Siegmund

I am from the same camp as mycroft: "2/1" traditionally applied only over the majors, and playing 1D-2C was a common newbie error -- which has become an occasional deliberate system choice recently. 1D-2C GF is recommended by the Grant and Rodwell book - likely as a simplification to save them from having to teach a special set of rebids over 1D-2C - but not in any of the other standard 2/1 references that I recall.

I have interest, but I have no way to know if partner can peel one major without my help and lose only one trick in the other, even if he says he has the aces. Pass for me.

One really great feature they had at Swan Games was a button you could click at any time during the hand, "stand up automatically before another hand is dealt" - rather than waiting until new cards were dealt / deciding whether to stay or go according to how good your hand was / leaving your opps sitting there staring at a hand their new opp may need redealt. This would also make it easier for people to avoid being 'unintentional runners' - and make me a lot happier about seeing some vigorous enforcement against the frequent runners.

I considered it obvious at one time, and found out the hard way that my partners more often took it as various other things. Three-suit takeout seemed to be the most common guess, which still seems odd to me.

With at least one of my regular partners it will start 1D - 2NT (natural GF, may conceal 4CM in otherwise NT-oriented hand) 3S And now it's a matter of judgment for North: partner said he was 4S-5D and afraid of one of the round suits for notrump. Will he consider the 4-3 fit even though the ruffs will happen in the long hand? Honestly, I doubt it. (Are you sure you really want to be in 4S, if spades break 4-2 and they attack hearts? No guarantee it will make.) * * * With another partner it would go 1D - 2C (11+, denies 4CM, an "inverted minor non-raise") 2S (spades stopped, not hearts) - 3D and...well... at least we've avoided the doomed 3NT.

Gib opens 1S, I respond 1NTF, Gib raises to 2NT... I have a 6-count with 6 clubs, so I want to bid 3C to play... but when I mouse over 3C, it's explained as a transfer to diamonds. 3D is explained as a transfer to hearts. OK, it's an interesting bidding idea... but not remotely standard, and not what I expected GIB to do.

The odd thing about this is that, in 2002, we (well, many of us) in the ACBL started doing it in accordance with the Montreal minute, even though a lot of us thought Wildavsky's reading was correct --- and nobody told me in 2007 I was supposed to go back to doing it the way I was before 2002. In fact I just explained this rule to someone last weekend, on the drive back home from a tournament, including the significance of applying "had the irregularity not occurred" to only one partnership. As far as I knew, the new wording to reflect the WBF interpretation was in everybody's 2007 book. I am surprised to find out otherwise. I don't recall the ACBL ever deliberately rejecting that interpretation.

All vul, partner deals. [hv=d=n&v=b&b=13&a=pp1cp1hp1s2cdp]133|100[/hv] What is partner's hand? And where will you go now, with your beautiful QTxx QT Kxx Axxx, or some similar piece of cheese?

I expect partner to have clubs and hearts. If he was 3-suited he'd have doubled 1NT. If I had to pick a shape I'd say 2425 is most likely but a very weak 5-card heart suit is possible too. Wonderful thread title. I, too, love at least almost all MP games.

Latecomer to the thread, but chiming in anyway: I am strenuously opposed to the "don't alert any doubles" idea. It leaves you feeling silly about asking 99% of the people how they play them, and leaves you without redress against the 1% who do something odd. I dislike the ACBL approach, because even from one region to the next within the ACBL there is big variation in what is 'highly unusual and unexpected' vs. merely a minority treatment. It's a thorny problem, but the closest thing to an answer I actually liked was (with the pre-2007 definition of convention) "alert all conventional doubles except the simple takeout double." I could have been persuaded to extend it a little further, perhaps to doubles which imply all unbid suits (making the old-fashioned negative double not alertable either) but in years past, having both negative and penalty X non-alertable was an issue for integrating beginners into the club game. This solves most of the common issues like making most 1NT-P-2D-X=diamonds not alertable but colorful etc alertable; making Rosenkranz, Support, etc alertable. It does make a few more things alertable than you might really wish were, but I think that's better than making too few things alertable.

I am willing to try 2NT... I dont devalue my QJs as much in notrump as in a suit contract and I do have the club stopper. Part of the problem is that if I pass now and then bid 2NT over partner's double I am not sure he'll think it is natural - we play scrambling/goodbad/etc in so many situations this may look like one too without discussion.

Partner having had the ability to how me Hx and not done it sways me to 2D instead of 2S. Without that agreement I'd have bid 2S. Glad to see I am not the only one using that agreement :)

Oh dear. I already see too many students who are unwilling to open flat 14 counts "because they dont have a second suit to rebid". Now they have a rule that tells them they are right! Argh.

