FelicityR

Oh dear! My apologies. I forgot that this is GIB/Argine bidding, not experienced human bridge partnerships. I should have realised that from my earlier reply where I stated that the definitions of the bids after 2♣ leave a lot to be desired. But the hand does demonstrate that the robots still have bugs that need fixing. North shows the strong hand type and then forgets that the partnership should be in game. Not satisfactory, to say the least.

You can hardly call North's hand strong - well, I certainly can't given the potential misfit, and that South has limited his/her hand by the rebid of 2♣. I am hazarding that very few players, even British ones, play 4SF as invitational these days, preferring the GF version. I openly admit there will be hands where using 4SF as an unconditional GF will result in a poor contract, but that's no different than making a game force in the 2/1 system. Anyway, a player has to use judgement here, and it is normally the responder who has set up the GF who dictates where the contract is headed. With any 'forcing to game' bid there is also an opportunity to bail out below game level if you feel the hands are not fitting well and will not produce a game. But that is as rare as hen's teeth. If you do not use 3♦ as a splinter here but to show a 5♠/5♦ hand instead, I would expect something like ♠AKxxx ♥x ♦AKQxx ♣xx not a watery ♠AQxxx ♥Q ♦Qxxxx ♣Ax where the second suit ♦s is as good or better than the first mentioned ♠s.

Hello all. I rarely reply on these forum pages these days, but as I have played and studied Acol for some 40 years, I think I am well-qualified to answer this question. 3♦ is NOT Acol. Acol is a neat system that preserves space and uses fourth suit forcing (4SF) by responder to set up a game force. In the very early days, 4SF was only forcing for one round. The bid by responder on the above hand that conveys this meaning (GF) is 2♦, not 3♦. If one wished to show a 5♠5♦ hand then 2♦ followed by 3♦ would show this. The fourth suit 2♦ is traditionally used as asking for a stop initially. Already North knows that a) South is minimum with his/her rebid of 2♣, and b) The hands are a potential misfit. Therefore, there is less likelihood that a slam is on despite North's shape, especially given that North has a 14 count with very poor intermediate cards. The bidding should be 1♥ - 1♠ - 2♣ - 2♦ - 2♠ (shaping out showing either 3514 or 3505 shape with 3♠ support, etc. Some partnerships here might rebid 3♠ on the South hand to show 3 card ♠ support with an honour and a better than minimum hand (11-13), but as a game force has already been set up it is not entirely necessary. And Acol preserves space, not wastes it. The 3♦ bid as shown in the diagram would mean to me 4+♣ support and shortness in ♦, thus a splinter, and would be a game force. The description of the bids given in the diagram from 2♣ onwards are inaccurate, to say the least.

Nigel was a gentleman through and through. I read through his bio, and it appears he used to play at Reading Bridge Club in the 1980s. I used to play there sporadically, so I might have played against him without actually knowing it. I had a look at his contribution to these forums, too. Over 9000 posts which to me shows a total dedication to the game, but it was the gracious way he worded his excellent posts on these forums that endeared him to many. RIP Nigel. You will be sorely missed by those that knew you, and your bridge friends on here, too.

I haven't commented on these forums for a long time myself, however I thought the following would be of interest. My own small club (just an extension of the local golf club) closed down. Before covid it sometimes could not even manage five tables. After the committee took a vote, and quite a few members had migrated to online bridge, it was disbanded through lack of interest essentially. I am not a fan of online bridge even with my regular partner, who also dislikes it, so I have a few friends over once a week for social bridge. A friend who lives in Brighton tells me of a local bridge club who have had to vacate their premises - reason unknown - a large grand house perfectly suited for bridge - she thinks that it was once a hotel - and now play both their rubber and duplicate bridge in a pub in the afternoons and evenings! She says the pub is roomy, but she no longer plays herself at this club as numbers have dwindled, too, and has moved to another bridge club in Brighton. I cannot imagine a pub being conducive to being ideal bridge playing conditions, even if they have separate rooms that they can facilitate for the purpose, and I can just imagine the noise once full-time sports resume. She says the pub has a full range of large televisions for the showing of sporting events, and even if they keep the sound muted, I can just imagine the general hubbub and cacophony from a crowd when sporting events get exciting, such as when England score a goal in the World Cup.

