Siegmund

I don't think it is quite that close. To get any use at all out of these sequences you have to be using them on say 6-8 HCP at least. And at least in my area, I think playing them as not invitational at all, just a way to choose between both majors, may well be more popular than the invitations.

I choose the 15-table Web with 15NS as the phantom so nobody plays the boards out of order. Only special instruction needed is to tell 1NS to not bother carrying their boards to the top table. If I have 2 sets of boards available, I'd pretty much never go back to the 14- to 18-table single Mitchells with not everyone playing every board. But I will be interested to hear what other exotic options people espouse.

This is one area where I like the Unassuming Club approach better than the Polish approach. AUC swaps the 2C and 3C rebids: 1C-1H-2C = artif GF denying 3 hearts. Various rebid schemes by responder are possible here 1C-1H-2D = artif GF showing 3+ hearts. Use the -wrotka of your choice. 1C-1H-3C = long clubs, 15-19ish I've been keeping 2S as a GF with long spades rather than putting those hands through 2C, but you can use 2S, 3D, or both to take care of various problem hands. Assinging one jump shift to cover BWDH may be all that is needed.

MLTC is indeed mathematically the same thing as 3-2-1 point count with some special rules for evaluating shortness. It desperately needs a new name. It doesn't have the slightest connection to actually counting tricks. (It may well be better than the 4-3-2-1 count- thats a different topic.) LTC is imperfect but is a spectacular tool for teaching intermediates how to think about which cards will take tricks or not and why. The value is not so much in the evaluation itself -- though that isn't bad for such a simple method -- as in the fact it corresponds to actual numbers of tricks. As to LOTT - even more imperfect - but it had a HUGE impact on the average player's bidding style, bigger than any other book written in the last 50 years. Lawrence's book... *cough*... phoned in. There's a reason it has disappeared from sight for the last 10 years.

I can't remember the last time my partner deliberately chose the 4-3 fit over the 5-2 fit after 1NT-2C-2D-2M. For me, the answer is exceedingly simple: why not use it? Because it gets you to 3H on all the hands you want to stop in 2H, and only breaks even on the hands where you want to stop in 2S. Game-forcing Smolen at least breaks even all the time - though it gains essentially nothing vs. the standard treatment (it does make opener declarer, but this rarely makes much difference especially when responder is strong.) There are other alternatives at the 3-level -- retransfers all the way from 2NT->C to 3H->3S for instance.

Is it merely "decent", or South's obligation to give back that trick? 79A2: A player must not knowingly accept either the score for a trick that his side did not win or the concession of a trick that his opponents could not lose. We are talking here about a trick that could not be lost by the defense by any legal play of the cards, and which will not be lost of the revoke penalty in the book is applied either. You can say that his side did in fact win the trick (after an illegal play by East), and the hand was played to the end so no concessions happened -- but I personally would feel awkward about accepting this trick, and in fact would think South a complete cad, if perhaps not quite a cheat, if he hurried on to the next board to keep this trick.

At favorable, sure, a 6-card suit is possible/normal -- but mine will tend to be KQT9xx type suits, that have some reasonable chance at 5 tricks. But I think of myself as a quite classical (rule of 2-3-4) preempter, not a wild gambler. So I am sure the people who prefer a wilder preempting style do it on all kinds of AJxxxx type suits.

If pressed, I would say the K is closer to the Q than to the aces. That is true, in general, of kings, relative to aces and queens. The trump king is worth quite a lot less than an ace -- lots of examples of this in Rexford's Variable Keycard Blackwood book, where he is able to distinguish between an ace or a trump king i certain auctions. I experimented, a while ago, with the idea of 6- or 8-key-card blackwood -- thinking that with 5-5 type hand, you might want to ask for "any ace, or the Ks and Qs of the suits we care about" -- and it is REALLY hard to construct very many situations where the queen ask really is important. In a lot of situations we would do better to just bid aces first and kings next, Stone age cuebidding style, with an asking bid for trump quality when we care about it.

As hrothgar said, an ag gag law. The one we have here in Idaho is less extreme -- it only prohibits collecting information about what others do on their own private property ( = how feed lots treat their livestock) -- but it claims, questionably, to have the right to restrict what you can observe while standing on adjacent public property. It's promoted as "protecting private landowner's rights" but that isn't really how it is used. The new Wyoming law goes a step farther, and tries to do the same kind of thing to protect ranchers who are (mis?)using public land for grazing, not just ones who own their own land. Despite the examples in the article, the test cases will not come from the national parks, where things go directly to a federal magistrate, but from state land. I will be surprised if it is upheld, when it faces the inevitable court challenge. I am not at all surprised that they passed it. Welcome to what politics is like in the wild west.

No question when the auction period begins -- but I, too, remember being taught when I first started directing that a hand could not be interrupted once it had begun. I see other directors do it from time to time, and I can never find chapter and verse for why they shouldn't. (Lots of secondhand reasons, like the potential for UI if you look at your cards but then talk freely with your partner before coming back to a late play -- but I thought there was a clear "thou shalt not" somewhere.) Did I get quietly removed in the 2007 law book, or...?

Never even heard of "1,2,3,4" before. Extremely conservative. 2-3-4 as mike describes is a very common agreement. The ancient rubber bridge version was "rule of 2 and 3" (2 vul, 3 nv - 2 unfav 3 otherwise, if you are a modernist), as rubber scoring doesn't really create the condition of "favorable" vulnerability.

