david_c

The double is takeout, and North must take it out. I like 2♣. This is natural. The principle is that all continuations after this double are the same as after a double of a 1♠ opening (though the suit lengths required may be different). But if not discussed, that is a little risky. Fortunately, 2♦ is a perfectly good alternative. Unless South has an absolute monster of a hand, his double guarantees 4-4 in the unbid suits, and will very often be 4-5. So North is assured of a reasonable fit there. And even if N/S are in trouble, it is not particularly easy for the opponents to double a 2♦ contract - as long as you bid it immediately.

OK, yes that seems like a good plan. But there seems to be a slight danger of going off when trumps are 3-2. When RHO wins the ♠T and plays a heart through, LHO may be able to ruff in front of dummy with the seven or eight, forcing your king. Now you may have to guess whether the position is Qxx - Tx or xx - QTx.

The "matchpoints" line looks good to me - cash the king then finesse the jack. Only loses when LHO has QTxx (or trumps are 5-0). But surely that's too boring to be the answer :)

Personally I can't wait :D I don't think announcements will be much of a problem. People will get used to them very quickly (since they come up a few times every session). The one thing a TD will probably notice going wrong is over-announcing: you're not supposed to announce Stayman / transfers after a 2NT opening, for example, or things like 1NT:2S (transfer to clubs), but I'm guessing a lot of people will mistakenly try to announce them anyway. But in my opinion the best thing about announcements is that it doesn't really matter if people get them wrong. The changes to alerting will take a bit longer to sort out, I think. I am expecting a lot of people will not remember to alert their penalty doubles.

What on earth are people finding so offensive about this? It makes a perfectly valid point that the commentary is unlikely to be the reason people are choosing to watch different vugraph to the onsite presentation. "Don't flatter yourself" is normal English idiom, and a totally inoffensive choice of phrase. It simply means "beware not to present this as evidence you are doing something right."

Almost certainly not. I think that using 3-level bids to show choice-of-game balanced hands is an excellent idea. However if you play some form of Stayman as well then there is some duplication involved. Having two ways to bid GF balanced hands means that you don't have so much room to investigate more complex hands. So I think the idea works best in a Keri / Heeman - like structure where a 2♣ response forces 2♦.

In a word - Yes :) Obviously, looking at a particular hand double dummy does not give you useful information about the best strategy. However, it is equally wrong to consider responder's balanced hands as a whole, expecting to be able to get a single answer. Responder has to look at the hand he is dealt. He will bear in mind all of the disadavantages of using Stayman listed above (well, 1 to 4 anyway). And then, maybe he will decide that this hand is one where it is right to blast 3NT. Or maybe he will decide the hand is one where it is better on average to use Stayman. The one thing I am certain of is that there are plenty of hands of each type.

There's something wrong with this analogy. What FIFA actually does is sell the right to provide coverage to [usually] the highest bidder. This is viable because coverage of the world cup is worth a huge amount of money to the television companies. If you apply the same reasoning to vugraph, then you have to believe that BBO should be prepared to pay money to the WBF for the right to broadcast. In particular, it would be BBO's responsibility to pay the expenses of the operator. Now, I hate to say this, but I believe this analogy is valid. There are almost certainly enough people wanting to watch vugraph that a sizeable profit could be made from providing the coverage (whether this be though charging the viewers, or though advertising, or whatever). The decision of the BBO management that vugraph should be free therefore puts it in a poor bargaining position with the WBF. Of course, we all hope that instead of selling of the vugraph rights to the highest bidder, the WBF instead chooses to subsidise it "for the good of the game". In the short term, BBO has such a dominant position that they can ensure this is the only option. In the longer term, I'm worried that it might not make economic sense.

Forget about the "Curse of Scotland" - the ♦9 is known as the badger. If you win a trick with the ♦A (or more rarely some other ace), and that trick contains the ♦9, then you are said to have ousted the badger. In some circles (particularly for non-beer drinkers), ousting the badger is seen as the most important thing to try to achieve in a bridge hand. This nickname is also an integral part of the card game M** (in certain juristictions).

Sorry, but you missed the entire point. There is no logical basis for arguing that the cause and effect relationship between liberal abortion policies (I am NOT talking about mandatory abortion) and a low crime rate is NOT an argument for a liberal abortion policy. Of course it is: what else could it be? In my view, the cause and effect relationship is just an observation, one which has no bearing on the morality of abortion. To say that it makes a difference is to say that some [potential] humans are more desirable than others. I do not accept this as a moral argument.

