Siegmund

I'm not aware of any ebook source for this (or for a great many other oldish bridge books.) However, a lot of independent bridge booksellers will be happy to ship a copy anywhere in the world if you are willing to pay the postage :) (Which you very well may not be -- I've no idea how much it is these days.)

I've tried grafting this style on to Unassuming-Club-like Polish variations. For that purpose I like it quite well. Garden variety Polish leaves you occasionally bidding 1C-1D-1M on a 3-card suit, if you want 1C-1D-1NT to promise a strong notrump. So what I was trying was 1NT = 11-14 no 4CM 1C-1D-1M promising 4 cards (either balanced or clubs+major) 1C-1D-1NT 15-18 1C-1D-2C strong artificial, 1C-1D-3C 15-18 with 6 clubs, Unassuming-style, but that is really optional. with 1D promising real diamonds, 1M promising 5 (but including 5332s), and 2C showing clubs and denying a 4-card major. I agree with the 2006 posters that the 1D opening was the problem for MP precision -- and for a whole lot of more modern Precisions too. I seem to have a really strong allergy to a weak notrump that isn't shape-restricted in some way, missing way too many major suit fits on partscore deals. That attitude doesn't seem to be shared by a lot of other weak notrumpers, but I've never quite managed to figure out why, despite everything Stark's and Kleinman's books had to say.

A slower auction MIGHT have helped --- long as you have ways to tell aces and voids apart and won't accidentally end in 7NT after 1S-2N, 3C-3D, 3H-3S, 4C --- but the actual auction would have worked just fine if North had bid 5NT to show 2 and a void. The difference between a singleton and a void is the main extra thing North needs to show here. Some people find it important enough to build it right in to their Jacoby responses.

Unless you have nine tricks when partner only expects seven from you! If you do open 3N on this, you are a) going to have to overrule partner when he wants to sit to 4M, and b) going to miss quite a few slams when partner has 3 or 4 tricks and passes you out in 3NT. Put me down for 5m at unfavorable, otherwise 1m (heaven forbid we should mention opening 2C on 9 playing tricks....hehehe)

Robot loses its mind in today's daylong tourney and costs us a boatload of IMPs: http://tinyurl.com/y98tv3uh (The hand will show me in the North seat because I had to declare. I was south during the bidding of course.)

Late to the party, but will chime in anyway... My experience has been the opposite of yours: opening leader is almost never well-placed to demand a certain signal. Third hand, who has seen dummy before he chooses his card, is much better placed to give the information opener is likely to need, if he has a clue what opener has. I won't even play A-attitude K-kount. The way of dividing up interior sequences is new to me, and there is certainly room for sensibly re-apportioning the interior sequence leads. Journalist, Standard, and 0/2 Higher are not the only ways. I could entertain a variety of new lead systems -- provided they are 'showing' systems not 'telling' systems.

The table host can now set minimum completion rate of seated players, in increments of 5%, only up to 90%. Until recently (dont know if last week or last month) it was 95%. Why? Even 95% is not so good. If I were king, the slider would go in 1% increments all the way to 98 or 99. I can still reject people with only 90% manually, but it's a nuisance to have to. The minimum completion rate slider is only useful at the very top end. Might as well take it away if it's only going to go to 90. I would START the slider from 85 or 90, and have it go up to 98 or 99, actually. In my experience low-90s is solidly into "hopelessly prone to running away" territory.

So are about two-thirds of my human partners. I've not had much success reprogramming them either.

I echo OP's partner's experience, that I don't remember it being a common problem at the table. Partly this is because, if you come from Standard or 2/1, you are used to having horrible problems with diamonds after a 2C opening, and no matter how bad your problems are after 1C-1M, you say to yourself "hey, at least partner got in that 1M bid, instead of it going 2C-2D-3D." It makes it feel like an improvement if you EVER get the diamonds introduced before getting to the 3-level. I certainly don't like the idea of jamming more hands into Odwrotka - it's bad enough having 3- and 4-card support hands going through the same sequence. (But the upside to playing Odwrotka is that when it goes 1C-1M-Jump, responder doesn't worry about showing a 5th card in his major.) * * * As for your second problem, "we didn't want to play MAFIA responses" is most of the problem - I struggle to imagine a Polish style system without MAFIA - as for MAFIA folk the problems after 1C-2D are not so different as after 1C-2C or 1D-2D. I have been using 1C-2D-2M as "assume for now it's a stopper, and if it goes 1C-2D-2M-2N-3M, I really had 18+ with a long major", since on a frequency basis the minimum balanced hands greatly outnumber the strong hands --- but if you like using 1C-2C-2D artificially, you can certainly consider using 1C-2D-2H similarly.

