Gilithin

If the major is spades then it makes perfect sense to play X as showing hearts. If the major is hearts though, there is hardly a hand for the X to show other than hearts, so we may as well take advantage.

This seems to be an exercise in hand evaluation and methods. First of all, the East hand should not be described as weak. Opposite a 15-17 NT, I would think most players would evaluate it as game forcing, although if West upgrades aggressively it would not be unreasonable to treat it as invitational at these colours. If the hand is GF, the simplest way of dealing with it is just to respond 4♣. If 4♣ is still Gerber for you then the system will clearly have an alternative auction. The Standard American approach is for 2♥ followed by 3♥ to show a GF 5-5 hand. After East bids 2♥ and South chooses 2♠, X should show 3 spades. Now East could just bid 4♠ but 3♥ should still show the 5-5 hand. Either way E-W will finish in 4♠. A more European approach is to use the auction 1NT - 2♣ -- 2♦ - 3♦ to show a GF hand with both majors, You will have to tell us what South bids over 2♣. Finally, a small number of pairs play a specialised response, typically 3♦, for both majors (weak/GF) - again you will have to tell us what South does over that. If East instead evaluates the hand as invitational, there are a similar range of methods available. SA players will transfer to hearts, then bid spades; some pairs will prefer a 2♥ followed by 3♥ sequence; and a very small number of pairs will have a specialised response, again typically 3♦, to show this precise hand type. So a typical auction might be 1NT - P - 4C - X -- 4S - AP but there are lots of moving parts depending on the agreements in play.

You might be thinking about Ken's VKCB convention. Even if not, that seems like a sensible place to start.

(1♦) - X - (XX) - P -- 3♥ - P - P, your bid. Supporting with support in a competitive auction is an important rule that will save you and your partner many headaches.

I am somewhat surprised. I can imagine playing the double as 3 spades, or as a SNT double, but playing it to show really good hearts and any strength (penalty?) would never occur to me as a viable option.

Can we not make a discovery play in diamonds first by leading the queen instead of a second spade? Once we find out that East has ♣A and ♦K, it is a guarantee that West has ♠K even beyond the inferences of the lead and auction. Even if East ducks in tempo, we do not appear to be any worse off than the immediate spade.

Is that really what Opener's double means in East Anglia?

If East has a true heap then they do not have a bridge reason for the hesitation. This is the basis for playing Reverse Weasel rather than the more easily penalised Weasel.

If you have agreed Reverse Weasel then it seems clear that 4♥ is your only ethical call here but that 3♥ is the systemic one - which did you choose? Has the 1♥ opening really promised 5 though? I thought you played Acol with 4 card majors and you have consistently reported here that bridge in East Anglia has not yet caught up with the 21st century.

If you have a serious interest in this subject, mikeh has written a number of posts about the way real experts do hand evaluation over the years. One simple example of that is here. If you are instead more interested in hand evaluation methods then this legendary thread on ZP is a good place to start. Justin makes a similar point to Mike in that thread, albeit in a typically more concise way. If you are interested in how to adjust hand evaluation methods based on positional factors then a good thread to read is this one. Finally, the BBF specialist on hand evaluation was Tysen Streib, the inventor of TSP. He has not posted here for some time but look for anything from tysen24 for many modern insights into the subject.

Silly question I am sure but what does this wiki article, which contains many aspects that are at least 30 years out of date and even at that time were generally not used by top players, have to do with "Expert Class Bridge"?

Fox News Opinion writes:

Not legislators and regulators for not putting in place rules allowing the prospective students to make a properly informed decision? You should not be able to prominently display in a large font that the "mark"'s money will be used for X and then hide in small print somewhere else that it will in fact be used for Y. It does not really matter whether we are talking about university fees, political donations or just retail advertising - it should all be legislated as criminally misleading and prosecuted accordingly.

Given the cost and the current circumstances, there has to be a very strong case for giving a set sum to every American adult on lower wages irrespective of their debt situation as a small assistance in coping with rising energy costs and inflation. Something like every household earning less than $60k per year with tapered relief up to $100, or put in whatever numbers float your boat here if those are too high. It seems to me that this would be easier to sell to the public and be considerably more effective than having the cash targeted specifically at students.

Basic monetary theory says that if you give young adults making a comfortable living (say $100k to $125k) additional disposable income, there will be a mild inflationary effect.