Hello again. I had to reply as this is an Acol question. Why is your partner opening 1♠ here instead of 1♣? With 5/5 in the black suits I usually open 1♣. There are a few reasons why I would not open 1♠ here: rebidding a poor ♠ suit as my next bid; and if game is on partner will have a better hand than me and you'd want the lead coming up to him/her. It might be acceptable in 2/1 to open 1♠ here, but it doesn't fit well into Acol bidding. Let's say you open 1♠ and partner forces with 3♦ in Acol? What now? It's bad enough rebidding 2♠ after 2♦ but make that a level higher and it becomes impossible to describe your hand accurately.

I totally agree it is wrong on every level for any player, whatever their gender or nationality to receive rude and/or disgusting unsolicited mail from other players. Women especially as it can be very upsetting as appears to be the case here. For BBO to completely overlook the matter as it is 'a first offence' is absurd. Not everyone who has been subject to lewd comments reports it. I personally think that BBO needs to reappraise their nonchalance towards this type of behaviour. Their are levels of rudeness/lewdness, and anything bordering on sexual or political (e.g. anti-semitism) should be dealt with firmly from the outset, immediately blocking that person's IP address. They may come back on another device, phone or computer, and start again, but in time they will have no means of accessing BBO except by buying new equipment. At least many Police forces around the world now take this type of computer abuse seriously and will deal with a formal complaint. BBO need to do likewise. It's not as though they have much investigating to do.

A few days ago I was reading the wikipedia entry for Afghanistan, having learnt about the Anglo-Afghan wars from school history lessons long ago. Sadly, for the decent Afghani people, the country has nearly always been in turmoil: wars, coups, assassinations, tribal revolts, etc. for many centuries. It is also the world's leading illicit producer of opium (heroin) and hashish, too. I'm no political analyst, but plain common sense just tells me that military intervention was going to create more turmoil and more bloodshed. If the Americans, British and UN forces thought they could tame the country, they were unforgivably mistaken.

One of my partner's (Berneice, an older lady who has since passed away) greatest moments was playing against Tony Forrester and Roman Stolsky(?) back in the 1980s at an EBU Congress. Our team of four (no better than average club players at the time) had won our first match and then was paired against the best young players in England. Tony Forrester is still a regular in the England team partnering Andrew Robson, and has been one of England's best players for many, many years. As I remember we were vulnerable and they were not, and I believe the scoring was slightly different back then, non-vulnerable undertricks were less penalised, and after two passes Tony Forrester opened 1♠ in third position. I had a big hand, equivalent to a 2♣ opener, and I overcalled 2♠ which back then wasn't Michaels but a bid showing a very strong hand. I forget how the rest of the bidding went until the final round but it was frantic as I remember, where Tony Forrester called 6♠, I must have bid at the seven level with a ♠ void, and Roman Stolsky then bid 7♠ as a sacrifice. My partner thought for a minute then called 7NT and that was the end of the auction. I can't even remember my hand but I do remember feeling panic thinking if we go down it's going to be a disaster. Fortunately, my partner had the ♠A and 7NT made. When we'd played our eight or nine boards, we went back to our teammates who immediately asked whether we had bid the grand slam on board x. Yes, we said pleased as punch (happy). However, we still managed to lose the individual match by 18-2 or something like that. Soon after I met my husband and bridge was shelved for my nursing career. I probably have played against some other good players back then however, that particular board became etched on my memory. 7NT against Tony Forrester. That doesn't happen every day of the week :)

Hello all again! I thought I'd post this on the forum as I am sure you will be pleased. My friend phoned me at the weekend and said she had played a live bridge session at her club in Patcham, Sussex, England on Friday of last week. Hopefully, my club will re-open soon, too. However, I did have a smile ( :) ) at the Patcham Friday Pairs' Winners with an impressive score of 75%. https://www.bridgewebs.com/cgi-bin/bwoo/bw.cgi?pid=display_rank&event=20210730_1&club=patcham

I had to reply to this, Nigel, even though I have resisted posting on BBO some time ago. I'm not surprised that AI has finally entered the world of crosswords and found to be better than humans. I personally gave up crosswords many years ago, having been a Times, Telegraph and Guardian crossword 'attemptee' for want of a better made-up word. Occasionally I would complete one, feeling jolly pleased with myself. However, the watershed moment came when I had one clue left to finish a broadsheet crossword. It was 'Old timer found in dry places'. I had a couple of letters to help me construct the word, but for the life of me I tried for about an hour, juggling the letters into the remaining spaces, thinking what it might be. In the end I consulted a thesaurus and found the word 'Clepsydra' an anagram of 'Dry Places'. I studied Latin at school but not Greek, so I wasn't aware of the word until then. But what got me is that a 'Clepsydra' is actually a water clock. So it can never be found in 'dry places', or if it was in a 'dry place' it wouldn't be working :) I have never done a crossword since. The AI computer programs are welcome to them. Bridge is much more fun!

