Siegmund

With two partners I play X as a doubleton honor in spades and a desire to compete if responder has promised 5. In the past I used it to distinguish 3- and 4-card support. I have no strong feeling which is better.

I cant help feeling like, regardless of South's call, it is a bot error, if it said it was seeking a penalty and then failed to seek one when the opps arrived in North's better suit. As for forcing vs not -- it would REALLY be nice if this was specified in the descriptions of all the bot bids; a much more important piece of information than the point ranges which are always phony anyway.

I think it's a nice format; I read about it somewhere in the mid-90s, but seem to recall the option to run a club game this way being taken away in the late 90s. (There used to be a couple kinds of official pro-am/member-guest type of games you could run, which went away, for which they allowed an exception to the usual rule of stratifying by the higher player's points.) If they said it is OK again, great. (But you'll have to manually enter the strata in ACBLscore and click past a lot of warnings for putting people in "wrong" strata.) I would have pushed a lot harder for this format before stratifying by average masterpoints came in. That is now the more normal way of achieving this same effect.

Had the same situation come up twice in a sectional pairs today (context is basic 2/1 with a good but unfamiliar partner, no explicit agreements here beyond "negative to 4H" and not playing negative free bids): 1D-(1S)-X-(P)-2H-(2S)-3C If you are sufficiently old-fashioned, this sequence shows a long weak club suit, as an unconstested 1M-1NTF-2M-3C would. If you are of the "negative doubles promise 4 of the other major, period" school, which is a common viewpoint on the forum -- A) What does 3C mean here, and B) if it has some fancy forcing meaning, for instance a game try in hearts, do you have any way to show the 7-10 club hand here, or is there nothing between a one-round-forcing 2C and a weak jump?

The embarrassing part is I already do occasionally play an experimental system with a whole lot of transfers at opener's rebid in uncontested auctions (1S-1NTF-2C=bal or diamonds, 2D=hearts, 2H=clubs for instance), and wish the ACBL allowed me to play transfer responses after 1x-1y and not just after double, and yet somehow I never think of it as an option in competitive auctions.

Sectional here that day too. Hope you run another one soon.

Some reason I always forget about transfers as a possibility in auctions like this. Will have to run that idea by a couple of partners, who may or may not believe in it.

1C is standard. We open many shapely 11-counts, and a few less shapely ones. 2H is forcing one round, 10+ points and 5+ hearts. Is this a Good/Bad 2NT situation? We have explicitly agreed that after 1D-(1S)-2C-(2S), showing the same values, Good/Bad is on. (With some reluctance, on my partner's part.) But somehow this one feels different. I don't know why. Any thoughts?

"Just winning" works very well for finding teammates. It works much less well for finding good partners. (Still trying to find the right recipe for finding new partners from anywhere out of one's own hometown, though the internet does help.)

I've never seen it tried (and a quick google search turned up no information on Patton scoring besides a one-liner on wikipedia with no details.) Glad to see other people are thinking about it. I have been kicking around ideas for alternative IMP scales quite a bit lately for my own curiosity. Been aiming more at 6-, 8- or 10-point scales, because YES I want a 10-point difference to count, and want vulnerability to still count. Roughly, so that 10-point difference overtricks partscore swing / NV game vs partscore NV game swing / V game vs partscore V game swing / NV slam swing V slam swing each have their own rung. There is quite a lot to think about -- for instance, if a band breaks at exactly 450, then even on a hand where one table is in game and the other is in a partscore, an overtrick is worth an imp to one side or the other, and I don't really know which such situations I want to build in to the system and which to exclude. I would like to see more ideas in this thread.

In the Polish family, there are always two ways to bid a minor after a 1C opening (1C-1D-2C and 1C-1D-3C, most often, with one 16-19 and the other 21+). No reason why you couldn't do the same in Precision I suppose. For quite awhile I played a variant of Polish where the 2C was really just a heavy weak two, 7-13 (but not many 7s or 13s), and hands down to 14 were included in the 1C opener. The wider range is much more manageable if you aren't afraid of the 5C4M hand, too: having 2C promise 6 is a major improvement. That's just a different way of "promising more": with only 5 of a minor you can either bid notrump or have some cheap bid promising 4CM, and wait for six to open 2m.

