Siegmund

Put me down for the MAFIA approach (and for not playing 1m-2NT as 11-12, perhaps the single worst treatment that has a checkbox anywhere on the ACBL's convention card.) Incidentally, I never feel like I have a lot of idle sequences available after an inverted raise. I open a lot of 11s and respond with a lot of 11s, so the space from 2C to 2N/3C is jam-packed with sorting out strengths and stoppers, just like the space between 2M and 3M is needed for game tries (and eliciting information usable for slam bidding sometimes) after a major-suit raise. I'm sure there are alternatives to inverted minors that are playable and useful. But I blanch in horror at the thought of sticking a bunch of 4-card majors back into those auctions. In fact, I've gone the opposite path, and recommend treating 1D-2C as an "inverted minor non-raise" denying a 4-card major. (A highly artificial approach like ken's might work too - but thats something very different than just dumping some extra major-minor two-suiters into inverted raises.) And, at risk of repeating myself... if you're playing 1m-2NT as natural and nonforcing, get those hands into your inverted structure and dream up something, anything, better to do with 2NT!

I don't think there is much non-method blame to assign. At IMPs you might rather be in 5D (and East is probably the one to make that decision over 3♠.) I agree with the 3♠ call - partner is fishing for 3 hearts or a club stop, you have neither, but you have the values to try for a game... 3♠ keeps options open that raising diamonds doesn't. Bidding 3♥ as West I would rate between bad and insane. You're going to "enjoy" playing J9 opposite Kxxxx in 4H when 3NT is cold a LOT more often than you're going to bid magic 5-2 heart games where 3NT is bad. There is plenty of method blame to assign, for agreeing FSF-game, though. :)

I really like the symmetry of the 4441s... maybe someday a 2D opening to show a 6-10 4441 will be legal again - ha. But for the poll I voted 5431. Especially when the 4 ranks above the 5, these are the bread-and-butter hands where the player with good methods really racks up the points over the average club player.

With 4-5-1-3, not playing any methods to show 4-5s, I tend to start with a double. But I certainly wouldn't criticize anyone who wanted to bid 1♥.

Justin sez: QFT. It's curious indeed that brad-fred came to a style where this is a weak 2 - a sound weak 2 person would object to the ratty spade suit and a weak weak 2 person would object to it being so heavy outside, I would have thought :)

Just a me-too post: I bid 3♥ here and yes, I think 2♥ natural and 3♥ stopper-asking is standard.

Is there a simple way to put into words why pulling only 1 round of trump is better than pulling 2? The two lines I was trying to decide between were pulling 2 rounds (if trumps are 2-2 its now easy to pick up 4-2 clubs), and if trumps are 3-1, I thought CAK, ruff high, HJ to pull last trump, was better than pulling the 3rd round immediately and only making if clubs are 3-3. (I was defending the hand, at the table, but declarer was in 4 and was so busy whining about not being in slam that he didn't make even a token effort at making six.) Edited to add: yes, you opened 1H and LHO passed.

If we're assuming normally distributed imps on each board, then the z-score of the teams is proportional to sqrt(# boards). Maybe xcurt is trying to say that if the z-score is proportional to that, then the probability of that specific outcome will be e^-(z^2/2) -> e^-(k*#boards). But I think it's more likely he was trying to say something else entirely and it got garbled.

[hv=d=s&v=n&n=skhj98dt754cak753&s=sathakq752dkj6ct2]133|200|Scoring: MP[/hv] You're in 6♥. The lead is a diamond to the ace and the ♦9 back. What is your best chance for the contract? You have several choicesas to how many trump to pull vs. how many entries to the clubs to keep. Is your answer different if you are in 4♥ and just want the maximum number of overtricks?

At MPs, I like double and leading a major. I do think declarer is overwhelmingly likely to hold clubs - even AKQ-8 is likely to be treated as 'running' while AK-9 in something else might not be. I could be persuaded to double and lead any of the three non-club suits at random. At IMPs/total points it's close to a pass if NV. I am risking 270 to to gain 50 or 100, and I have a hard time being sure I am going to lead the right suit the necessary 85% of the time. Of course there isn't a poll option for shuffling 2 or 3 cards together for the caddy to pick so I'm voting the spade. Edited to add: I find it hard to believe that ANYbody's partner doesn't EVER fib about having 11HCP.

