Siegmund

It'll be quite close between 8x6, 7x7, and 6x8. The last being least overswissed has something to recommend it, as well as playing substantially faster with fewer changes. As far as the comments I'd make to a tournament sponsor -- for all three of the above my answer is the same: what a ripoff, only 48/49 boards, instead of the 52-56 I'd otherwise get. Your only two options I find acceptable are 6x9 and 8x7.

Put me down for 1♦, thankyouverymuch. Even if you occasionally open 2NT with a singleton in an otherwise suitable hand, this time you have 1) a singleton in a major you'll often be transferred into, 2) Hardly any tenaces 3) two suits to bid naturally if you choose. I'd be much more willing to open AQxx KJxx A AQxx with 2N than the posted hand.

I would have doubled the round before and it didn't feel like a close decision. The 2S bid has promised 3, the way I and most everyone I know plays, though admittedly not a good 3, so I expect partner to believe spades are trump and be showing his diamonds to help us decide how many spades to bid. Having a 4333 and diamonds being my weakest suit, if partner needs any help there to bid a slam he ain't getting it from me. If you impose the forcing pass on me and partner preferred to bid on, I do have aces rather than kings in the opposing suits, so it makes sense to not consider this hand super-defensive. I guess I pass again if I've gone that route.

It is a little odd that they don't get much intention for follow-suit suit preference signals. Among those who play Lavinthal discards its close enough to 50-50 whether they play revolving or absolute-rank discards that you have to ask before you agree to play it. Or take the sensible approach and refuse to play them outright, of course.

It's a regional thing. All my f2f partners use standard and most my internet partners use udca. It's a bit of a strain switching back and forth and I blow a trick a week on the internet as a result... I personally find the technical differences to be quite small. And, while as peachy says, any combination of leading and carding agreements is possible - my own experience is that standard+0 or 2 higher+3/5 mesh very well as do udca+4th. Just a convenience thing of having a number of situations where you play the same card from a given combination whether leading or following. I've never met anybody who played UDCA on opening lead and right-side-up attitude and count the rest of the hand.

No poll option for "I wish I had passed it out but since I didnt I guess I have to bid 3H now"? :) And yes, this is an auction where I want good/bad to apply.

Really easy pass. Might make, might go off one. If partner has anything like a favorable-vulnerability 3C bid, 3NT is gonna be slightly worse than 0%. R/W it's actually an interesting question - between seeing if partner has 3 spades or just gambling on 3NT. Edited to add: I see you've posted the hand. Even in 2nd seat that's a super-max for favorable 3C and you STILL need misdefence to make anything. If partner's a trick worse that that you wouldn't have a prayer.

I think that experts the world over would agree that in general when you have a stack in opener's suit it's often right to pass and wait for a chance to come back in and/or nail them. You might also get them to agree that if you have to tell a "one card off" lie generally its better to lie about strength than about distribution. This hand is a pretty extreme example - the Mike Lawrence devotees will say it's an obvious 1S bid - but I think pass > 1S > 1NT > X is about right. Any of the four might be a triumph or a disaster on any one deal. I imagine a poll of experts in any country will elicit votes for at least 3 calls.

Having the point ranges be non-adjacent is certainly helpful, rather than playing limit+. The only such bid currently in my system is 1S-3H = either preemptive with 4-card support, or 17+ with 4-card support, such that 1S-3S is limit while 1S-3H-3S-pass is weak, 1S-3NT = 13-16 balanced, 1S-3H-3S-3N = 17+ balanced, 1S-4C minimum club splinter 1S-3H-3S-4C club splinter with serious slam interest, etc. There is certainly potential to expand that scheme to other ranges that want to be at the 3-level because of a 4th trump.

If it were one-suited spades, the penalty X would be obvious. Here, the main downside of the double is that it 3m is likely to play two tricks better than 2S. I am doubling anyway. At least that way if we get lucky and they are in trouble in 3m, partner won't be afraid to double that too.

A historic moment, josh and I liking the same bid on a hand... IMO it's a touch too strong for 2S/2C; that means a spade raise is telling TWO lies (spade length and hand strength) while 3C or 2H is telling only one - and, among other things, 2H makes it easier to find out if partner wants to rebid his spades or not.

On a side note... As long as we're on the subject of what to do with 7-trick hands at favorable (or 8-trick hands with neither side vul)... has anybody ever tried playing a preemptive 5H opening, same as 5C and 5D? There's no need for a 5S preempt -- but if you're trying to deny the opponents a spade fit, and you have so many hearts you'd have an obvious 5H bid over their 4S, maybe it'd be better to do it right away.

That's one reason I have Kantar on my card with my reg p, kfay: the solid-major hands, that have more than enough tricks for preempting, I can still describe that way at any vul, and not have our side's constructive bidding harmed much. The preempts I am a firm believer should never have ranges "more than one trick wide"... and favorable 4H openings look like x KQTxxxx Qxx xx or xx AJ9xxxx xxx x. At equal, as here, I want to actually have 7 tricks, which'll more often be KQJ7+A or AQ7+K.

