Siegmund

I might cuebid - 3S if we freely bid 2nd round controls and partner will reply 4C if he has KC, otherwise I start with 4C myself, I guess. If we're playing Josephine style GSF, I may be able to find 7 when partner has HAKQ+CK. Blasting six is OK too. Better if you don't have any sensible ways to explore. Six HEARTS, at MP, not diamonds, if you think anybody else in the field is bidding slam (and I do.) Any heart losers you have are losers whether they are trump or not, except in the specific case if partner having only 3 hearts and you getting a 4-1 break, and we don't give up our extra 60 points when slam makes in exchange for an extra 10 or 20% chance of making it if we think there will be company in slam.

To me, 3NT is going to sound like gambling with long clubs. It's not 100% clear to me if I am supposed to pass with a spade stopper and pull to 4C if not, or pull only if very weak, or always pass expecting partner to have the spade stop and the club suit. (If I am 3352 and they've shown a 9+ fit, I am going to guess #1.) With both minors I'd have to double 3D to show diaonds, and then bid clubs over 3S if partner didn't show interest in the diamonds. (That requires 'your partner' to tell the director that the MI changes his first-round bid, not just his action over 3S, and falls under the adjusted-score department, not the what-do-I-bid-now department.)

I think it's not online harvesting, but rather the business in question buying a mailing list from the ACBL or baron barclay or some similar outfit. Unlike "normal" spam it may well be worth asking to be taking off the mailing list for something like this. Even as a book dealer, it bothers me at least a little bit to get unsolicited ads - especially those obviously sent out en masse, as opposed to ones from a firm I've already done business with or that knows something about me. By a funny coincidence, for the last 2 days I considered posting a "gee, I used to get emails from Boehm but he didn't send me one this time, so unsubscribing really must work" note -- and then today I received the same email you all did.

Doubling again requires very little in the way of extra strength, if the hand is otherwise perfect. On the posted hand, I think it's close between a double and a 2NT bid, if 2NT sounds like "you weren't excited about hearts before, so please don't bid with only 4 of them now, pick a minor instead." I won't be caught dead rebidding 3C with only a KJxxx suit and 14 points. If you're in a partnership where partner will take X-then-2NT as a balanced 20-count, then yes, you're committed to X-then-X. I don't think the balanced 20-count comes up often enough to justify that use of the bid (and have a meta-agreement about 2NT almost never being natural in this type of auction.)

Surprising thread to me. I imagined this was a 3DWTP... it's not anything close to a minimum, between the 5th diamond, the super-chunky clubs, AND the upgraded SQ (4 losers where it could have been six, if we can find somewhere to play!) There are not many 5-6s that I wouldn't be willing to rebid 3D on if I were willing to reverse in the first place, really.

Double bust, pass neutral, new suit positive has been near-universal in my experience. That is not so different, incidentally, from double=penalty ... the time you're most anxious to go after a penalty is when game for your side is not certain.

NF constructive for me. I can't recall a partner who explicitly discussed the difference between these two sequences (after a 1-level overcall vs. after a 2-level overcall), incidentally -- in the case of your first auction, NFC has been nearly universal when I've filled out a card at a partnership desk. With my regular partner the jump shift is a fit bid, but I wouldn't assume that without discussion.

Shame the poll didn't offer 1H as a choice. Not that 1H followed by a jump shift in diamonds is perfect but it's worth a passing thought.

There are enough tricks to open about 2 1/2 hearts in 4th seat, but you need some agreement about what type of hand does that so partner knows how to proceed. My style is to use the 4th seat jump openings for "just look at your aces and trumps and decide how high to raise me" hands - and on this deal my partner would undervalue his kings badly, and quite likely cause us to miss a game we might have found after, for instance, 1H followed by 3H. We make a similar distinction when the other side preempts between e.g. (2h) 3S and doubling-then-rebidding-spades.

What is 1D (1H) 2S in your system? With at least two of my frequent partners, the posted hand for responder is not a 1S bid. If partner had a void in hearts or something he might pull, but again, not with anything like the posted hand.

Interesting hand indeed. Actually holding these cards I would have bid 2C without a second's thought... but the case for passing is quite strong if you do take time to think about it. (I wouldn't go quite so far as to say passing is obviously right -- I can see us making a whole lot of clubs if they can make a whole lot of hearts.)

Double and raise looks good. Starting with 3S is a good way to get dropped in 3S-going-down anytime 4H makes.

You can put me down for pass. The SAK may eliminate a heart loser in partner's hand, but they won't do a thing for a club loser unless he's 0-4-7-2, and the 1S bidder is going to have something to go along with his SQJ - losing CA and a diamond seems more likely than not to me. And the matchpoint-itis excuse of catching up to 3NT doesn't apply at IMPs. If it had been a leap to 5D over 2S I would consider pass absolutely clearcut, with partner having a variety of ways to explore, Over 3S his options are a bit cramped.

