standard Bulgarian, and then one of them opens 2♦. I ask and they say "No agreements. All we have agreed is Standard Bulgarian". Is that fair? Surely Bulgarians have a better idea of what 2♦ might mean than I do, even if there are various flavours of Standard Bulgarian with different meanings for 2♦. My personal opinion (and it is only that) is that it is bad bridge to make bids that partner might not understand and if you do you deserve any bad results that occur. So you should explain what you mean by your bids to the opponents even if that means they have more info than your partner. Eric

Three years ago, I was much more skeptical about opening 1NT with hands like "Example A". However, I noticed that a lot of the pairs whose bidding/play I respect were happily opening 1NT with these hand types. On occasion, they suffer a poor result, however, they have also dramatically improved other elements of their constructive bidding... For what its worth, I'm MUCH happier opening a 12-14 NT with hand A than hand B. While Hand B contains 12 "HCP", its a real ratty 12... I'd probably opening a weak NT with it, however, I consider the bid marginal at best. Exactly. By opening 1NT on hand A you lose the ability to differentiate between it and hand B, but you gain the ability to differentiate between it and all unbalanced hands with 5 spades. So you can't argue for or against a 1NT on hand A simply by examining balanced hands, you must also look at your unbalanced 1S auctions. Eric

Do they have summer in London? :) One of my favourite quotes told to me by an English man ... "Last summer, which occured on a Wednesday in England ..." I remember that year. It was quite unusual because we normally hold summer on a Thursday. Eric

I don't think the hesitation suggests that bidding 5♦ on will be better than passing (the most likely reasons for East's hesitation are he is thiking of doubling or thinking of bidding a long suit of his own, probably♠) so I wouldn't adjust. The only bid I would disallow from West would be X, as this caters for anything (bridge related!) partner may have been thinking about. Eric

I hope someone will correct me if I am wrong, but I believe this isn't really an example of reversing the signal in trumps, but more an exampe of an unnecessarily high card sending a message to partner (which was probably the very first sort of defensive signal) When declarer draws two rounds of trumps and you play high-low partner knows you have a third trump for a possible ruff. Since this is just an agreement with partner you can play it the other way around. Note also that many pairs use suit-preference signals in trumps instead. If you have 3 small trumps and declarer is going to draw them all, you have 6 possible orders to play them in. Imagine all the messages you can send! Eric

I lead a ♥ and it looks fairly obvious. No doubt better players will tell me why I am wrong however. Eric

Except players' statements. Being a world champion is not a guarentee of credibility. When the accusation is cheating at cards, you can't use their previous success at cards as evidence for their innocence! Indeed, if someone like me were to win the world championship that would be pretty good evidence that I had been cheationg at cards! Eric

Maybe they don't psyche a redouble because they don't know that your methods allow them to get away with it! Eric That's fine. I don't think they're going to ask in the middle of the auction "what is pass if I XX" and if they do hopefully partner will have the table feel to sniff it out. Whatever reason that they don't, in real life they almost never do. But this is the sort of thing that makes disclosure of methods somewhat of a farce. You can be playing substandard methods and we might never have the opportunity to find out in time to take advantage of them. Or if we do find out it is by asking questions which might reveal our hand. Are you happy with this state of affairs? Because to me it goes against the spirit of the laws. Eric

Maybe they don't psyche a redouble because they don't know that your methods allow them to get away with it! Eric

If you will always "take out" partner's pass then opponents can rescue themselves from their doubled contract by redoubling, even with a singleton spade! I think there is a difference between the pre-empt auction and the 1♥ auction. In the former case doubler is guaranteed to be stronger than opener so the opportunity for playing for penalties at a low level is more often going to be diagnosable. This of course raises an interesting disclosure problem: If your methods allow opponents to escape via a redouble how are they meant to discover it? Eric

I pass on both. There is almost no upside to bidding immediately on these hands and a very large downside. Eric

