Siegmund

Matchpoints, all vul. ♠AQ3 ♥2 ♦J764 ♣KJ962 Partner deals and passes. P-(1♦) to you. A bit shy of a textbook 2C overcall, but your side may well want to be in the bidding. If you don't act, the other side's uncontested auction will be 1♦-1♥ 1NT-2♥ Those of you who choose option #2 or #3 in the poll, you may further spell out whether you bid or double in the comments.

Simplest solution is to have the jump to 3D be GF by agreement. Playing all of responder's 2nd round jumps as GF beats the pants off "everything invitational, FSF only game force." Don't know why so few people do it. The transfer solution is interesting but I'd only do that in the context of a system where we used a lot of 2nd round transfers and had a unified approach to them.

I default to opening 1M any time I have a 5-card major and a longer minor. It does vary from place to place and partner to partner. When I lived in Alaska "everybody" did this; down here, many of my partners do, but not everyone. Just something to ask your partners.

Re #1, surprised to see so many people fretting over 10-12 vs 11-12... the traditional meaning was natural and game-forcing. With one regular partner we explicitly agreed auction #1 would be blackwood, our only exception to "notrump raises are always quantitative." As already mentioned, #4 might be pick-a-minor rather than blackwood (but it's not to play, thats for sure.) Without discussion I would assume quantitative for 1/2 and blackwood for 3/5... but I would be very wary of using either of the first two auctions without having discussed it.

Long as we're having a poll... 4>3>2>1 for me. I would rate #4 better than going back to the old way. The popup blockers are really very straightforward, in my experience - a nice "do you really want this to pop up?" query from your browser the first time and it remembers the answer - so worrying about people having trouble with blockers wouldn't have been on my radar screen. Except, perhaps, as a reminder to the programmers not to use extra windows (of either type) in the first place if it can be avoided.

Thought it was going to be a unanimous poll, and was, as usual, disappointed.

A good suggestion, and one that might reduce the demand on the GIB button if the result was already there. Preferably number of tricks available in each of the 4 declarers x 5 denominations, not just makeable contracts -- always a pain when trying to see how far down something goes or whether a sacrifice was paying, with the printouts at a live tournament.

Weird to me that "beginner" is being used to refer to any time other than the beginning of the time you play bridge -- in my mind, beginner is below novice, not above. (Yes, I know the official BBO meaning is the other way round. I think they got it wrong.) As far as questions on this forum go, if they are things that are in the standard textbooks and the books all agree, they belong here. As soon as they move into controversial areas they belong in int/adv or one of the bidding forums.

I guess I play a mixture of responsive and Rosenkranz -- where responder doubles, bids a new suit, or raises, I like to use these (re)doubles to show one card short of a raise in partner's suit, and a desire to compete. When I actually have enough to raise, I do. This probably will not suit your partner, if he likes classical Rosenkranz even when you have 3 or 4 card support.

I tried this one and three times in six rounds of bidding I tried to choose a call that wasn't allowed. Was reasonably pleased I stopped short of slam after I saw what was opposite, however.

With most my partners I reproduce cyberyeti's auction, 1S-2C-2N-5N-6N. North is a bit heavy to sign off at 6N knowing nothing about how strong his partner is. South is turning him down. You need either 3-3 spades or the heart finesse (or a few squeeze chances) to make 7, technically enough to make it worth bidding against a strong field, but in the real world 1470 is going to be above average at least up to a regional open pairs. I don't have any science at all to recommend finding the good 34-35 point grands, short of full relays.

One certainly can swap the meanings of 3S and 3NT when hearts are trump if one wants. My partner and I considered doing this but ultimately didn't, even though we did in numerous other auctions (for instance giving 1H-2S and 1S-2NT the same meanings.) The reason we didn't was that when a minor was agreed as trump, 3NT (and 4NT) waiting bids in cuebidding auctions were passable. Even though you can swap them around so that the artificial bid is 3M+1 in a major suit auction, you cannot do "always 3m+1" or "always 4m-1" in a minor suit auction. We found it easier to have one package of cuebidding agreements, rather than have to have separate rules over minors and majors. There is also the matter of how often your opponents will make lead-directing doubles in your cuebidding auctions. If most of your opponents are playing simple "I want this led" or "I have a card here" doubles they will double a lot more often over an artificial or control-denying bid than they will over a natural control-showing bid. Whether that is good or bad depends how much work you have done to take advantage of the extra step you gain after their double, and whether you think you get enough use out of that extra step to compensate for what the defense learns.

Disappointed to see people putting RKC at the top of their priority lists. Sigh. The highlights have mostly all been mentioned - cuebidding style, splintering style and possibly having more than one range for them, knowing for a certainty what is forcing and what is not (1-1-1-3s, followups to inverted minors, among others.) If there is one thing I would add to the list, it is how disciplined your preempts are and how many tricks they promise. Sequences like 4C(7 tricks)-6C(5 cover cards) that go 3C-5C at the other table where they don't have a firm grasp of that are some very low hanging fruit. If I were to add a second thing to the list, it would be a brief visit of competitive auctions: when is forcing pass on? pass and pull strongest action? difference beween cuebidding and jump raising after michaels? that type of thing.