I prefer 4♠; my 3♠ bid is going to be a bit more in high cards and often only 6 spades. I can understand either bid.

I voted pass. At this vulnerability, double is tempting, but I do need THREE tricks from partner for that to be right, and only 1 of them is going to be coming from hearts.

Admittedly slightly off-topic... I'm quite surprised y'all would consider a system that uses four bids for RKC and none to start cuebids... at some point this feels like too much complexity for its own sake. Do you always ask for queen-points before showing specific controls?

Apparently I have a small ego. Or a history of being a bad guesser, one of the two. At the table it wouldn't have crossed my mind to try anything other than the showup.

West. It's the second pass I dislike; I'm OK with the first one. Seriously tilt-inducing to get handed a zero by someone who bids the way South does.

Looks like P>3N>4S to me. Actually you'd have a moderately hard time getting me to bid 4S at imps either, unless you have a realllly high standard for your jumps to 3S (yes, I know some of you do.)

North has a bit in reserve; doubler hasn't, IMO. And I would not call a club lead 'expected', when our side has the king.

...and I hasten to add, there are still a fair few people out there who DO play penalty doubles after their own side has bid some number of notrump. I'm not surprised that a number of experts play it as takeout, but I was surprised by the unanimity in the thread.

Remind me to suggest that method to my regular p sometime. Very sensible (and if you play it, yes, P>X>2NT on these cards rather than P>2NT>X)... in real life I think all my partners would consider 3H mandatory with 4. (Yeah, brings us back to the title of the forum.)

Yes, pass. Partner DOES show six, and you'd rather the weaker hand's long suit be trump.

If your goal is to make it as close to 50-50 as possible, you might give one person red odd cards and the other person black even cards (or however else you divide them up 7-and-6) so each person has 26 runners. I would have guessed QJT9753 was ahead of AK8642, but it really is only a guess. Really we'd need to pull some data (and I don't have any handy.)

NV I move (I'd choose 2N - 4-3 heart fit is OK at the 2-level but not so fun at the 3-level), V I don't.

I still use, and prefer, the split-range approach. As already mentioned, its more a losers-based thing than a points-based thing, and your style is a matter for partnership agreement. Personally, I'm quite surprised the convention is so universally used; 5-5s are not nearly as hard to bid naturally as 4-5s and other somewhat lopsided two-suiters are.

I'd prefer to call that a difference between comparing against other players and comparing against a datum. It is indeed very possible for all the pairs one direction to fail to beat par. That's a feature, not a flaw, if you choose to take ddpar as your datum. :D Whether it would be popular with players or not, I am not sure - but given how popular the hand records with making contracts printed on them are, I think it'd be a lot more popular than IMPing against +185s ever was.

Eh? It's illegal to make use of knowledge about your partner's psyching tendencies that your opponents don't have access to, yes. But it's certainly possible to know that an opponent has never psyched in his life (about half the players at my home club are on that list!) and conclude, completely legally, that IF anyone is operating, it must be partner. It's also certainly possible to have an auction occur which makes it clear to all that SOMEone at the table MUST be operating (or misbidding or very badly misevaluating his hand.) In such a case you have to make a judgment about who is most likely to be operating -- and there's nothing illegal about judging partner is more likely to be operating than your opponent, if that's what the AI indicates. On this particular hand, I think that on the 1st round, the failure to double is strange and caters to the possibility that 3rd hand psyched - while on the 2nd round, the bidding has made it abundantly clear that either 3rd hand psyched or NS are having a bidding accident (e.g. long weak clubs for the 3C bidder), and I can legally judge how likely I think those two possibilities are. If West doubled 1NT but passed 3NT this would be 110% green IMO. It doesn't look to me like Cascade assumed anybody was operating at all - he said that if East and South BOTH had the legal minimum for their bid, he wasn't convinced double was a winning move. That's a view, a minority view, but I think he spelled it out pretty clearly.