I haven't posted on here since I 'retired', but I still regularly look at the posts, however, I am going to reply to this one, Nigel. Over the years I have watched many a JEC/BBO Forum match on a Saturday night, obviously willing BBO Forums to cause an upset. I think it happened once in maybe 200 matches. So, my view is, for what it's worth, let sleeping dogs lie. It's not worth the effort. Playing with a team where both partnerships have regular partnerships might work, but playing with a pick-up partner is a recipe for disaster, even accounting for experience. Moreover, the level of experience and bidding and partnership understanding that the JEC team has greatly outweighs any of us. Especially me as just an advanced player. I'd rather see a JEC match where he and his team are playing established internationals, and given how many are playing on BBO at the moment, wouldn't it be better to ask some of them if they would be agreeable? There's perhaps a good reason why the weekly BBO Forum match disappeared off our screens. It's a bit like a TV series that has also disappeared from the channels due to poor ratings.

I've been thinking for some months now that it's about time to pass on the baton to new forum members to comment on these pages. I thought about ending my tenure here at the end of this year, or alternatively on my 1000th post, but have decided to retire early. I miss playing in a club environment, and whilst online bridge offers some consolation to those who cannot play with friends in the real world, to me it just feels too sterile and haphazard to participate. An analogy that springs to mind is surprisingly sunflowers: you can admire Vincent Van Gogh's sunflower paintings, but it is nothing like being in a field of sunflowers on a summer's day :) I am also getting older - as we all are - and I now feel there are different priorities in my life. Not so much a bucket list, but a few life experiences I have missed out on, mainly with regards to travel, that I hope to fulfil in the next few years, hopefully when the pandemic crisis that we are all living through has receded. It's been good knowing all of you, and whilst I am a lesser player in terms of experience than others on here, I do read many bridge magazines and books, and sometimes can get what's left of my brain around the complex elements of this game. I realise there might be a few forum members on here that will say "Please carry on, Felicity" but my mind is already set. This is the last post and the last time I will be logging in on BBO Forums. Goodbye to all and good luck in your lives :)

I actually like 'Pass' here. If we end up in a contract there is good chance that the suits are going to behave badly. Admittedly it is borderline, but since partner hasn't opened 1NT strong here there's more likelihood that he/she has a weak hand. The last thing I wish to do is encourage partner with my balanced 10 count to go to game. If partner has a strong hand perhaps they can balance, Pre-empts sometimes work.

I got the answer wrong :( but would I get upset to get caught out on a deal that is a complete freak and turns up 'once in a blue moon' as verified by the odds posted by the OP. The answer is a resounding NO.

This is completely depressing to watch. I can understand young people of limited intelligence behaving irresponsibly, but here are the next generation of 'professionals' just having no respect whatsoever. If you wonder why older people now despair of the young, this video goes some way to showing why. It behoves the supposedly more intelligent younger people to behave responsibly and so, through their restraint, their peers may perhaps follow their example. As was said earlier on this thread, uncontrolled herd immunity. I wonder if they would all behave irresponsibly under private health care if any of them fell ill? Just because the National Health Service will pick up the tab is no reason why they should disregard rules. (And, don't worry, there are plenty of older people who have broken lockdown rules as well, but I know that if I had behaved this stupidly at university many, many years ago I would have been kicked out.) https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/students-party-coventry-university-halls-lockdown-a4559436.html

If you can't trust your partner here you never will. Pass.

