david_c

1. As written, it's the Jaguars as a whole whose blocking skills have been praised. 2. Should be "they're". No excuses! 3. "Effectively" is fine. In this context it means "in effect": it has nothing to do with whether it was effective. 4. If they were shopping him for a tight end, there would be a comma before "for". So technically the sentence is unambiguously correct. However the writer might have considered recasting the sentence to make life easier for the reader.

Fair enough, but someone should really have told Wolff to "put up or shut up", as least as far as appeals casebooks are concerned. He makes the same comment every time, and it's incredibly annoying.

In my opinion, yes, this is often more efficient, but it does depend on exactly how much space you've got. For example, I spent a lot of time working out relays to use over a 1♠ opening (after a 2♣ GF relay response). In this case, if you start by showing strength, then you find that the most important hand types resolve at exactly 3NT. So this is ideal - but if there was any less space it would fall apart, and if there was any more space you wouldn't be using it efficiently. I'm not sure what happens over a strong club. You have more space there. I think I would be happiest with it from a technical point of view if as soon as the basic hand type had been shown (eg. "single-suited spades"), the next relay asked primarily about strength, before continuing with the complete shape later. But that would make the scheme a lot more complicated than if you show the complete shape immediately.

I believe that the EBU dropped this regulation a while back. Indeed, it was replaced by This would be very relevant to the case in this thread.

The usual reason I would look through the archives is when I played in or watched the event "live", and want to see what the commentators had to say about it. When the commentary is recorded properly, it's great. I do agree that when it gets messed up, it's worse than useless.

For me, bids below 3NT are hardly ever cue-bids. The only exception I can think of is that after hearts have been agreed, 3♠ may be a cue-bid. (Possibly the continuations after an artificial major-suit raise are another exception, depending on what your methods are.)

Intuitively, I would take the heart finesse at trick two. It must be right to play for a dummy reversal, but that can wait. I feel like I have better control of the hand if I give up the heart trick immediately.

It was ages ago that I asked this question, and I'm still not sure. Anyone fancy having a go this time? :blink: You're playing WJ05, or something like that. (i) 1♣ : (1♠) : pass : (pass) , Dbl - can this be a minimum balanced hand? (ii) 1♣ : (2♦) : pass : (pass) , Dbl - can this be a minimum balanced hand? (iii) 1♣ : (2♠) : pass : (pass) , Dbl - can this be a minimum balanced hand?

I agree with Mike on this as well. Whatever you might think of the system as a whole, this is hardly going to be its greatest feature. It's more the sort of thing you do when you can't find anywhere else to put the hands. It must be really easy to lose a spade fit this way (or to get too high by trying to get spades into the picture later).

Well said Mike. Richard (and others), I'm sure everyone agrees that sometimes 4-card openings can cause the opponents problems, and responder's raise to the 2-level is undoubtedly the best example of this. But what about all the other ways the auction can turn out? I'm really struggling to think of any more examples where the opponents have a particularly difficult problem, whereas it's easy to think of situations where knowing whether opener had a 5-card major would be helpful to partner. Do you really believe that on average the information is more useful to the opponents? We can't prove anything of course, but that seems very unlikely to me.

OK thanks Arend, I had misinterpreted the double, thinking (for no particular reason) that it ought to promise a take-out double sort of shape. If the double just shows a "good" 3♣ bid without implying anything about the other suits then I agree that you should only ever bid 3♥ with natural hearts, not 4♥. I'm not sure I would be 100% confident in deducing that it was a splinter though.

4-3? :) I'd expect North to have FOUR hearts. For one thing, having made a weak 2♣ bid it's difficult to see how North can now bid 4♥, whatever it means, unless partner's double has significantly improved his hand. To me this suggests a double-fit. But that's not really the point. Why should 2♣ deny holding four hearts? I realise you could make a negative double with that, but personally I would much rather raise partner if my clubs were longer and the hand was not too strong. If you think this is bad bridge (and sorry, you're not going to persuade me on this) then can you please make allowances for those whose style is different? There's no way that 4♥ can be anything other than natural unless you have an explicit agreement that 2♣ denies four hearts.

I expect that these TDs have found that there are fewer complaints with no-psych tournaments and hence they are easier to run. I doubt that's the reason. More likely, these TDs are the sort of players that don't like their opponents psyching against them and don't think it should be part of the game. So, when they get the chance to make up the rules, they decide to ban psyches.

Looks like a psyche to me. If this is a "no psyches" tourney, then the ruling is correct.

Er, are you sure about that? In my copy they recommend a 2♠ opening.

