Siegmund

Wouldn't be the maddest call I've ever seen. But it IS mostly in hopes of partner leaving it in, not of us finding a decent contract, if you try it.

Put me down in the minority who are happily accepting. This hand has gotten WAY better with first the SQJ and then the HK being upgraded. I feel like 2S was an underbid of at least half a trick. (If partner also had a way to show a SSGT in diamonds and didn't use it, even clearer, since a singleton diamond is really the only thing partner could have that would be bad news.)

I pass. And thought harder about X than I do about 4S. (Presumably internationals look at the vulnerability before they leap. Folks at my club often don't.)

I wonder if a jump to 4♣ would get partner to tell me about his DK or HA. If I just cuebid 3♦ I will hear about major stoppers which really isn't what I want to hear about. I dislike 4NT, mostly because I won't know what if anything we're making even after I hear the keycard answer. Lacking good methods, setting the contract at 5♣ doesn't feel SO bad even at MPs.

3 and leave the double in, regardless of what I had for dinner.

If you like simple natural bidding, one small variation on the above is 3M = non-minimum 6322, 3NT = non-minimum 5332. In the absence of an agreement I gravitate to that treatment more readily than to the 3-step version (more 'natural', in some sense.)

Somebody playing a match at my club this weekend did that with half the set of boards. I suppose they don't realise how irritating and time-consuming it is for the person who deals the boards by Duplimate to have to turn them all around again before dealing. If nothing else, this points up a hazard of getting too precise with procedural details in the Laws. In my area (where duplicating machines are uncommonly seen), intentionally turning a card face-up after the last time a board is played is so standard that it would be regarded as a mild failure to follow procedure to not face at least one card in a finished board. (It is definitely mandatory in my club for the director to ensure a card is faced in every board before he puts the set away after the game -- once upon a time it was just a custom; but after we had a few boards get re-played unshuffled, we took steps to ensure it wouldn't happen again. The players face the card as a courtesy to save the director some work.) Presumably in a club where duplimates are in use, there exists some other procedure to guarantee the non-reuse of boards.

At the table, I held this hand, and continued a heart, and that was curtains: declarer had Q7 8 QJ9 AT96543 and doesn't even need to stumble into a squeeze. Only a spade lead or a HA lead and spade switch beat it. I don't honestly know if partner would have played J from KJ6. He doesn't know I have six of them; he might be afraid of declarer having Txx hearts and giving him his 11th winner to go along with 7 clubs and the visible SADAK. I also don't know if this particular declarer would have routinely falsecard 8 from 86 in his hand. IF the answer to both of those is "no," maybe I can work out he has KJTx (or just JTx) and find the switch.

Both vul, partner deals. (MPs if it matters, but it looks like you're just trying to beat it in any case.) You allow your opponents an uncontested auction: 3♣ on your right, a long pause followed by 5♣ on your left. All you have to do now is beat it. ♠6532 ♥A97543 ♦3 ♣K7 1) Your lead? 2) If you selected the ♥A, see hidden text: Your opponents are an up-and-coming B pair, capable on their good days but a bit erratic. Your partner is strong and reliable but old-fashioned (so you are playing standard leads and signals.)

I think I like 4N better than 5D, given the suit quality, even though it'll more often be 1-4-3-5 or 0-4-3-bad6 than 0-4-4-5. I certainly like either bid better than I like defending.

1S for me almost always. At favorable I don't mind the 2S deviation.

Unless you have something in your system bag for handling 4-5s, double and 1H is obvious. (Thinly veiled brag: with my reg p, I do :) )

Limit raise for me, unless partner is an extremely conservative opener.

I dislike 3S with a singleton ace on general principle, but with a 4-loser hand, my only real choice is to find SOME kind of a forcing bid agreeing hearts, so 3S it is for me. 4H would both be an underbid, and waste the space I might be able to use to try to catch back up. Opening 2N (or 2C) isn't my style but I know a few people who might try it.

If my only two choices are to play Bergen, and to play simple standard with no artificial raises, I will pick Bergen. As already said in this thread - Bergen is better seen as a starting point, to a major raise structure that feels right to your partnership, than as a perfectly optimal finished product. My preferences include using 1H-2S and 1H-3C to show 7-10ish hands with and without a singleton, and to use 1H-3D as an artificial "very weak or very strong raise" (twice as many raises since I get a rebid!) with 1H-3H limit. That doesn't bear any resemblence to Bergen, but it's something I would never have thought of playing if I hadn't tried Bergen for a while and then pondered how I could make it better.