Us Brits are above that sort of thing. WHOOPS! I forgot Buenos Aires 1965. Perhaps we started it? Oh dear...:(

Interesting hand, Mike. I, too, thought it close but reasoned that any plus score at teams is better than a minus score. Is that a good way to look at things, too? I was brought up with that maxim that you never quite know what might happen at the other table so bringing a plus score to your colleagues after a series of boards in a match is better than any negative score. I know that hands like this can turn matches, and you only need a couple to go against you to go from a winning position to one where where you either lose or trail. That's why I replied saying 'that the state of the match' is a major consideration here. Or, how you perceive the match is going influences your decision. Also, the opponents may well sacrifice to 6♦ here which complicates things further whatever bid you make below that. That opens up other questions about what you partner and you do next? It also gives partner an opportunity to use a forcing pass in competition. Would I be right in saying that partner (South) would 'double' with a poorer hand, but would 'pass' with a better one? Or is it better for partner to bid one more with a better one? Ah bridge...still as complicated and intriguing as ever :)

It's strange everyone seems to be angling towards a slam but there's no guarantee slam could be made. It's difficult to tell whether West is weak or semi-strong here with cards over South the doubler. Partner could have two aces but slam just doesn't happen. I would like a Double of 5♦ to be responsive here, but it isn't, well not in my book. Sadly, mundanely, boringly, even though it is a good(ish) 6-5 I opt for 5♥ only. That decision might be different knowing the state of the match, but Felicity isn't in a positive mood this morning :(

The other commentators have defined the bids in the auction. Furthermore, North/South should also be picking up inferences that East/West have failed to make any intervention over their bids, even at the one level. That, in itself, is helping North/South decide that 3NT probably has some play on the balance of odds, even though the auction looks slightly off-kilter.

This was in The Guardian online this morning. Yes, uncontrolled is about right. Surely the writing was on the wall months ago that this would happen? Were there any contingencies in place? I somehow doubt it. Why do students travel to university? Covid has proved they don't need to Who ever thought it a good idea to disperse 2 million Covid super-spreaders across British cities this month? One hundred and twenty-four returning Glasgow students have already tested positive, with dozens more at Aberdeen, St Andrews and elsewhere. Six hundred are now confined to their Glasgow lodgings and told they may have to stay there through Christmas. Now this fiasco is to be repeated in England as freshers’ week gets under way there too. At the same time as this mass return to campus, the Scottish leader Nicola Sturgeon is banning most households from meeting even their next-door neighbours, the most severe curb of personal freedom in this phase of the pandemic so far. Yet teenagers who have won the privilege of a university place have also won the privilege of travelling as far as they choose from home and meeting thousands of new friends. This might be called a giant exercise in herd immunity, a national version of what used to be a children’s chickenpox party. Is this now policy? When Johnson introduced the “rule of six” in England last week, schools and universities were excluded. Schools needed to stay open to allow parents to return to work, and schoolchildren are largely less affected by the virus, and by definition local. Students are not local. The tradition – and expense – of a residential university education dates from days when they were elite institutions catering for under 10% of young people. The remainder of post-school students went to local technical colleges. Today roughly half of England’s young people go to university, with about 80% of UK undergraduates leaving home to live elsewhere. The reason for such generosity to universities had nothing to do with scientific evidence. Such “evidence” has all but disappeared from British political discourse. The reason is politics. Students have votes, and universities have influence. Queen’s University Belfast has even chartered planes to ferry Chinese students to Belfast. More than 24,000 Chinese students applied to British universities this summer, and acceptances are up 14%. To hard-pressed universities, overseas students are gold. There is no way those planes are turning back. But imagine the government aiding the travel industry by flying in thousands of tourists, from China or anywhere else. We know a university education is about more than teaching. It is about the “rite of passage” of graduates through the groves of academe, a rite inherited from the monastic tradition of a residential university. But we are supposed to be in an emergency. If lockdown can allow hundreds of thousands of clever young people at least some of the delights and promiscuities of freshers’ week, what about their school-leaver contemporaries embarking on work or training, but told they must do so from home, while observing social distancing and avoiding unnecessary contact? I sense that here, as in so many walks of life, coronavirus is moving mountains. Commuting students living at home have been widely seen as inhibited, denied the socialising benefits of life on campus. Not everyone thinks that way. Manchester’s professor of higher education, Steven Jones, wrote recently that he found his “stay-at-home” students, if anything, more in touch with the world. They linked university with family and community, and were “invariably an asset, bringing important alternative perspectives and enlivening academic discussions”. No less significant is what the pandemic has done to teaching technology. Education must be the most conservative discipline on earth, rooted in “what was good enough for us is good enough for them”. Universities still live in a pre-digital world of three or four-year residential courses, leisurely holidays and medieval calendars and costumes. Parkinson’s Law reigns, with study expanding to fill the years allotted to its completion. Yet in just six months of the pandemic, universities have seen more innovation than in a century. Lectures and classes have gone online. At the London School of Economics, teachers have converted lectures into videos with library clips, inserts and YouTube interviews. Lecturers have had to become theatrical performers visible to their colleagues. Zoom classes and other devices promote feedback. Prospective students can see “trailers” of courses they may or may not want to attend. In other words, students – pandemic or not – will become digital commuters, much as will many office workers. Where they live will not matter, at least not all the time. The LSE can link its classes to 25 different locations worldwide, even adjusted to time zones. This can only transform the concept of the exclusive campus. It becomes a cross between a television studio and a wifi-enabled pub: Ye Olde Rite of Passage, perhaps open to students of all ages. Physical campuses will not be unimportant – education is also about human contact and new friends in new places – but they will be dynamic and different. Born of coronavirus out of the digital age, a new university will dawn. • Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

