Siegmund

At least we've nicely focused the debate down to two reasonable alternatives: either doubler has to have a plan, and opener is allowed to rebid freely, or doubler has made no promises, and onus is on opener to avoid getting in over his head. I was a bit surprised at how much of a disconnect there is between what the books say and what the webpages say (though we would each choose different paragraphs of the same webpage to support our positions, in a few cases.) Probably good evidence that there is a trend afoot. I shouldn't be surprised at all that the people who play 2♦ as a reverse don't think opener's 1NT bid shows a stopper, I guess.

I suppose it's really a semantic difference. To me, "it's the smallest lie on these cards" and "it is the system bid on these cards" are not the same thing. If it's a sufficiently common lie, then yes, one ought to consider making it an official system bid, and one ought to consider the effect of that on the rest of one's system. The best parallel I can think of is opening 1NT with a 5-card major - where the realization that it was sometimes a sensible distortion no doubt occurred to people as far back as they ever played 5-card majors, but it took until somewhere around 1980 for anybody to dare to mention the possibility in a mainstream book and another 10 years after that for it to become the usual advice for novices. Yes, 25 Conventions is an 11-year-old book and not a book I particularly care for. My point is that books of that age are what people are currently buying and putting on their bookshelves, and looking things up in when they want a source more authoritative than internet message board posts as to what is standard. As for who has a better finger on the pulse of what the average player plays... I don't know you well enough to know; but as a general rule, I find that the top experts live in a rarefied atmosphere when they play against each other, and tend to accumulate a stable harem of clients who are willing to take the master's word as gospel. Some of them are rarely seen outside of the KOs and can play a whole regional seeing only ten opposing convention cards. I don't claim to be better than adv++/exp-; but I spend my time playing pairs and selling books to a cross-section of tournament attendees; and am acutely aware of how sharp the regional differences in bidding preference are, even over distances of only a couple hundred miles. I am curious how different you find the bidding in NY and Texas, actually. I don't get farther east than Denver much, myself, and have learned the hard way not to speculate about what is normal for east coast 2/1ers.

On your posted example hands such as Qxxx AJxx xx xxx, yes, a large majority of tournament players would double after 1♣-(1♠). A small minority of them -- I don't know how small, maybe it's 5% maybe its 20% -- will have explicitly agreed that the double promises hearts and says nothing whatsoever about diamonds. Some of that minority may also have an agreement that they treat opener's 2♦ as a reverse. But I would expect the majority of them to justify their bid saying something like "yes, it's an abuse of the negative double, but I'm unlikely to get burned, and I've got three clubs anyway so I'll get away with it if I have to retreat to 3♣ after partner's 2♦ rebid" (or, on the alternative hand with 3 diamonds and 2 clubs, that they'll pass and play in the 4-3 diamond fit.) You may be assured that just about all the conventions books currently being sold to the masses attending regionals are very explicit that negative doubles show either both unbid suits, or one of the unbid suits plus a planned rebid if partner bids the other. For example, the exact wording in 25 Bridge Conventions You Should Know, currently the top seller in the "conventions books" category, is: "You will usually have four cards in each of the two unbid suits. You will always be able to stand partner's bidding in any unbid major suit, and if you do not have the unbid minor you will have support for opener's suit." In the section on opener's rebids, "with 4-card support for one of the suits partner has shown by doubling, you bid that suit." Many of the books explicitly warn that that 2♦ is not a reverse even though it looks like one. Maybe that's not the best way to play it. Maybe that's not "Expert standard" anymore. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that somewhere there's a group of a hundred 2/1-playing experts 90 of whom don't play it that way. Maybe there are a few clubs and units where that's not how the up-and-coming intermediates are taught the convention. But if we are talking just about "standard", without qualifiers -- you're going to have a really long wait until 1♣-1♠-X saying absolutely nothing about diamonds is the usual way of playing it.

Apologizing for drifting off topic a bit: Almost everyone has a tendency to think of his own system, or the most popular system in his area, as more standard than it really is... but it seems to particularly badly afflict the BBO forums, where all the cool kids play a hypermodern flavor of 2/1 that has yet to spread to the suburbs let alone the boonies. Having run into it twice in one day today - let me just say that I feel Justin, Josh, et al. overestimate how many modern bidding trends have become (or should be) standard, even more so than Hardy did with his rather ambitiously titled book.

I am fine with 2♠ and continuing to game in the suit of partner's choice. I can understand 3♦ but that really just seems to needlessly crowd the auction and imply much less tolerance for hearts. And I don't know which I find stranger - the idea that a "standard negative double" says nothing about diamonds (it doesn't promise diamonds, but it sure as heck promises a plan for what to bid next if partner picks the 'wrong' red suit - most often notrump or a retreat to opener's first suit), or the idea that 2♦ over said double shows extras.