It's not specifically xx-xx, but when responder is 3-1-5-4, the single biggest benefit of showing the pattern is avoiding 3NT when opener is afraid of hearts. Finding minor-suit slams is the second-biggest benefit. Finding a spade fit is a distant, very distant, third -- and some of those are 4-3s when opener has xxx(x) or Axx(x) hearts, not 5-3s. With some partners I use 3H for 3154/3145/3055 and 3S for 1354/1345/0355; with others we use 3C in a vaguely Puppet-like way, in that opener bids 3M with 5 and 3D without - but after 1NT-3C-3D all of the followups are aimed at minor suit slams. Keeping 1NT-3C-3D-3H just to show 4-3 in the majors feels incredibly wasteful.(If I am 4315, my plan is 2C, then show clubs, then show my singleton. An easier plan to achieve with Martens style transfers, which I have yet to talk partners into.)

It seems to me that there are much easier ways to free up the 3NT rebids -- all you need is any one bid below 3NT that is transfer-like. (I like 2nd round transfers after 1NT-2C, not quite the way Martens does them but similarly.) And, for that matter, than 1NT-2NT is a much more valuable sequence than 1NT-2C-2X-3NT, 1NT-2D-2H-3NT, and 1NT-2H-2S-3NT put together. I hope you're getting more bang for your buck!

You can make room, if you want it. I have converted several partners to using 1NT-2H-3H and 1NT-2D-3D as "I have 4-card support, but really, it will play better from your side": Axx Axxx Axxx Ax type hand (or Axx Axxx AKxx xx, if you do not show the small doubleton.) Using 2M+1 as the most common superaccept and only revealing more if responder wants to hear more is an excellent plan. But if you choose to show doubletons, you now have 1NT-2H-3S=doubleton heart and 1NT-2D-3H=doubleton diamond (as you probably already already 1NT-2D-2NT=doubleton spade if 1NT-2D-2S is generic superaccept.) I don't worry too much about max vs. min (partner can make a game try over 2M+1, if he cares). I also essentially never superacc with 4333.

Life is easier if you can tell every handtype apart. Pity they only gave us 36 initial actions to choose from. One price of a "Shape First" system is that you are going to have actions where shape is better defined but strength is worse-defined. But generally speaking, my solution is that the weak notrump hand is expected not to take a second call without a fit. Not so different from standard american where after 1C-P-1H-(2D) you don't do anything stupid with a flat 12 count if you can't raise hearts. After 1C-P-1D(neg)-(2D), X is the 15-18 balanced, a suit is natural and strong. Sure there are problems. They just don't seem to be much worse than the ones I would already have playing regular Polish. 2D with 5-4. 2NT with 4-5 or 5-5 (or 5-6, etc, clubs either equal or longer than diamonds, so responder always picks clubs with xx/xx or xxx/xxx) if I open. I don't have much field experience with 2NT.

Most of my system experiments the past few years have been in the direction of shape-first. I've not had one where 1C was any more natural than in a typical Polish system though. The more familiar-feeling way is something like 1C = 11-14 bal with 4CM, or 15+ bal or 16+ minor or strong 1D = 11-18ish, unbal with 4CM (4441 or 4M5+m) 1M = 5+ as usual 1NT = (11)12-14 bal no 4CM 2m = 6+ no 4CM The 1C works very much like Polish, but the temptation to bid 1C-1D-1M on a 3-card suit and a weak balanced hand is removed. Thanks to that pesky GCC rule against transfers over not-strong 1C openings, I've also played with a 4-card-major version 1C strong 1D balanced with 4CM 1M, unbalanced (except for 6322 and maximum 5332) 1NT/2C/2D as above. I find them fun to play, but I a) have no idea what is the best way to respond to the 1D opening, and b) find it much harder to interest partners in playing them, as compared to 'simple' Polish or Unassuming Club.

So it applies in some NABC pair games. This in a nutshell is the reason I don't currently have any Midchart conventions on my card: I could play them in a main event, but not play them the day before to practice (except online), and not play them the day after if I didn't qualify. Maybe there are a handful of districts where Midchart is allowed in the A/X part of a strataflighted pairs game at regionals. (Good luck finding more than two days of that in a week-long regional, too.) I proposed it once when I was a D19 board - even had a list of players who would travel to play in our tournament if we added a couple of Midchart events - and struggled to even get a second for the motion. Where I live currently, I get one 2-session pairs game per year where the Midchart applies (the district finals of for NAOP.)