I think I am finding a 3NT bid, maybe now, preferably one round earlier. Maybe partner will pass; if not, he won't have to ruff spades right away and will be able to ruff clubs in the short hand, and 4H on a 4-3 fit has a fair shot.

I have not had good success getting to the 3-level on a lot of 9-loser hands. For a time I played a system where 1H-2S = 4 trumps, 6-9, singleton somewhere and 1H-3C = 4 trumps, 6-9, no singleton. The former was a big winner; the latter never seemed to lead to anything miraculous. I eventually gave up and started putting the flattest of my 4-card raises back into 1M-2M. IIRC Klinger recommended defining 1M-4M as 7-loser hands without many face cards (5-5s and some 5-4-3-1s,virtually never 5332). You can stretch it a little bit farther than that, but not as far as you have. At first glance, I think you would be close to a workable scheme if you made all your raises about a half trick stronger. As for adjusted LTC vs 3-2-1 count, adjusted LTC *IS* 3-2-1 count with downgrading of honors in short suits. IMO the adjustment does more harm than good.

True. I don't think you will get much agreement for that. From a matchpoint perspective, the best bidding system is the one that gets you to the best-scoring contract as often as possible. (For IMPs the concept is similar but harder to put into one readable sentence.) That may very well mean deliberately providing several sequences to distinguish small variations between common hand types, and providing no sequence at all except "close your eyes, pray, and blast" for really rare hand types. It is very hard to quantify differences in quality between systems that solve the same problems in very different ways. Generally there are a few methods out there that are so bad it's easy to prove they are bad, but among the leading contenders the decision is usually made either based on taste, or based on how a few "pet" problems that particulary worry a pair are handled. There are also often outside constraints - ease of memory, compliance with system regs, etc. - that cut down the universe of allowable systems in odd ways. In the ACBL, for instance, you are allowed to use transfer responses after 1NT and higher openings, and to use transfer rebids anytime, but not allowed to use transfer responses to 1-of-a-suit openings, in General Convention Chart events... so in a strong club system, you may not be able to play the same responses to 1S as after 1C(strong)-1D(weak)-1S, even if you want to. Play the suboptimal but always-legal method, or memorize two different structures? --- The above mostly applies to players above a certain level of mediocrity. With a random flight B players grabbed at the partnership desk, the big advantage of 2/1 is that fun scores like +230 that result from "is it forcing?" accidentally happen less often in 2/1-without-discussion than in SA-without-discussion. 2/1-with-careful-agreements, SA-with-careful-agreements, Polish-club-with-careful-agreements, etc, all do better than any sloppy system, and approximately equally well as each other.

If you have a way to show a slammish minor one-suiter at the 4-level (perhaps 3C-then-4C, perhaps a 3S transfer, etc.), then of course there is science to identify two heart losers: it is called cuebidding. After the 4C bid, partner bids 4D, you bid 4S if you show 2nd round controls freely or 5C if you don't, partner will know whether there is a hole in hearts and sign off or keep exploring accordingly. Two fast heart losers is sufficiently remote that, absent fancy agreements, a garden variety ace-ask is the practical approach.

He didnt say that 2C/D/H were weak; I took them to be normal-opening-bid strength. Is 2C still Brown Sticker even if it is not weak? (Setting aside his hand evaluation for the moment; say 2C=11-15 and pointed or round suits.)

I am experimenting with transfers by opener now, in fact. It's still not too much fun when opener is 5332 of course. But it does make a lot of rebid problems easier, giving Gazilli-like options for how to show all the two-suiters. It's one of several auctions where I am trying transfers by opener (others include after 1H-1S, using 2C=diamonds and 2D=clubs).

I certainly agree I was light for 2H. That was part of what made me afraid to rebid 3S, sounding even stronger than I already had, but I suppose if I bid at all partner is forced to 3N/4C if he doesn't like what I bid, and I shouldn't be worried about stopping in 3H.

Yes, but some of us think if both pairs refuse to play the board late, both pairs are directly at fault for it not getting played, and have limited themselves to A- at most, absent some very odd extenuating circumstances.