Pass and hope we make it. I would've settled for a limit raise rather than 2NT on the first round opposite all but the most conservative openers. That aside, partner had a forcing pass, 5D, 5H, 5N, 6C, 6D, or 6H to choose from if we wanted to ask my opinion about anything, and he didn't. I'd need a major surprise for partner to think about acting here.

4H with most partners. (Kantar 3NT, with my regular p, promising a solid suit, no side ace, at most one side K+Q.) At favorable this'd be too good and I'd have to open 1H.

My experience is wildly at variance with aqua, kfay, and jdonn's. I can't, in all honesty, remember the last time I used 5NT pick-a-slam with my regular partner, or wished I had it available playing with someone else. We've never bothered to formulate a rule about when it applies. Somewhere between "when any other meaning for 5NT would be completely illogical" and "anytime we haven't agreed on trump yet and it's not a NT raise". The latter might be a reasonable simple rule to adopt. GSF on the other hand I use very routinely (most recently last Friday.) This frequency difference is directly tied to slam-exploration style. RKC addicts will rarely feel the need for GSF since they use RKC to ask for trump honours all the time. Those who rely heavily on cuebidding at both the 4- and 5-levels are more likely to reach the 5M level already knowing about kings but not knowing about trump honors.

I was among those voting that option, so I will chime in. 1NT has one strike against it - the lack of a spade stopper. Otherwise I have notrump distribution and values all over. It's a way to get my whole hand off my chest in 1 bid (accepting that partner will expect a little more in spades and a little less in hearts.) Double followed by 2H may have 2 strikes against it - I'd like to be about half a trick stronger for that action, AND I'd like my hearts to be better than KQxxx to bid them that strongly. Double followed by, well, any other plan (for instance a suggestion you might play in 2D) doesn't make any sense at all - a 4-2 trump fit with xxx in the opps suit isn't fun. It wasn't really clear to me what course the doublers intended to follow. In any event, its 2H way out in front, and the other two similarly badly flawed; I don't have any strong feelings what should be 2nd.

I like bidding - mostly to deprive opener of several easy rebids (goes past 2D to clarify his diamond length) ... but I will admittedly not be real happy to see partner bid 3H because of his singleton diamond on the next round of bidding. Pass could easily be right. But IF I'm ever going to bid, much better to do it now than to wait for it go X-p-1S back to me.

My preference is to either not play superaccepts or have the cheapest-bid-past-completion as the only superaccept, leaving room for responder to continue sensibly onward. Playing a leap all the way to 3M as your only super is awfully wasteful. With a strong pickup partner without discussion, I would expect 3D to be max, 4-card support, doubleton diamond (that's how I answered the poll), but I have seen people take very liberal interpretations of "max" and do it with just about every hand with 4-card support and a doubleton.

I voted double-and-clear (at MP I think it would be 100% clear) but I can still respect the double-and-not-clear folk.

I definitely want the >> here, between 2H and anything-else.

The feature about Meckwell's behavior that sticks in my craw is that they waited until their opponent opened 2♦ and then protested -- surely at this level they looked at their opponents' convention cards at the start of the match (or the first time they were seated at this pair's table.) There would have been nothing wrong with saying, as soon as they became aware that their opponents were playing a Multi, hey, we need a director, and either a written defence gets provided or the multi gets removed from the system card and the opps take a few moments to adjust the rest of their system accordingly. To inspect the opponents' convention card, be aware that they are playing an illegal convention, and then sit back and save your director call as a "secret weapon" to wreck your opponents' system in mid-match when they don't have time to discuss alternatives, and quite possibly get a board thrown out and trade it for a favorable artificial score (ok, this is the ACBL, we don't have an "automatic 60/30" rule for illegal conventions like the EBU, but there is usually some kind of protection for the non-offending side)... I find that grossly unethical. Disclaimers: yes, I am only 90% sure that's what they did, not 100% sure; yes, I have something of an axe to grind re Meckwell (a longstanding refusal to fully disclose their own system in years past); no, I wasn't there at the table and I don't have any personal experience of the involved players.

It's certainly possible to get ACBL hands in Duplimate format to feed to the machines... so I'd imagine it's possible to get them in a variety of other formats too.

Pass seems pretty obvious to me. I don't like defending 2S at MP particularly; but I do like -140 better than -300 or -530, which seem like very likely results if we either play of 4 something our way, or defend 3 of something doubled because partner thinks I might, you know, take a trick. Or -170 instead of -620 or 790! And if we can, in fact, set spades? We may have a bottom anyway if the field is bidding 1s-pass-3s and then gambling on 4 since it doesn't have game-try sequences available, since we'll be defending one level lower. Our opponents already chose to stay out of 4S, and we can't force them to change their minds; we can just maximize our expectation on the assumption they chose wrong.

If you've seen some of my partners' notions of opening bids, 3C nonforcing is just about right here. :D I mean, it IS a misfitting 9, and you have no guarantee partner's hand is worth a trick to you in clubs. You don't have any alternative, anyway, if you don't have an agreed-upon way to show a limit hand in clubs.