They are a contentious topic in everybody's unit, I think. I voted 1-7:30, though I'd really prefer 1-7 both Fri and Sat. It seemed close enough in spirit to not stir up the mud with 'other'. (As such I am in the minority in Idaho and Montana, but the majority in Alaska. I'd be curious to poll a bunch of WA and BC folks and see where this changes.)

Others of us have asked other national level tournament directors about similar systems (OK, my question was about 1D promising 4 hearts, rather than 4 spades) and gotten the opposite answer -- even a "I wish that was what 'catchall' meant too, but no" amplifying remark. At least it means you know which directors you want on the floor if you want to try to play the system.

As the others have said... I think the director's statement about using the order of suits as a memory aid is universally accepted. The law is plenty clear: NO aids to memory, calculation, or technique, beyond those things you are explicitly allowed to know. It's quite rare to see any accusations made of using this type of illegal information, by the declaring side at least.

Many sectionals in my area are now using duplicated boards for the Swiss. As mentioned upthread, one set of boards per 4 tables per session. So 10 sets for a 20-table 2-session Swiss. (In an emergency, you can have only half that many, and have someone re-dealing the morning boards as soon as the 2nd match starts, and making the afternoon boards -- but you really don't want to commit to that.) In Montana, there is a travelling set of six or so boards that go to every tournament in the state so there are enough boards. In Idaho we had to have at least 3 clubs provide boards for 1 sectional. The dealing is timeconsuming but not a huge hurdle. Getting enough boards, and getting the cooperation of the director, is the hard part. There is (extreme) resistance to duplicated boards at Regional swisses -- for reasons which are not clear to me. I am cautiously optimistic than in maybe 3 more years it will become common at regionals. At the sectional level I saw it for the first time in 2012 and it spread like wildfire and became a majority thing in this area by 2015.

Entropy of different ways of partitioning sets is a common notion in many fields - from computer science to, say, calculating the diversity of a biological system, based on the abundances of several species. In that context, entropy usually is defined as Sum[ p_i * Log[p_i]] or something proportional to it. In the bidding context, you can imagine a system where you always pass as dealer, with all 52C13 ~ 635 billion hands you might be dealt. That's the highest-entropy opening strategy you could have. With probability 1 you make a call with e^27.177 or 2^39.208 possible meanings; to exactly specify what hand you hold, you need to pass partner at least another 39.2 bits of information. You can also imagine systems where you either pass or open 1C as dealer, nothing else. Opening 1C if you hold exactly AK32 K64 Q7654 8, and passing on the other 635,013,559,599 hands conveys just a tiny bit more information to your partner than always passing does. On average, you now need to convey only an additional 39.20799644213 bits rather than 39.20799644219 bits to exactly specify your hand. On the other hand, you could, say, pass with all 0-10 HCP hands and open 1C with all 11+ HCP hands. 56.2% of the time you'll hold one of ~357 billion weak hands, and 43.8% of the time you'll hold one of ~278 billion strong hands. On average you now need to convey only 38.219 additional bits of information to exactly specify your hand. If you found a way to open exactly 50% of your hands and pass exactly 50% of your hands, you would pass 1 full bit of information and only have 38.207 to go. If your goal was to convey maximum information at your first call, you'd split hands into 36 equal classes for each action from Pass through 7NT -- well, 16 classes of 17,639,265,545 hands and 20 classes of 17,639,265,544 -- and need only 34.038 more bits to exactly specify your hand. Of course in the real world you run into some other issues: opening 7NT that often is going to result in a lot of sets; and lower opening bids have more future chances to convey information than higher opening bids; so we design bidding systems so that the lower openings are much more frequent than 7NT openings are.

As the others have said, the 15-17 responses +1 point... When I play 15-17, if I don't have a 4-card major I pass with 8 and raise to 3NT with 9. I have lots of better things to do with a 2NT rebid than wait for a 8.725-point hand to come up. Playing 14-16, presumably pass 9 and blast 10. (There will be slightly more 9s worth an invitation opposite 14-16 than there are 8s worth an invitation opposite 15-17, but I doubt it's very many.)

It does make me ask a) does the bot play anything like X=double negative, P=waiting, over 2c (2s)? b) why didn't East just bid those hearts? Afraid of being passed in 3H?

http://www.bridgebase.com/myhands/fetchlin.php?id=295062944&when_played=1458076802 2C (2S) P P X P 3S P Pass!

One of the less funny examples of the genre I have seen in a long time.

Unassuming Club used 1D-1M-2N and 1D-1M-3C to distinguish which minor was longer when opener had a minor two-suiter. It IS nice to have a way to do that. Several jump shifts are available, for these, for BWDH, for artificial raises. Pick which 4 you think are most important:)