I like the fit-jumps too. But with several of my partners, we have Bergen on and have defined 2NT as a hand that would have made a fit-jump, i.e., a 3-card limit raise with a side 5-card suit. (The flat 3-card raises either just bid 2M or start with XX.)

Obvious opening bid is obvious. Absent an agreement to routinely pull doubles when you have 0 tricks and only leave them in with a potential defensive trick here, obvious pass is obvious.

Apparently I'm the only one who is jumping to 3C as opener (yes, a minimum 3C for me, but I didn't seriously consider bidding only 2C.) 1C-1H 3C-3D 3NT-4D and from here there are several paths to 6D or 6NT. 4S by opener, agreeing diamonds, sounds like a good start.

"Original" Gerber used 4C for aces and the cheapest non-playable bid on the next round to ask for kings. That isn't a horrible idea, if you really believe ace-asking is important enough to do it at that level in the auction. The 4C then 4NT variation is not an improvement though it does perhaps serve to avoid one more source of possible confusion. It is hard to convince most of us to give up 4C as a splinter, or a natural long-suit slam try, or a cuebid, in most non-notrump sequences, however.

I'll be very unhappy if partner leads out of turn against 1 (or 3) notrump. I think I may well be happier leading a club than playing in clubs however.

It is, however, an opening of two clubs or higher. Returning to the original question, a) I would be surprised if they intend the GCC to allow the same non-jump bid to ask for both shortness and trump quality, and b) I would be surprised if they intend the GCC to allow the 2C response to both promise support and do a bunch of other stuff -- as opposed to a 2C response that JUST asked for a singleton, without making any promises about anything.

Here's another way to simplify your system. When you don't have a 4-card major, pass with 8, and bid 3NT with 9. HCP-invitations are not precise enough to gain you anything anyway (in contrast to game tries over 1M-2M, which can show a profit.) Frees up the 2NT response for the toy of your choice, and saves you from having to alert 2C. Yes it does. Long as you have enough other sequences available to handle both the weak and the strong hands.

I had hoped the book would cover a few more topics than it did -- I was dreaming Rubens had found a shortcut for how to decide what to believe when the distribution clues point one way and the high-card clues point the other way -- but it is an incredibly comprehensive look at how suits break, and how the break in one suit affects the break in another. Excellent examples and very readable if you take it at a slow enough pace. Gets a two-thumbs-up for me.

I confess I was very disappointed by the notrump book -- it felt like the kind of thing a lot of us do for ourselves and post on our sites or on the forum, hardly any added analysis or text to read, no particularly good reason why it got printed -- and am disturbed to see that the second volume may have sunk even a little farther.

re question 1, it depends a lot what your passed hand "preempts" look like. With at least some of my partners this would be a normal bid. re question 2, people often use the 'extras' double after opening a weak two, but over a preempt it doesn't seem to be a common agreement. In fact the double to say 'I want to bid 5S but won't in case you have 5C set' is more common. (That too makes more sense when partner is a passed hand.) Perhaps if you play very wide-ranging bids in 3rd and 4th, like this one, you should indeed use double here to show strength. Question 3 is the crystal-clear one: you wouldn't dream of pulling this double, unless you had 0 defensive tricks.

Personally, I felt that when I made the switch from SA to Polish style, I was gaining something by having 2D very strong and 2M Acol Twos, vs. the single strong 2C opening. I suppose you could play 2H as strong as a SA 2C-2D-2H, but that leaves a lot of 18-22 minor suit hands to try to squeeze into 2D (I assume those are the hands you are most worried about, not wanting to jump to 3m on them all.)

A few quick comments: I can admire that, having played souped-up SA for a very long time in preference to 2/1. Both systems, however, leave lots of room for fine-tuning on the second and third rounds of the auction. The first half is true, in my experience. Though I am not sure exactly what baggage you mean. Just worried about the ethical implications of a system that caters to beating up weaker players? I'm sorry, but we are on different planets, if you find stolen bid doubles an effective method (over anything other than 2C.) There are several alternatives - Lebensohl, Rubensohl, etc - out there. But better for you to play whatever method you like until you run into a problem hand, then find a method that allows you to bid the problem hand, than blindly play something because someone else recommends it. Does not compute. Nothing stopping you from using these conventions together if you choose. (And nothing stopping you from opening 1NT with a 5-card major without playing Puppet. People were doing that for years before Puppet ever became popular.) But more importantly -- missed minor-suit slams are a gaping weak spot in most people's 1NT systems, and a huge opportunity for you to turn a profit by improving your system, rather than abandoning that area.