I had the impression that OP was from an area where it was forbidden, and didn't know it was legal here when he visited. I'm not aware of anywhere online where the books before 1987 are posted. I have hard copies of most but not all of the old ACBL versions, either law books or full reprints of the laws in old Official Encyclopedias or Hoyles. I've never seen copies of pre-1987 non-ACBL laws; it would be interesting to know if there was a time in the distant past they were the same and then diverged.

Welcome to the ACBL. I have never given a "no play" for this reason, ever ... but when I first became a director, all I had was the Laws and the Bridge Laws Mailing List, and bluejak and other European directors pounded into my head very young that I must never give NPs for bad reasons, must never give A+/A- if a 'real' adjusted score can be had, etc etc. The local club directors who studied with me before their tests got that same approach passed on to them. But one of our members took a training course and directors test at IIRC the Gatlinburg regional -- and came back preaching that nobody should ever get a late play and NPs were the preferred solution. The conflict forced our unit board to take up the matter -- and we got a policy of one late play per pair, A- for any additional late plays for the same pair. But I have since been to a few "Q&A for club directors" sessions at tournaments, and the official advice from the ACBL to club directors really IS to give NPs and not late plays. It's going to become more common, not less, as fewer old-fashioned directors are around. Are late plays optional? Absolutely not. They aren't a punishment or even much of a delay for you, they are a convenience to the other non-offending players in the room to let them leave early without waiting for you. If the delay was clearly caused by one pair, and the other pair doesn't want to stay, I am sympathetic enough to give A- without a PP. If the pair responsible for the delay doesn't want to stay, or someone just leaves without speaking to me first, A- and PPs just like you would get if you walked out of the middle of any other game. I kind of gaped in shock, the first time I had two pairs come to me and tell me "we've decided to take an average instead of staying." Apparently some club directors actually do ask people if they want to stay to play the board, and habitually give either NP or A/A if both pairs agree not to stay.

When was the rule change, 1987 or 1977? Amazing that it took only until 2007 for the ACBL to get the Laws changed not only so that they could allow asking but so that everyone has to allow it. Defenders have always been allowed to ask each other in North America. In fact the rules used to be even more liberal: under the 1963 laws, any player including dummy may ask any other player if he has revoked. I don't know if it was 1975 or 1987 when dummy's explicit right to ask a defender disappeared from the laws -- I don't have a 1975 law book handy. The only thing new in 1997 was publishing one law book for the whole world with elections allowed, under which the ACBL chose to continue to allow it and the rest-of-world continued to forbid it. Previously the ACBL published a law book for the western hemisphere and the WBF/Portland Club/whoever else published one for the eastern hemisphere. This was one of several longstanding differences between the two books.

1/2) In auctions like 1H-(1S)-2D-(P)-3D-(P)-3S, some people play that the 3S bid asks for a spade stopper (Western), some people play it shows a stopper (Eastern). In my experience Western is the vastly more common meaning - but I am from the West. 3) A cuebid of a suit your opponent has promised, but not bid naturally: for instance 1H-(2H Michaels)-2S.

I have seen it on vugraphs / forum-posted hands. I have never seen a real-life pair use it, and never had a partner ask me to play it. How useful it is depends in large part on what your cuebidding style is. My last regular p and I used Brashler-style sweep cues, and had essentially no need for it. The typical 'problem auctions' like 1S-3S-4D with diamonds but lacking clubs did not happen, because our auction started 1S-3S-3NT("I don't have clubs, do you?") If you are committed to Italian style cues and already have a meaning for 3NT you aren't willing to give up, then yes, adding LTTC is an improvement.

We got to 6C by an auction similar to wang's: X - 2D ; 2S - 5C; 6C. Yes, I thought 2D was an underbid too, but I expected West to come back in with more spades or partner to bid hearts next, and my plan was to bid "as many clubs as I had to." After the 2S call I was ready to insist on game in a minor and partner liked his hand even more. I do think it's right to bid only 6 not 7, since there is a risk of a light 3rd seat opener and losing a major suit finesse. Partner felt his hand was too big to just rebid 2H, and like some in this thread, our only path to showing a really huge hand that isn't one-suited is to X then cuebid then bid naturally.