Yes, extremely common among the live novices. And it's completely impossible to get them to alert it, indicate it on their convention card, or otherwise grasp that that isn't the standard meaning of the call. Sigh.

I would like the Laws to be the same everywhere. (They almost were, a few editions of the book ago - not much besides inquiring about a defender's revoke was different between ACBL and non-ACBL laws then -- but now we're on different planets with Law 12, among others. I can't help feeling the law book hit a high water mark in 1987 and has been creeping backward since.) But that's not what Vampyr asked: the regulations are supposed to suit local needs. provided they don't conflict with the laws. Would be silly to expect the same regulations in a novice game and a world championship (use of screens, amount of disclosure needed, etc.)

My chrome is also upset. Something about forums.bridgebase.com claiming to be www.bridgebase.com or vice versa. (You can still log in by clicking past a couple scary warnings.)

I approach the tournaments primarily as declarer play practice, with a tiny bit of hand evaluation on the side. As such I prefer it when normal people have normal auctions. When I open 1C and rebid 1NT on my bad 14 count, it annoys me to get random noise added by the people who deliberately lied to the robot. Annoys me in a way that people playing a different system wouldn't. I do find I bid differently with my 11s and 12s when I know partner is weaker. But I have yet to see any systematic advantage for the people who open 1NT on everything under the sun. Eventually it causes them to miss their 26-point 3NTs and get to their 23-point 3NTs, and it's hard to turn a profit doing that. There are plenty of interesting bidding decisions on the competitive hands or on the "is it worth a slam invite?" problems.

That has sure taken me by surprise. At the table, all 4 of us were in agreement that it asked for a lead, but not about what suit.

I was one of the -510s. My double scared the opponents out of bidding a failing slam -- which made me expect a terrible board -- but it turned out nobody was failing. I did have JTxxxx in clubs as a backup plan if a redouble had come back. Admittedly that would still have cost me 1100 on a bad day and 500 on a good one, but 500 or 800 is an improvement over allowing them to score up a slam on a non-spade lead.

With one partner I actually have the agreement that in an auction like 1♥-2NT(Jac)-4♥-4NT, double asks for a club lead, arbitrarily the cheapest unbid suit, in an auction where they have bid only one or two suits (if they've bid two suits, doubling the final slam asks for that suit.) But on the given hand where they have bid 3 suits, I was hoping that since a double of the final contract was for diamonds, that this double must ask for "an unusual lead, but not diamonds" - therefore spades. If I did nothing at all I'd think partner might gravitate toward clubs. In fact I had the cashing ♠AK, partner led a diamond, and they wrapped 13 tricks in about 10 seconds. And we still got an excellent board. The recap sheet showed five 510s, seven 1010s, and one 1310. Every pair in the room took 13 tricks because nobody it seems had a way to ask for anything except a diamond lead or the normal lead.

I want to be passive too, but decided a diamond looked safer than a spade. Not at all sure I am right. The problem with a sim is that it's very difficult to describe the range of strengths and distributions on which opener might make that raise to 6NT. It includes a bunch of flat 19s, shapely 17s, and the occasional 4-6 or 4-7 hand where the diamonds might peel.

So is there really NObody here who uses this double to say anything other than "let's see if the opponents will have an accident"? That's one explanation why the wrong lead got made at my table, I guess...

If you take rhm's line, AND choose to cross in clubs, you will succeed. LHO was 4-3-2-4, RHO 1-4-5-3. I chickened out, and used a spade to return to my hand for the second ruff, and lost to the 4-1 spade break in the end.

From a Sunday Swiss last weekend, spots approximate (none of x'es is a card that will ever set up.) ♠J98 ♥Ax ♦ATxx ♣Axxx ♠AKQxx ♥T9xx ♦Kx ♣Kx You are in 6♠ on the lead of something like the ♣5 (a "small club" but not the smallest one in the deck), and have some work to do. If you choose to try ace and another heart, LHO wins and switches to the ♦J. You are at some point going to have to choose whether to worry more about a bad trump break (losing to Txxx) or a bad minor-suit break (running into an overruff when you cross back to your hand) or a bad major-suit break (running into an overruff when you ruff a heart low.) The line I took was one that had moderate chances of success, but wasn't the one that worked at the table, naturally.

Here's an auction for you from this past weekend. 1♥ - 2♦ 2♠ - 3♥ 4♥ - 4NT And now your partner doubles 4NT. Assuming the auction continues on to 6♥, what lead is your partner asking for? Do you have a formal agreement with your regular partner, or do you consider it just a matter of bridge logic?

I've seen several Precision pairs do it, but usually some restricted kind of Mini-Roman -- most commonly "mini-Roman but we always have spades," and have also seen "either 4-4 or 4-5 in the majors", kind of half-Mini-Roman-half-Flannery. For most systems Mini-Roman is a solution looking for a problem, but stone age Precision had enough of a problem to have a reason for its custom 2D bid that was very under-loaded.

Should clarify that my 2C vote was based on the linked FD card saying 1D-2C was inv+, not GF (it's very new for me to see anyone playing it GF, so it's still not the first thing I think of.) Given the systems a lot of BBOers are playing, sure, 2NT inv is the practical system bid. Have to say I am a big fan of 2NT still being forcing, and of having 1D-2C and 1D-2D be played more-or-less the same way. But I realize that's not what people are doing here.