Siegmund

My personal preference is for a different 2S/2N structure, similar in spirit to mikeh's. When I do play 4-way transfers... 1) I super-accept with a high honor, and only with a high honor. The point of this is for responder to find out whether the suit peels for 3NT when he has HHxxxx and nothing else. (That is, for all practical purposes, the only invitational-to-3NT minor hand; if you have lots of outside entries you just start with 3NT; if you are missing two honors and are worried about outside entries, you have to insist on the suit contract.) 2) "All invites through 2C" is evil. What a way to guarantee double-dummy defense, telling everyone both your exact strength and opener's major-suit lengths. DO NOT INVITE on balanced hands. Pass with 8 and bid 3NT with 9. You really won't miss it once you are used to it. Find a sensible use for 2C-then-2NT later (a 6-8 point hand that was interested in 4M but not interested in 3NT? Transfer to a minor with a 4-5 or 4-6 hand? 4-1-4-4 hands that missed a major fit and demands opener bid his better minor? Whatever your system needs. It needs at least one of these things more than it needs a balanced invite.) I have no strong feelings on whether to swap the steps on opener's rebid. There are cases both ways (not wrongsiding the weak hands, vs. shoehorning the 5-5 minors hand into 2NT) and someone once suggested doing it one way over 2S and the other way over 2NT.

When games were hand-scored, it was important to minimize the amount of factoring you had to do. If you run a 10-table skip mitchell, with a rover pair, you will have 30 boards in play, all of them played exactly 9 times. If you run an 11-table game with a phantom, and you play only the usual 9 rounds, you will have 33 boards in play, some of them played 9 times and others of them played 8 times; all the boards played 8 times need factored up which turns 0-7 into 0.06-7.94. (In both cases, you will have some PAIRS playing 24 boards and others playing 27; but THAT kind of factoring is simply multiplying by 9/8 after adding up whole numbers.) In the computer age it has become very common to run games as you described in your post, and the "N/S are getting to sit still so they should be the ones to suffer the 'penalty' of a sitout" logic is quite common. (Note that with 10 tables and a rover it will still be NS getting the sitout though.) There are still people who will complain that it is better to have only 30 boards in play rather than 33, so that you are closer to the ideal of 'every pair plays every board.' But especially as the alternate movement is not a 'perfect' one either, I would not lose too much sleep over one person's complaint. [Edited: at the time I wrote this, OP was asking specifically about a 10 1/2 table Mitchell game. It has since morphed into a more general post.]

Opposite vulnerability I can see a double here if we have an agreement that clubs is a biddable suit for our side. This vulnerability, nosirreebob.

K-S is one way to go. If you're open to something that looks a little bit less like Standard American but still very natural, try An Unassuming Club: a Polish style 1C, natural 1D/H/S/2C, with weak 1NT. The Andy Stark book spends a lot of time on the notrump itself; not so much on how it fits in to the rest of your system. The other book that came out around the same time ("How I Became a Life Master Playing the Weak Notrump") does spend a lot of time talking about integrating it into a system - but otherwise has extremely little to recommend it.

You will find some very complete system descriptions of that flavor on Mark Abraham's systems page - not much 'natural', but a lot of strong-pass or strong-club systems featuring 1D=4+ hearts and 1H=4+ spades with relays afterward. "Better?" I'm not sure we know - and not sure we will know as long as they are played by so few people.

If you open reasonably light, and you consider your HQJ to be worth a bit less than face value since they are liable to be opposite shortness, I think it's fair to treat this as only an invitation. But once you decide if you have a game force in spades or an invitation in spades, your bid is easy: one of these hands jumps to 3S immediately, the other of them bids FSF and rebids spades. Which is which depends on your agreement (having the jump be invitational seems to be the more common way but IMO things work much better if 1-1-1-3 is forcing and FSF handles all the invitations. Hehe... almost like playing XYZ, but without giving up the natural 2C bid.)

I like 2S, planning to choose between 3NT and 5D at my next turn. If for whatever reason this hand is unsuitable for either 2S or 3S, I just rebid 5D immediately, though I admit it's not perfect. At least it shows an 8 1/2 or 9 trick hand with long diamonds, while the jump to 3D could be on a whole lot of different shapes with only 6 diamonds, inviting partner to e.g. rebid hearts with six of them.

There seems to be a trend towards using Michaels all the time instead of the weak-or-strong approach, though I personally am not convinced this is a good thing. My own preference, actually, is to bid out the 5-5s, and use the cuebids for the otherwise difficult-to-bid 4-5s, if I can do so at the 2-level, as I described in this short article. The 1950s ancestor of this approach, Roman jump overcalls, is described in many of the convention books, and the hand-strength judgement question is covered at some length in Klinger's LTC book, if I recall.

Without a jack it'd be a real close decision. Without the HQ I'd be passing. As it is, not much to think about.

One more vote for "transfers are worst of all worlds" over a strong club (and not so hot over 1NT either imo.) My personal simple preference is X,1D, and 1NT as CRASH, all the other bids natural. With my last reg p, we played Truscott (X=CH, 1NT=DS, 1D through 2C two touching suits, 2D upwards natural) and it worked ok too. Emphasis is on taking up space quickly and then getting out. To me that means if you have a normal overcalling hand you bid 2 of it rather than 1, and the only use for the super-cheap bids is something partner is likely to be able to bounce. Doesn't matter too much exactly which suit combinations you agree to, long as they enable you to take up space effectively.

Just out of curiosity, since it hasnt been the topic of much discussion yet... are y'all happy with our pass over 1D on the previous round?

I wondered if that might be the book you had in mind. A really excellent book which completely changed the way my reg p and I approached our slam auctions. We did make a few minor changes to Brashler's presentation, but the method deserves much more publicity than it gets.