I am willing to shade 2H down to 10 losers and 5HCP here - though it often turns out badly when I do - but not 11. On the other hand, the times that I find the nerve to pass with the 10-loser hands (and give only simple raises on QJx Jxxx QJx KJx hands!) I often find myself ahead of the field, and really need to learn to do it more often.

No problem at all to play 7 rounds in an 8-table skip mitchell. 7x4 is far and away the most normal choice of movement for an 8-table game. 6x4 is strange (and is nothing more than the 7-round game with a round omitted.) It is possible to play all 8 rounds in an 8-table mitchell but it's rarely done unless you have more than one set of pre-made boards, since it requires the sharing of boards between two tables. There are various other options too (e.g. 13 two-board rounds with three stationary pairs and one overall winner) that aren't all that popular because they require extra moving rather than lesson moving. It sounds to me like you just have a club management that is fixated on always playing exactly 24 boards. IMO it's a gyp to play so few boards whether the movement is fast or not, but not everyone likes playing bridge as much as we do...

Thanks for pointing out some further instances where the single and double dummy plays differ. I can believe there are enough cases to make x better now. (And I now have some ideas where to look when I look at the KQxx cases in more detail. The difference there is a lot bigger - 0.2 tricks - so I will be needing quite some number of reasons for x :) )

I know the textbook answer -- "you need at least QJ9 to lead a sequence... you're trying to set up the suit against notrump, not just one trick like you are in a suit", you don't want to burn 2 honours on one trick if partner is short, you want to keep a high card to get back in to run the suit, blah blah... Problem is, I've been spending some time fussing with double dummy simulations lately, and it looks like that isn't how it works. "Lead x from QJxx at trick 1, and thereafter defend double-dummy" averages 0.07 tricks worse than "lead Q from QJxx at trick 1 and thereafter defend double-dummy", over a large sample of 1NT-3NT hands. ( I inspected several dozen of the deals where Q and x lead to different numbers of tricks to see what the common features were. The results were mostly what you'd expect: x gains when partner has a doubleton ten or king, or dummy has a singleton ace or king. Q gains against a lot of positions where declarer has AKT (or AT/KT in his hand and the other honor in the dummy, and partner has the nine), and when partner has K9x(x) and we need to preserve the tenace. I did not see very many hands where third hand actually needed to know whether opening leader had a 3-card sequence to know what the correct defence was -- the "partner needs to know how good your sequence is to decide if it's worth returning the suit" argument doesn't appear to hold water. That really only seems to leave one situation as a possible explanation for the discrepancy between the simulation and standard practice -- the ten (or ATx/KTx) is in the dummy, and double-dummy the best play is to rise with the ten at trick one rather than play second hand low, while real-life declarers are afraid to burn the ten, on the theory that Q9xx+J9xx is twice as likely as QJxx with opening leader. Is that one situation enough to turn the balance against the honor lead? Has anyone actually tried systematically leading high from QJxx (and KQxx and JTxx) against notrump and found it works badly, or all we all just blindly following some ancient advice that turns out to not be quite right?

I would take all further actions by responder as slam tries for hearts (cuebid, ace-asking, 5H either diamond-asking or trump-quality-asking according to the rest of your ageements.) IMO opener DID show extras: isn't "with a weak 6-4, bid hearts twice immediately, with a stronger 6-4, bid hearts-clubs-hearts" standard? (Or a more extreme shape with less in high cards, of course.) What I think responder has depends some on what his other options were. matmat's posted hand doesn't look too far wrong to me - though to look for a slam now I would want one less spade face card, with a queen or jack in hearts or clubs that I am now upgrading.

If whereagles is the one who posts the poll, instead of one of the respondents, we are allowed a unanimous response, right?

What, no option in the poll for "pass all my balanced 8s and raise to 3NT with all my balanced 9s, so 2N is an idle bid"? Seriously not a terrible idea. Assuming we are playing standard 2NT bids, I generally go with almost all 16s and pass with almost all 15s - and wish partner had asked me a more useful question about my hand.

About the second improv: With AQx opposite Jx in clubs we always have two club tricks (either we won the CJ in our hand at trick 1 or East played his king on air), so assuming that East did in fact win the first trick, you are now pitching one spade on a diamond and the other spade on a club, all top tricks. In other words I don't think the '2nd improv' has anything in common with the actual hand or the '1st improv'. As described at the table, I'm not allowing the finesse.