"Calibrating" is not a good term here (I don't know which is, though). I wonder if this comparison between currency dealers, physicians, meteorologist and bridge players is fair. After all, bridge players and meteorologist have a tradition of expressing knowledge in terms of probabilites: If a bridge player says that a given line of play has 75% chance, and it fails, he might still be right (a computer simulation could confirm it). If a meteorologist says that there's 75% chance that it will be raining and it doesn't, he might still be considered right (at least by his collegues). This is because his estimate is based on a probabilistic model which has been validated in the general case, so it's irelevant if it fails in a particular case. If a physician says that there's 75% chance that surgery will suceed, and it fails, he will probably be considered wrong. This is for two reasons: first, patients and physicians alike are bad at making decisions based on probabilities. So it doesn't realy matter if the assement is 75% or 95%. In both cases some binary decision (to cut or not) will be made on the basis of the physian's assement, and that decision will "turn out" to be either right or wrong. Second, it is difficult to verify what the probability really was. Maybe if you have 1000 "identical" patients you can verify the assessment that surgery will suceed in appr. 750 cases. But this is not a typical situation. And even in that case, the families of the 250 unlucky patients will say that the physician should have noticed that those cases were not typical. I would like to believe that bridge players are more honest than other people. But it may have more to do with whether the reader of your message realy wants honest self-assesment. Who wants a physician, politician, judge or military adviser who keeps saying "there's 25% chance that my advice/decision is wrong"?. But a bridge coach, or a meteorologist, can make such statements and keep their job. I think calibrating is the correct word here. When surgeons say that there is a 75% of success, you don't need 100s of identical patients to check their accuracy; you simply need 100s of instances where surgeons are predicting 75% of success. Similarly for meteorologists: If they repeatedly say that there is a 30% chance of rain, and yet it only rains on 20% of those days then their estimates are clearly not calibrated with reality. However it turns out that their estimates are accurate in the probabilistic sense. And to answer your last point I would dearly love to have physicians, politicians, judges and military advisers who told the truth. If that truth is that my operation has only a 25% chance of success I want to know that. If that truth is that there is a 95% chance that there are no WMD in Iraq then I want to know that too. What surprises me is that there are people who are happy to be lied to by "authority figures". Eric

Thanks. Luckily for me I never get hands like this. About 17 points is my maximum and about 7 is my average. Eric

Just out of interest, what would you open if your ♣ and ♥ were interchanged? Eric

Is opening 1♣ and rebidding 2NT understating the strength of this hand by much? A club slam is quite a lively possibility and it is much harder to find if you open 2NT or 2♣ followed by 2NT. Whereas you will rarely miss out on a good game if partner passes your 2NT rebid. I read the following recently in a very good bridge blog: "The trick is to realize on a majority of deals you just need to bid what you have. Nothing fancy, just try to describe your hand as well as you can. It is only on a few select deals that you should be using your "expert" bidding." It's very good advice. :D Eric

What does the director do if it turns out your adjective was a psyche? Eric

Can we say for certain the 1♦ bid would be not conventional? There is no natural unopposed sequence where opener rebids 1♦. Obviously there is also no conventional unopposed sequenced where opener rebids 1♦ (forcing pass systems aside!). So the question is should an impossible bid be assumed to be conventional or non-conventional for the purposes of applying the law? Eric

But he might redouble! Eric

I thought of your auction up to 4NT Eric. Then, I asked myself: Which suit for RKC? It seems to be subtle reasoning for the heart suit: 4S shows the king so 4NT must be more interested in the heart key cards. Would my partner work this out and trust that I had worked it out? Would he/she be confident that I had the heart king? Well I suppose this is the Advanced and Expert-Class bridge :P 2NT showed a balanced hand (i.e at least some support for all suits), 3♥ stresses the ♥ suit, and a 3♠ cue-bid is a co-operative move towards a ♥ slam. All this makes ♥ the agreed suit for RKB. Eric

The 8 picks up either small singleton on your right while playing the A loses. Eric

Hopefully you can explain, why you choosed 6NT in contrast to 6H, your 6-3 fit, when partner holds the ace of diamond instead of the ace of hearts and they lead a club. As far as I see, in your auction North does not deny the ace of diamond. Marlowe You are right in that partner could have ♦A and not ♥A, but the odds are against it. Firstly, the ♥ are much longer than the ♦. Secondly if partner had controls in all the suits he would likely have bid Blackwood himself rather than make the 4♠ cue-bid. Thirdly, with a weakish ♥ suit partner might have chosen a different sequence rather than rebid the ♥ suit. Fourthly, if I bid 6♥ I might have to explain how I went down on a ruff when there are 12 top tricks. I wish I could have been certain tof the keycards partner held, but this is MP and so I went with the odds. Eric

1. I bid 4♦ to show the solid suit. Slam is likely 2. 2NT is natural and NF 3A. No, but you could play it as GF 3B. If GF you can simply raise to 3♦. You can raise to 3♦ anyway as opener won't have 4♠ 3C. No. 4. This is FSF, primarily asking for a Club stop for 3NT. Eric

I would make the 4♦ bid if NV, but it is too weak V (IMO). On the other hand, 4m pre-empts are a very effective weapon at the table and often do much better than they deserve, so I am not going to be too harsh about the bid. I don't understand why your partner bid. I especially don't understand why he bid what he bid. Eric