As long as we're on the subject... Since when were control-showing bids considered artificial? Under the old laws they were clearly not conventional, showing strength in the bid suit. Has someone reinterpreted them as "artificial" now despite them being the most natural of all the common uses of new-suit bids at the 4-level after another suit is agreed?

Amplifying this a bit ... as table host, it would be nice to press a button to actively recruit people from "help me find a game," so that these people will more likely be sent where they are wanted vs. dumped somewhere completely at random. There could either be two such buttons, for pairs and individuals, or simply a generic built-in preference to take pairs first if there is a pair available and someone rests two seats be filled.

An interesting thread. I have tried for several years to cultivate the habit of consistently having my hand on the table if dummy is on lead, and not having it on the table if dummy isn't - but I've never succeeded in making it more than an 80% kind of thing for some reason, and -- solely because I don't want to CAUSE my partner to lead from the wrong place if he looks at my hand and I have it in the wrong place -- I have never told my partners this is what I am doing / encouraged them to use it as a guide. I had assumed that it was legal under the heading of attempting to prevent the irregularity of leading from the wrong hand. The only analogy I can think of is that saying "no hearts, partner?" after EVERY time partner shows out of a suit, a couple times per deal all night long, is legal even though it's annoying as heck and only very rarely prevents a revoke. Reminding partner what hand he is in every time he is on lead prevents partner from committing an irregularity quite a bit more often, and is much less intrusive. At least one of my regular partners noticed what I was doing, and commented positively on it as a habit he wished more people had. I've never had an opponent comment on it either way (apparently I've never played at mycroft's table.)

My current treatment is to play 2S in this auction as a 6-8ish hand with 4 spades and 5+ of a minor - a hand insistent on playing in one of its two suits, though not overly interested in game unless partner has an omgwowmax. If I changed my methods here it would be to Martens's Transfer-after-Stayman rebid package. Big believer here in avoiding invitational 2NT bids whenever possible. jlogic's 5-spades treatment is one I haven't ever given much thought to. May have potential. (Depending where he is putting the hands it displaces of course.)

Ah, yes, at least double-dummy, the defenders should always find the club switch to set it. Nevermind... thats what happens when I play way too late at night.

Like the title says: Hand from robot tourney Eleven obvious winners, and only one realistic chance for a twelfth - the heart suit, where the textbook 70% play is small to the jack. GIB succeeded in doing everything but attempt to set up hearts, including using up all its transportation so that it couldn't even take advantage of a 3-3 heart break, had it gotten one. In this 10-table MP game, 6NTN was the contract at 9 tables, and it went down one at 8 of those tables. (At the one table it made, it made because West made a bad heart discard.) The bot appears to have a consistent blind spot.

Matchpoints, none vul, partner deals. pass-(1NT)-pass-(3NT)-all pass. You are up to bat with ♠QT976 ♥J92 ♦543 ♣64 Your lead? (There will be a followup question from partner's side of the table, too - as to how he ought to interpret your lead.)

Welll.... double-dummy sims say 6NT is >50% at 31HCP and 7NT at 34 (provided you have all 4 aces.) It may be an unavoidable flaw of the simulator for it to make these slam tries and raises more agressively than mere mortals do.

At the table, we did pass out 1DX, and achieved the double-dummy result of letting it make one. It seemed like a very normal result, AND our side risked getting too high and going off a couple in 3NT or somewhere silly -- so we were quite disappointed to get only 1 matchpoint on a 17 top for -140. Full deal for anyone curious (and yes, both sides were vulnerable - but if you don't turn on "show bidding" it ignores the vulnerability when it chooses color settings, apparently) [hv=pc=n&s=sa93h53daj96cq754&w=sqt7ht97dk83ct832&n=sj82hkj62d54cak96&e=sk654haq84dqt72cj]399|300[/hv]

Opting for 3NT on those hands rather than retreating to 4M is a bit unusual - though if partner has 7 solid and nothing outside, there will be only 9 tricks in the major so 3NT-1 will tie 4M-1 and may make on a bad lead or a 4-4 break the wide open suit. I think bidding 4M and hoping for a working king or queen is the more usual approach. (You may even deliberately make partner declarer so the lead comes toward his hypothetical Qxx or Kx rather than through it.) It's a convention I am fond of, though I admit I'm still waiting to reach one of those miracle slams the asking bid responses enable you to find. It does take some pressure off the 4M openings, though, and adds only one artificial opening to the system rather than Namyats's 3.

An interesting bidding problem from the Ogden sectional: ♠J82 ♥KJ62 ♦54 ♣AK96 Both vul, partner deals, pass-pass to you. Playing 2/1 and a strong notrump, I presume you will start with 1♣. It goes X-XX-pass back to you. I presume you will pass; doubler tries 1D, partner doubles, RHO passes. What now? And what do you think your chance of getting a good board is?

The expected number of 8+card suits in 36 deals is .7279 (expectations add, even though the 4 hands in a given deal aren't independent, so we just multiply the chance of an 8+ card suit in one hand by 144). The number of successes for a rare event in a large number of trials is approximately Poisson, so the chance of 3 or more successes is approximately 3.76%. The Poisson approximation is imperfect, and (since if one player has an 8+ card suit, the chance of another player also having an 8+ card suit is slightly elevated) the extreme cases happen a bit more often than predicted by the Poisson assumption. But not by much. The right answer is surely under 4% and I wouldn't be surprised if it were under 3.8%. I could swear I saw an estimate very close to 3.76% posted way back at the beginning of this thread. But nobody seemed willing to believe it. Sigh. At any rate, the previously stated "should happen about once a month at an every-day club" is right on the money, and it doesnt appear there is any evidence of a bad dealer.

Artificial for me.