It's one of several areas in the Alert Chart which was much better written pre-2005. I would tend to assume that negative doubles don't need alerted at any level, and penalty doubles surely don't from the 3-level upward, but might well need alerted at the 2-level. (I wonder if there is deliberate flexibility, to allow a club with a lot of very old-fashioned players to deem all of 50s Goren not to be "highly unusual or unexpected.") I still tend to assume that a takeout-oriented double when 3 suits have already been bid or after a notrump sequence should be alerted, but "all takeout all the time" is certainly popular on the forum and becoming more popular in real life too.

That's going to be a 'bummer' for an awful lot of people, I think. A great many folk just play the occasional tournament, or perhaps have one or two regular weekly dates, and will never accumulate 10 in a month, ever. Something like "most recent N tournaments, or those played in the last M months, whichever is more" may perhaps be more suitable.

The multi-fit bid is an interesting idea, one I may have to try out. I also am a believer in limit+ inverted and game-forcing 2NT. Glad to be a little bit less alone in the world :) If I had to guess right now, I would say to keep Inverted over 1D -- I find it much too valuable for stopper-finding to want to give it up -- and would probably abandon Reverse Flannery in favor of keeping all the other gadgets in play over 1D, but you might also be forced into playing 2H and 2S as natural fit bids since you lack the extra step you had in 1C-2D (I don't know exactly what your followups to the multi-fit are.)

Now that may actually be a detail worth bringing to the laws committee's attention. We know the intention of the law is that a trick already won isn't taken away by a revoke... right now it is done by trick number, but it could be clarified to not take away this trick. (I have no strong feeling on whether it's an item worth pressing.)

I actually believed that rebidding 2H with 1444/4414/4441 and 2S with 4144 was standard for several years after I learned bridge. It's not that I actually saw anyone do it, or show an example of a 4441 hand and explicitly say to bid the 4-card suit. But what all the beginner's books said was something like "after 2C-2D, rebid 2NT with a balanced 23-24, or 3NT with a balanced 25-27; with an unbalanced hand, bid your longest suit." So the bright beginner -- who knows what a balanced hand is, and who can figure out for himself that it's a waste of bidding space to go clear up to 3 of a minor with 4441 hands -- naturally concludes that rebidding your cheapest 4-card suit is the right thing to do. Some people were aware it was a problem ... the ones who were busy persuading their partners to play Roman 2D, often with no upper point limit (which I played quite happily with several partners my first 2 years of duplicate, actually, though I've very rarely played it since.) Opening 2NT on 4441 hands with a singleton honour was certainly much less fashionable 20 or 25 years ago, as was being willing to open at the 1-level with 23-point monsters (though there always 20s and bad 21s where it was the suggested bid.)

Good advice. 'Course, from where I sit, it looks like South has no shape and no suit, while North had 4-card support for his partner and a doubleton in the opps' suit.

I have lockups in Windows 7/64 several times per week - usually only about 30 seconds rather than 60 - at all sorts of random times, not just while on BBO. I tend to assume it's a case of garbage collection gone wrong inside the OS rather than anything to do with any one application I am using. I don't know if my case is exactly the same as yours or not.

Punish them? N-S at this table played badly (blew an easy trick by revoking.) N-S at the other tables played better (knew how to follow suit.) If your opponents play better, your score is worse, and vice versa. Nothing unfair about that. Common to both teams and matchpoints is that you and your partner control only 25% of your own destiny. Your table opponents control another 25%; your teammates / the field sitting the opposite direction to you control 25%; and your teammates' table opponents / the field sitting the same direction as you control the last 25%. Teams has almost twice as much randomness in it as comparison against a large field does -- it's like being stuck playing a 2 1/2 table pairs game your whole life! -- but has the dubious advantage that you can tell exactly who to point a finger at when you don't like a result.

I think 6C is normal even when not pushing. My auction with my reg p would have gone 1C-1S (majors first), 2H-3C (GF since no Leb), followed by a bunch of cuebids. In Walshy 2/1, the proposed 1C-1D, 1H-FSF route looks normal.

If I play 3H as 6+ slammish, opener's rebids for me are cuebids; 3NT would specifically carry implications of the lack of a fitting trump honour; and the continuations would be cuebids. The 3H bid would absolutely never be a hand that still wants to discuss what trumps is. With 4-6-0-3, my system is 2C followed by 4D transfer over 2D.

I've used the 2NT opening specifically for both minors with clubs better or longer than diamonds -- leaving 1D-any-2C in a Polish type system to promise 5 diamonds and 4 or 5 clubs, and avoid the temptation to open 1D on 4D5C hands. I suppose you could use 3C for the same purpose. The continuations I used assumed the both-minors opener was unbalanced (2245 hands opened the appropriate notrump range), and I raised 3H/3S replies much as I would over a 3m preempt (good honour doubleton or any three), but I have no great conviction that that's the perfect solution.

There's a certain amount of bad luck involved, but such blame as there is goes all to West. Even with no explicit agreement, doubles of voluntarily bid slams ask for unusual leads, of which a spade surely is an example. While there's no guarantee East will always lead a red suit without a double, and it's a little unusual for NS to be able to collect 12 tricks in the black suits once they are in, West has to know that he's greatly increasing the chance of a spade lead by doubling.