Siegmund

Not much danger of that. :( I've run into one club allowing the Mid-chart, vs. several that restrict things tighter than GCC.

Depends a fair bit what hands you open. When I am playing a Polish variant, if I am a passed hand, I will never have 11 HCP, let alone a bad 12. (As an unpassed hand I have used 1NT as wide as 8-11, still expecting opener to pass 14s.) I've never had an agreement about 2NT by a passed hand, I don't think.

In my world, 3D sets trumps, 3H was a cuebid of a card I don't have, and I am quite worried that 3S was a return cuebid of partner's singleton or void. I would have bid 3S over 3D (assuming my 1NT bid was correct, that is.) As it is, I didn't seriously consider anything other than 3NT on the first and pass on the second.

Apologies for being off-topic ... but insisting on pointing North toward north is quite common, in my experience. One of the clubs I played at even forced the out-of-town director who ran our annual sectional to conform -- his arrows went every which way if he tried to point them somewhere else. It really ought to be universal, far as I am concerned.

2NT seems right on values, but 2D keeps the majors in the picture. I'd go for the immediate 2NT only if I were playing a toy to show the 4M5+C hands immediately (which, with my two most frequent partners, I am.)

I've tried something similar over 1H-1S an 1H-1NT(NF), where opener's 2C showed diamonds and opener's 2D showed clubs. Over 1S I was doing it to free up the 3-level bids to show bridge world hands of death in 1 call, so the 2C and 2D calls were forcing. In a limited system you have more scope for allowing responder to pass with a weak hand and long minor. Over 1S, I experimented with a few other things -- like having 1NTF promise or almost promise 4 hearts, so that 2m could deny 4 hearts, and 2H could be an artificial GF. I liked how it handled the heart suits, but didn't overly like how it handled the weak minor suit hands. I never got it working quite the way I wanted it to.

I think 3S is a splinter, same as 1C-2C-3S would be without the interference.

Like the title says. Or, put another way, why does the bot think 4H here shows exactly 3, even if normally you'd bid hearts first with 4-4 in the majors? I don't think any of my human partners would bid 4H on 3. Some of them would say this sequence promises 5=4=2=2 some would say it's just 4-4 majors and a reason to insist on the major. Classic case where hearts plays much better than spades does. Robot Rebate #7207, board 3. http://www.bridgebas...3DKH9DQC7DTD9CJ

Question is, is it better or worse than full transfers. Seems the pendulum has swung away from straight lebensohl toward transfer methods in a lot of other auctions... but I've only ever seen transfers, not leb, here. Straube's 1NT idea is quite interesting. Has a lot in common with the transfer idea of simple completion to reject anything further unless partner has extras.

Without commenting on the other merits of the method... weak jump shifts are the least common to be held, of all the popular jump responses. They are noticeably less common than disciplined (Soloway) strong jump shifts, which in turn are noticeably less common than Bergen raises. I was not willing to give them up until I did a dealing simulation myself to prove how rare they were.

Seems like it has all the problems Lavinthal already has -- which is enough to keep a large number of people from using it -- and just trades the waste-a-high-card problem for the what-do-I-do-when-I-have-the-wrong-parity-spots problem. I'd be willing to call it an improvement on Lavinthal. I wouldn't be willing to play it.

More than a trick short of an unfavorable 3S bid in my world. At equal I'd probably do it. At favorable I'd bid 3 in second seat, and be torn between 3 and 4 in first or third. And I DO know quite a few people who would open this hand 1S happily. I am not one of them.

Yet another advertisement for the Martens "transfer after Stayman" rebids. From the posted choices, I am endplayed into 2NT, as I am very strict that a 3C invitation shows HHxxxx and no outside likely entry.

Every one I've ever played in. (All over the western US and Canada. I assume it is similarly universal in the rest of the continent.) People much prefer giving their own lectures to the newbies about what theyve done wrong than "being mean and calling the director" "like might happen to you if you had done that in a tournament." Many of them are genuinely trying to be nice, and avoid the "embarrassment" and "trouble" of calling the director "on" someone. And doing the game a horrible disservice even if they are trying to be nice.

Michaels is the majority treatment, but Ive met people who play it as the running minor asking for a stopper. I havent run across the 2NT treatment from the last two posts yet.

Looks like pass-skip-pass-pass, textbook ruling, to me. If we need extra confirmation, we have regulations that tell us when a call is considered made (removed from the bidbox with intent, or similar words) and it's abundantly clear no such actions were made.