The answer to that is really very simple Ken. Student loan schemes were thought up by people who understand that young adults vote less than pensioners and older workers. So stealing money from students and dishing it out to other sections of society is a nett vote-winner. Thus student grants were turned into mild tax cuts and handouts for pensioners in the UK, and to large tax cuts on the middle and upper classes in the States. You might feel happy about this - your generation benefitted greatly, perhaps one reason why so many world leaders have come from that generation.. The generation after yours though became a massive loser in the macro-politics game of government spending. The following generations probably will too, although the effect is slightly less and can perhaps be rectified somewhat still. But a simple rule is that countries putting their resources into the old rather than the youth are generally going to be in decline. America seems to be the very best example of that right now.

It matters if you subsequently have UI that enables you to extricate yourself from the undiscussed situation with a minimum of damage.

A. If XX is business, then it makes sense for 2♣ to be weak and natural, particularly if you allow light responses in the modern style. If XX is a rescue then 2♣ is going to be a forcing relay. B. If 1NT denied 3 spades then I am not really sure what this 2♣ rebid should be. But in some other similar auctions things are less clear so I would expect NMF to be on by default. If 1NT does not deny a 3rd spade then not playing it NMF here when that is the agreement without a X would be weird. C-F. I canno think of any reason not to play 4th Suit Forcing as artificial in these auctions.

Generally in auctions like this at the 3 level, X replaces the cue bid. Since West already denied a full spade stopper, I would think that it would suggest holding a half-stopper if, as would be most common, looking for 3NT. Whether that is really a good bid on this hand then becomes a little dubious. More to the point though, the OP wanted to show slam interest and in this case bidding 4♦ and then handing the matter over to partner seems like a sensible way of doing that. Whether that is actually a good decision at MP, where bidding 5m can very often be a disaster, is in itself worthy of a full discussion. If West had bid properly earlier, these decisions become much easier.

As South, I would have opened 3♥. After 2♠, it seems to me absolutely clear for West to bid 2NT. In a minor suit fit, the most important feature of the hand is a stop. North's 3♠ is an appalling call. After 4♦ East has shown their hand. If West cannot push on past 5♣ after this then East should respect that. In short, South could do better, West is an idiot and North is a complete idiot. If you play with idiots, you cannot expect to learn any sort of judgement based on the plays and calls from the other players. This can, in truth, very easily cause your level to go down rather than up. If you want to learn judgement in competitive auctions, my advice would be to find a regular partner whose bidding you can trust and to try to get some regular opponents who at least have some semblance of a clue about the game.

Maybe this is a hint to you that thinking occasionally when playing bridge can be helpful.

WHen the Founding Fathers were drawing up the Consitution, one of their greatest fears was the potential for European colonial powers, particularly Britain, from infiltrating the fledgling political situation and re-establishing de facto control over the country. One of the easiest ways of achieving this would have been taking control of a few populous coastal states and using the power of these to dominate the less populated states. The construction of the Senate was therefore deliberately set up to give smaller sates extra power, thus making such a political takeover much more difficult. This should make it extremely obvious even to the most dumb-headed, know-it-all poster that the structure of the Senate itself is not racist. It may have been used through history to support racism but that is a different thing altogether.

While this is true (and is the foundation of "democratic" minority rule, which requires control of the small states) it is not the same as gerrymandering. Gerrymandering allows the legislation to move the boundaries to create a safe majority of Representatives even with a minoroty of voters, or make a super-safe super-majority from a purple state. The extreme gerrymandering in US elections, all created using highly advanced voter databases, is what has reduced the number of competitive House races to a mere handful; and this in turn allows parties to put up particular extreme candidates as whoever wins the party Primary is guaranteed to win the seat. To bring it back to the quote at the top of this sub-thread, this is why the candidate matters more in many Senate races - they actually have to win a few moderate votes if they want to get elected. This is mostly not true for House Representatives.

The primary difference between Senate races and those for House Representatives is that Senate boundaries cannot be gerrymandered.

I have to agree with you here. It has been clear for some time that you come here principally for the amusement of trolling. The best thing that can be done with trolls is to ban them from the forum website. Where that is not possible, the next best approach is to avoid feeding them as much as possible. I don't wish you any ill and I don't even know if you are genuinely racist or if it is just part of the troll persona you have adopted. I do wish that you would find something more productive to do with your life though. At some point you will surely wake up and realise how much time and effort has been wasted here. Until that time, you have my pity if not my respect.