Agree with Han. On that particular hand you're quite happy passing a 2♣ rebid anyway. A hand like Qxxxx KJxxx xx x would be more interesting: I think it's still normal to bid 1♠, but there is a good argument for 1♥.

It seems to be really close between leading the jack (if it's covered, cross back to hand and finesse the eight) and playing small to the ten (planning to play low from hand if RHO wins and plays a small one back). I think that a priori leading the jack is better, the difference being the probability of 9x with RHO, minus the probability of singleton K or Q with LHO. (All other layouts are exactly symmetric - the cards you want LHO to hold if playing small to the ten are the cards you want RHO to hold if leading the jack). But this is so close that if LHO had the chance to lead a suit, and you don't have any other useful information, I think small to the ten becomes the favourite. This is because one of the losing cases for small to the ten (KQx(x) with RHO) is made less likely. [Also KQ9(x) is less likely, but both plays pick that up.]

Good question Mark: I thought it was a little too fast as well, particularly on the first trick of the play. There should definitely be a little pause when dummy goes down (as it were). I can imagine it's quite difficult to pace yourself. I'll be doing this myself on Friday and would certainly appreciate people telling me "faster" or "slower" at the time, if need be.

I've got to agree - the book is brilliantly written, particularly the introductory sections. Even though I really don't like the system, I'm glad I read it.

In this example, a basis for Im f is ( 1 ) ( 0 ) ( 0 ) ( 0 ) ( 1 ) ( 0 ) ( 0 ) , ( 0 ) , ( 1 ) ( 1 ) (-2 ) ( 1 ) (Of course, there are lots of other ways of writing this. Choosing any three columns of the original matrix would work, but it's better to get a more reduced form.) And a basis for Ker f is ( 0 ) ( 1 ) (-2 ) ( 1 ) I assume you know how to work out these things. Im f + Ker f is then the space spanned by all four vectors. Since the four vectors are clearly linearly independent, Im f + Ker f has dimension 4, ie. it's the whole of R^4. Im f (intersected with) Ker f is {0} (once you have a nice basis for Im f this is easy to see). If the four vectors weren't linearly independent then Im f + Ker f would have dimension 3; but it would have to contain all of Im f, so it would have to be exactly the same as Im f. In this case, Im f (intersected with) Ker f would be the whole of Ker f. [Hope the working is correct...]

It's mainly so that responder has a way to bid strong hands without a good suit, for example: ♠ AKx ♥ KJx ♦ Kxxx ♣ QJx What do you respond to 1♥? The good thing about this 2♣ gadget is that you can respond 2♣ without partner expecting you to have a good suit. (Your rebid will show whether you have real clubs or not.) Also, when you have a strong balanced hand like this, relay bidding works much better than natural bidding, so the continuations after 2♣ include a sort of relay system. And at the same time, whenever you don't use the relay, partner knows that you are promising a good suit. In other 2/1 systems this isn't so clear. There are alternative ways to solve this problem, but a 2♣ gadget is best IMO.

Doesn't everyone play something like this nowadays? :) This particular version seems to be identical to the one on Bocchi/Duboin's card, right down to the 3-level responses. I've always wondered what they do when opener has a balanced (5332) hand. Are these treated as single-suited? Also, can anyone explain why 1M:2C,2S shows clubs while 1M:2C,3C+ shows diamonds? It's always seemed more natural to me to have these the other way round: if responder is balanced it makes little difference, but if responder is unbalanced then opener is much more likely to have diamonds than clubs, so wouldn't it be better to use the cheaper response to show diamonds?

The original auction 1♥ - 2♦ - 3♦ - 3♥ - 3♠ - 3NT - 6♥ is fine in my opinion. North has a really pretty hand: I imagine that if North shows shortage in spades and South doesn't immediately try to sign off then North will go to slam. If your style is not to show shortage with the North hand then you'll probably get to slam regardless, since both players have extras and the fit is quite good. But there are so many things which depend on style here that it's difficult to say how the auction should go. Anyway, it would be very understandable to miss slam on this hand. It's a very borderline slam in the sense that if you take away any of the high cards then it's no longer good. It's just a matter of luck I think whether your preferred style happens to propel you there.

Well that's why I said, "This caters for LHO having five spades to the ten". Obviously if you give RHO the spade length instead then it doesn't work. But I can't find a way of catering to both possibilities, can you? I suppose we should play two rounds of clubs first to see what's going on in that suit, but I'm going to stick with my original play unless RHO is short (if he has a singleton club I have no idea what to do).

I can't see what goes wrong. I'm cashing four rounds of spades, pitching a heart and a diamond from hand, and then running all the clubs, coming down to ♠9 ♦J5 opposite ♥J ♦7 ♣T and leading the ♣T. Doesn't that work?