It's awfully rare that you will decide NOT to seek a penalty against 2♠, then decide on the next round that you want to nail 3♠. jlall's approach seems the obvious and sensible one. [Edited to add: in the context of off-the-shelf Lebensohl.]

I am a big fan of having an Obvious Shift agreement. It is, as a previous poster pointed out, not so much a "different kind of signal" as thinking about what partner will most likely switch to if I discourage the suit he has led. It spectacularly improved my defense as soon as I started thinking about what the obvious shift was. That said, I did NOT so much care for the REST of Granovetter's book ("all suit preference all the time.") In the regular partnership where we adopted Obvious Shift, we kept all of our existing agreements about signal priorities (basically "attitude first, unless obvious or irrelevant, then count, unless obvious or irrelevant, then suit preference" ), and just added to it that all attitude signals were made mode precise via OS Principle. The only other change we made to our system was using an early trump echo to ask for the non-obvious shift. Granovetter claimed, incidentally, that something like OS was expert standard, and I tend to believe him (all the defense books talk about how you must sometimes give false preference to avoid a disastrous shift, etc, they just don't talk much about how to evaluate the relative importance of the suit you're signaling for vs. the potential switch.)

Not much I can add to that.

The Yellow Book had a lot of interesting ideas in it (many of them mainstream-2/1, as well as many toy gadgets of Hardy's own system), and did contain a sound bidding system, but you REALLY had to want to learn the system to make yourself decipher it the way it was presented in that text. The Green Book is a much better organized version of almost the same basic system. I too remember wondering if he had had a ghost writer; it may have been as simple as he had a publisher and editor instead of self-publishing. He gave good lectures with well-organized lecture notes our regionals the last few years of his life too: maybe he just devoted more time to preparing readable material after he quit directing and started to emphasize teaching over pro playing. The Purple Book unashamedly contains whole chapters written by "guest authors" about each of several conventions that can be added to 2/1. At any rate, he was VERY influential in the Northwest (and I would presume similarly so in the Southwest where he lived.) As for Lawrence vs. Hardy 2/1 - among Hardy devotees, "Lawrence 2/1" was sometimes used to describe (and disparage) the 1M-2m-any-3m-is-not-forcing approach (SA with 1NTF, not 2/1 at all, if you ask me), but I thought it had mostly to do with whether a 5332 hand after 1M-2m rebid 2M or 2N. If you like the 3m-rebid-not-forcing style, Goldman's Aces Scientific is very readable and logical.

Flat 9-loser hand, 2♠ looks pretty obvious to me. Quick and dirty simulation for whoever asked for it: your hand as given, partner's hand 5+ spades and 11-16 HCP, 9.07 tricks expected, 34% chance of making game in spades. Double-dummy a clear pass, though if you believe that opening leader blows half a trick on average, you can make a case for bidding more, I guess. If I weren't so lazy I'd write something more detailed to identify which opening hands would make a game try.

It's certainly attention-getting. I'd be mildly surprised if there is a brilliant new method behind the madness, but I admit I'd spend more than a few minutes flipping through his book to find out... if it actually gets printed...

If you refuse to pass... looks closer to a (penalty) double than a raise to me. (Yes, that's kind of an extreme position to take, and only with a partner who will pull freely when he doesn't have much defense.) There are times it's reasonable to play 4-3 fits. Most of those times involve the 3-card hand having a ruffing value and a strong desire to compete.

Equal I might try it but probably wish I hadnt afterward. Vul vs not would be a terrible idea.

That's perfectly sensible. I just wanted to clarify I wasn't talking about being drunk, I was adding to your list my observation that (for instance) a glass of wine at dinner causes a great deal more "foggy" than the dinner itself does- about on par with getting 5 hours of sleep instead of 8 - though people will deny any impairment.

4H for me. Awfully nice hearts, poor diamond spots, AND the wrong vulnerability to be a hero and pass. I wouldn't call pass an abomination, just not the best choice. Most anything else I think is worthy of the name.