This came up in another thread a week or two ago, too... stepping back from this specific auction, would you gentlemen share your rules of thumb for when you think returning to a major after minor-suit agreement is an offer to play? My own tendency is that if you've passed up only one previous chance to support a suit, delayed support is obvious (e.g. 1♥-2♦-3♦-3♥) but having passed up two previous chances to support a suit - as with spades in this threads auction - my default is to treat the 4M bid as a cuebid in support of the agreed minor. I am aware of the fact that I use cuebidding more (and RKCing a lot less) than is popular these days... but the whole subject of continuing to explore for a 2nd fit after having already found one strikes me as a low priority area of a system.

As has already been said... your life is much easier if you raise to 3♣ the first time around.

English translations of three of the books are available at http://www.bridgewithdan.com/systems/ (Matula 1994, Jassem 2000, Jassem 2005) along with a few other fragments of documentation on variations. There are probably several of us on BBO able and willing to teach Polish Club, but it's not often anybody asks us to :rolleyes: I don't know who the lady you're referring to is, however.

I remain technically subscribed to BLML but I go weeks at a time without opening the digests, and then browse through several days' worth trying to find the start of a thread I find interesting... it's not what it used to be, that is for sure. Speaking of "what it used to be" - when I first started directing in the mid-90s, one of the valuable lessons from that forum was the European contingent waging a successful campaign for the ACBLand TDs to abandon the "rule of coincidence" which they believed was unLawful. I was very surprised, some years later, to find EBU doing what is in essence the same thing - adjusting and/or inflicting penalties after a single case of both partners forgetting an agreement on the same deal. That's what I don't get; it's the very same people who taught me that I must never do this who are now doing it.

I like bidding 3♥ on this type of hand. The downside of course is that a) partner has to be aware this is what a 3♥ jump can look like, and :P you need another way to show a really bid hand with six hearts since 3♥ is limited. I have the luxury of doing that while playing Polish, but not in SA or 2/1. @gwnn: I'm going to guess that OP is playing Gazzilli here, which does indeed free up all the jump rebids to cover the 14-16ish shapely hands.

First choice 6♥, second choice a cuebid - God only knows which one. Definitely not bidding 5♥, which supposedly says I am afraid of my trump quality for slam, and I can make slam opposite a lot of Jxx and Jxxx heart holdings.

My vote was strongly penalty-oriented. 1.no 2.no 3.maybe - I think that'd be a bizarre agreement to have in this auction, a nonforcing bid in a suit I supposedly have and where they are advertising a misfit 4. I played this treatment for quite a while (1999-2001ish?) and think it is in principle sound -- at the 1-level only -- but gave it up eventually because "I don't know" was far and away the most common answer I got when I asked "is it forcing?" (both at the club and in regional level open pairs games!)

This is one of the things that scares me about EBU bridge (and I admit, maybe it's just fear of the unknown, since I've not played over there.) To me, this looks like a completely routine, obvious-to-everyone-concerned, general-bridge-knowledge situation where transfers may or may not really be on. I am quite aghast that anywhere would have a regulation to make this an automatic penalty. Twelve or thirteen years of reading about "fielding" as defined across the pond, misbids and psychs, has not helped me grow a stomach for how it is handled. No adjustment and a warning to West to mind his manners IMO. The agreement was correctly disclosed and a player took a view.

If you have a clear agreement that 3♦ sets diamonds as trumps, 4♣ cuebid next. Absent discussion I would assume that diamonds are trumps and we're in a game force, but there are no "basic" sayc questions on the 4th round of the auction. Not everyone is going to be on solid ground here. Witness the differences of opinion in this thread (for instance, unlike JLall I think partner has fairly clearly denied possession of 6 spades by bidding 3♦.)

" 5 losers = not a 2♣ opener " is about as close to a bidding rule with no exceptions as bidding rules get, IMO. I don't particularly like my rebid options over 1♠-1NT either... or I didn't until I read another thread wherein many 2/1ers played 1M-1N-2N as forcing, a treatment I am liking more and more.

And here I thought the little old ladies in my bridge club who think 1NT-pass-4NT is ace-asking and 1NT-pass-5NT invites six were the only ones who thought "the convention of G" was a sin. But no, you've proven nothing about God; there's no telling what opening leader was being punished for.

I am OK with either double or 3S; I lean toward double, because I'd be much more interested in hearing about partner's second suit than about his spade stopper if he gets a chance to make a cheap bid. At IMPs I am OK with losing the heart possibility though. If there has been prior discussion, it's possible a 4S response is on the list. But really it doesn't matter too much - since I'm bidding however high I have to at my next turn to make sure our side plays this. The immediate 7D bid Old York reports is far from the worst bid I've ever seen especially if partner can't be trusted with a delicate auction.