Will be interested to hear more about it. There is certainly room to greatly improve its efficiency. I am slightly scared of it, because of a similar experience. With two of my regular partners, we use a variation on Brashler's Sweep Cues, and use 5NT GSF a lot... with different scales of responses according to whether the the person who replies has said nothing about trump quality, already promised good trumps, or already promised bad trumps... and it's the single hardest-to-remember part of the whole system for us.

Without addressing BBO specifically... Whether you can deal every possible deal is a separate question from how much entropy you have per deal. You can reach every possible deal completely deterministically just by enumerating them -- and if you did something like choosing the (30,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,001*n mod 53,644,737,765,488,792,839,237,440,000) th hand from the list to be your nth deal, it would be quite a long time before someone noticed the determinism. There are many possible shuffling routines which can reach all possible deals, but can only "start from" 2^32 places as they work their way through the list. There is a whole subdiscipline of "quasirandom number generators", guaranteed to eventually cover all possibilities and to scatter the first n points as uniformly around the sample space as possible. It's not much talked about now, but once upon a time it was used to do Monte Carlo integration faster and with tighter error bounds than by using pseudorandom numbers. How many bits of entropy are used for each new hand addresses a separate question -- how well can the next deal be predicted, given the hands which have been dealt before it? For humans, almost none are needed, if the pattern in which the hands are presented doesn't show any too-obvious trend. To defeat computer prediction of next boards, several bits per hand are desirable, but you can get away with quite a bit less than 96 per hand.

@mycroft: No, it doesn't. It is true that the first player I ever met who played it as GF is from District 19. I have even been asked to play it that way by one or two pickup partners in the last couple years. But in AK/ID/MT/UT I would say inv+ is the large majority method, and is certainly what I would assume when hearing an alert. I would not be surprised to learn that GF is popular in BC. I couldn't say what is popular in Seattle and Portland now (but up until 2005 it was inv+ there too.) I guess I am glad it didn't come up when I was at your table last month! *** Returning to the main thread, with the 4-way poll: I would say 1 is the technically correct answer, but 2 has an element of truth in that failing to say "denies a 4CM" will rarely cause a problem and failing to say "may include a 4CM" will often cause a problem.

The guidance has always been to explain the meaning of the call. I myself have always said "10+ points, support for my minor, denies a 4-card major" or "denies interest in a major contract" or similar words in my explanation. (Pairs who play it GF will say GF in place of 10+ or 11+ of whatever.) Many of my opponents simply say "inverted", and I assume they mean garden variety inverted minors denying a 4-card major as have appeared in the conventions books for the last 30 years. If such an person turned up with AKJx xx xxx Axxx and only made the raise to establish an immediate game force, I would not hesitate to rule against him if the opponents played him for only xxxx or 3 spades and misdefended as a result. I don't have any face-to-face experience with a pair that plays a raise that doesn't deny a major to ask them how they alert it. I would certainly consider it plenty unusual and unexpected enough to expect "does not deny a 4-card major" to appear prominently in the initial explanation.

This is going to be very sensitive to the conditions you place on your sim. Will declarer ever have 5 hearts? How good do his pointed suits have to be before he'll consider 2D or 2S? How secure of a club stopper is declarer going to have? I would expect the heart to be best against most styles, but might be persuaded otherwise for a FSF-game pair who will completely routinely bid this way with 5 hearts and 11 HCP.

Playing in weak fields, I liked playing 1NT with guaranteed misdefense so much that it was one of the biggest reasons I didn't play 2/1. The stronger the field the less incentive there is to do that. From a double-dummy analysis standpoint, running to the 7+ card suit fit is almost always the winner unless your side actually has 21 HCP. It's almost like you would wish you could play 1NT as 8-11 or 9-12 balanced, and make some other forcing runout bid on the shapely garbage hands. But that isn't an option given how few 1-level responses there are and how many of them are required to be natural :)

I voted Wilkosz, of course, since it's far and away the meaning I want to be able to give the 2D opening. Living in ACBLand, what I actually play with SA or 2/1 is natural and weak. Won't be caught dead with the F-word on my card. The 11-15 6+ diamonds meaning is a solid contender if I can play 1D=hearts or something else fun like that.

There is a good case for playing all the 1-1-1-3s as GF. I do it with several of my partners and believe it beats the pants off of making all these hands go through FSF. But yes, it doesn't seem to be as common now as it was, except among Pavlicek devotees. Don't know why.

Leaping to 6C is hardly the strangest idea in the thread. With a pickup partner, it has the additional merit that it won't be misunderstood.