I sat there clicking on 2S in irritation, because I thought that was our first decision. Also generally found it an eyebleedingly awful interface: screen cluttered and with an advertisement on it, played cards hiding part of dummy, spade pips not showing, the text in a tiny little box that refused to scroll to show me the second half of it, "WesNortEastSout" bidding box labels... I gather the problem is that you assume we will all have a maximized browser window at a high resolution. I seriously question the wisdom of a site being unusable in an 800x600 area.

I am onboard with everything from E and up for sure. For me A and B are the obvious passes and C and D are both open for debate. Playing a method where balanced 11s are being opened, that is.

Better than overcalling 2 of a minor and losing the major forever does. Not necessarily better than doubling - but the auction is never (or almost never, depending on opponents' methods) ending in 1 of our major anyway, so the inability to stop in 1S isn't really a worry.

In my mind there is quite a significant difference between a 1C opening where you may have one more diamond than you do clubs, and a 1D opening where you may be 3-3-2-5 or more extreme. The wording on the GCC, for better or worse, gives a definition of "natural" that includes 1C CBS and does not include Precision 1D. An agreement about strength doesn't turn a bid into a convention. The chart says you may use any (non-destructive) defense to an opponent's conventional call. Either you should be allowed any defense to 1D, or someone has to claim that the 1D bid is not a convention, which brings you to definition #6. The GCC is still almost identical to how it was in the pre-2007 world when the definition of a convention was in the laws -- and there was, admittedly, a grey area about catchall bids in that definition, where calls like Herbert negatives appeared not to be conventions (because they did not "convey a message other than" a desire to play in the named suit - they conveyed no message at all, except about overall strength). I can imagine someone trying to drive precision 1D through that loophole, but I don't remember hearing that argument made (before 2007.) ACBL's practice then was to treat "not natural" and "conventional" as synonyms, even though they weren't -- so I tend to assume they still do this, and would automatically treat anything not meeting their definition of natural as conventional.

Yes, because opener is about two tricks heavy for his 5C opening. If my partner opens 5C favorable I expect about xx xx x KQxxxxxx. I will run away now before I mention anybody having a systemic agreement to show a 9-trick preempt by opening 2C then jumping to 4 of their suit.

If we are speaking of the ACBL GCC, then yes, the rules are perfectly clear: you may not open an artificial 1D with fewer than 10 HCP, and if you ever psych 1M openings, you are forbidden to play Drury (at least if your practice is to always use it rather than ever making an immediate raise to the 3-level.) The former is sufficiently non-controversial that I would expect to see it nearly universally enforced if a director was called. The second is sufficiently controversial that I would expect a majority of directors to laugh at the notion, even though the definition of psychic control is perfectly clear. I don't recall ever seeing such action taken against anyone. I do recall a fuss some years ago, about psyching forcing new-suit responses to weak two bids... where it was deemed a psychic control if opener had an agreement to never go beyond 3 of his own suit. There had to be at least some risk of opener raising or splintering for the psych to be deemed not controlled. re dake's second example, partners raise directly to 3NT often enough that psyching 1NT in 3rd seat has never been very popular in the US.... in weak-notrump countries it is an extremely popular psychic because that risk is so much reduced. If you had an agreement that responder was forbidden to ever go beyond the 2-level at his first bid, you could well be accused of having a psychic control. I've not heard of it happening.

If you're choosing between 3S and 4S, 4 is the standout, I think. The alternative is rhm's sequence, 4D then 4S.

My habit is to use 1NT with 4 spades and 5 or more diamonds, possibly fairly weak, 2NT with a weak 5-5, and double with 4-4s of appropriate strength (and, as I mentioned in another thread, allow our side to play in clubs after the double.)

You have posited what I feel is an unusual meaning for 2NT - I would expect this call to promise a maximum, not deny one, as opener could have bid 2D or 2H and left the door open to stopping in 2S.

They both work on the same number of combinations. A beats B 7 times (one 5-1 break, three 4-2s, three 3-3s) and B beatsA 7 times (six 4-2 breaks, one 3-3 break.) The 5-1 break is enough less frequent to give B a very very tiny edge.

I like playing this double as takeout of spades even if 1C is completely natural - X, 1NT, and 2NT are more ways than we need to show the same two suits - though playing a strong notrump in this spot does provide an incentive to put more 4-5s back into the double, and is perhaps an excuse to go back to playing the double as a two-suit takeout.

It comes down to whether you think failing to play fast enough to finish a board is an "irregularity." The laws don't explicitly say it is. But 8B2 speaks of "canceling a board" as something different from the "proper movement...and progression" set in 8A1. If you do believe it's an irregularity when the players cause the movement to not be completed, then you go straight to 12C2 which tells you what adjusted score to award, and NP isn't in the list. It may well be 50/50 if you can't tell who is at fault... but my experience is that you almost invariably can. I have used NP when a contestant withdrew for a medical emergency, and have seen it used when the whole last round of the game was cancelled for everyone because of time constraints. I have never used it in place of a late play and never will.