Yes, I totally agree there are many side issues to factor in with herd immunity, but as things stand in this country right now we are in a dreadful mess that has been perpetuated by poor management by this government. But the question still remains whether a different policy of, perhaps, some restrictive lockdown coupled with herd immunity might have been a better strategy. The death rates for younger people are very low, but there's also the moral and ethical issues of allowing a very infectious virus to spread in the general population where younger people can still die from it. As you say, the problem of isolating the vulnerable is that they still have needs, but I think we all know now that both the lack of PPE, lack of proper face masks, coupled with a lack of infectious disease knowledge amongst care home management and their staff, contributed massively to the crisis that befell them. Some care homes coped better than others, as we all know. And. during the lockdown, many essential workers' children were let into schools in small numbers so that the adults could work during the worst days of the pandemic. However, as you say, systematic data is not available so we would never know whether it would have worked better in the long run. I read an article this morning stating that the NHS would have been thoroughly overwhelmed if herd immunity had been adopted. That might be so, but a policy of controlled herd immunity might have been the way forward. Isn't that what we are doing now, allowing children back into the classroom and students back into their universities?

Going slightly off tangent with regards the relative positives and negatives - please excuse the pun - of testing, how do the forum members see herd immunity now? The reason I say this is Sweden's herd immunity is now being seen as a model that may work in certain circumstances. The idea of controlled herd immunity for Ireland has been discussed. Sweden had their fair share of covid-19 deaths in the beginning but many of those occurred in nursing homes as in other countries. The topography and demographical features of Sweden is different to other countries, but the basic premise of herd immunity in any community, I assume, is the same. Let those who are well and do not have underlying health issues build up the immunity in the population generally and the spread will not be as severe in the latter stages and risk a second wave. Could herd immunity work? In hindsight if the UK had isolated all the vulnerable people from the beginning and let the virus spread through the community would we have seen far less deaths than we are seeing now? As a former nurse, I agree we should have provided visible protection for people who would have been exposed to large viral loads, from hospital staff to bus drivers and retail staff, but would this have been better in the long run.

With the opponents able to intervene, it's easier for all of us on the forums to assess if you provide the whole hand, not just North and South in isolation. And say whether it is IMPs or MPs and state the vulnerability. As the opponents have 11 ♠s between them, how they bid and the inferences drawn can make a big difference to how we would bid these hands. As Cyberyeti rightly says, South passing as dealer is just anti-bridge. It tells partner that you haven't got an opening hand which you obviously have, and it gives the opposition two bids to establish what values they have between them. The opposition may not let you play in 5♣ or 5♦ preferring to sacrifice in 5♠ depending on the vulnerability. But I have a feeling that despite good minor suits in both hands, once the opponents 'bounce' the bidding up to 4♠ (according to the Law of Total Tricks) it will be awkward to find game in a minor without taking a risk as both hands are minimum opening bids, and despite the distributional nature of both hands - and we all know that distribution overrides high card points on many hands - it's not easy to determine the final contract. I expect the bidding to go, I'm assuming, something like 1♣ - (1♠/2♠) - 2♦/3♦ - (4♠) - 5♦ or similar.