Sorry but I don't agree that this is an argument in favour of abortion. Certainly a reduction in the crime rate would be a good thing, but you're effectively saying that abortion is good because the foetuses that are being considered for abortion are statistically more likely to become criminals than those which are not being considered for abortion. I find that argument morally pretty grotesque. It may be true - the statistics seem plausible enough - but if we're talking about morality I just can't bring myself to accept it as an argument.

Not sure what "the various bridge authorities" means ... The WBF's regulations don't seem to include anything of this sort, though I may have missed it. The EBU currently bans psyches of game-forcing or nearly-game-forcing opening bids. So psyching a strong club is actually allowed. The same goes for Polish Club or Fantunes. And in two weeks' time the regulation is being dropped completely. I don't know much about the regulations elsewhere, but from a quick look at the ACBL charts I see they disallow psyches of any conventional opening bids, whether they are strong/forcing or not. So that answers the question about Polish Club at least. I don't claim to know what their stance would be about Fantunes. I doubt the ACBL knows either ;)

Oh, I can see something neat here now. After drawing trumps and running diamonds you reach this position with the lead in dummy: ♠ T ♥ Q8 ♦ - ♣ 5 ♠ 7 ♥ - ♦ - ♣ A98 Now if LHO started with JT9(x) in hearts, both opponents have been squeezed. RHO has to keep Kx in hearts otherwise his king can be ruffed out, and LHO has to keep two hearts otherwise leading the queen sets up the eight. So they can have at most two clubs each, and you can set up a club trick. Only problem is you have to guess whether RHO has ♥Kx ♣HH or ♥K ♣HHx remaining.

I'll play for RHO to have king of hearts doubleton, and need trumps to split and diamonds to produce five tricks as well. The line is to play small from dummy at trick one, winning with the ace, then draw trumps, run the diamonds (pitching hearts) and then ruff a heart. Hopefully this brings down the king, and a club ruff is the entry back to dummy to make the queen.

I see. And presumably anyone who has participated in the open trials will similarly be barred from commentating in events involving the open team. No? Why not?

Well, hang on. If an opponent asks a question like, "what would [some other bid] have meant there?" then they should be entitled to a human explanation rather than having to wade through the FD file to find out. Fine. But why should you have to repeat an explanation which they can already see on their screen? Sure, if they say they don't understand, or if they want to ask a specific question, then you have to give a written reply. But if they're just clicking on the bid to ask, I think anything more than "see above" is ridiculous. (Perhaps followed by "what else would you like to know?" in private chat.)

You're right of course, but as I've said before, it's much harder than it seems to write clear, understandable and effective systems regulations. I know, I've tried. Have you? Ah, I'm glad you asked that, because the answer is yes :lol: I live in England and have suggested several additions and changes of wording to the EBU, and I've got a fairly decent record of having them adopted. [For an EBU example, compare sections 11C2 through 11C5 of the new Orange Book to the equivalent sections 12.2.2, 12.2.3 and 12.3.5 of the old Orange Book. One of the main reasons for the change in wording is that it avoids any use of the word "natural", which is notoriously difficult to define.] They're admirably short. And I'm sure that really they are easy to understand, it's just that some of your players don't bother to read them. I would suggest you remove the word "artificial" from VIII C1(g), because "artificial" is another of those words that can be difficult, and in this instance it serves no purpose because natural GF bids are surely no problem either. That leaves the use of the word "constructive" in VIII C1(f) as the only problem. It's difficult to suggest anything better without knowing what it is you're trying to achieve there. Because I'm struggling to think of any non-constructive bids that occur after the first round of bidding. I would take the view that if something never actually happens in practice, there is no need for your regulations to worry about it. So cut that word and save any potential confusion. On the other hand, if you can think of some examples of non-constructive bids which would worry you then I'd be very interested to hear what they were. (Even if such a thing did exist, it would be allowed at beginner level here in England.)

I know that you think the ACBL Conventions & Competitions Committee is always the bad guy, but in this particular case, the interpretation of "constructive" as "not destructive" is actually being made by the ACBL Directors, not by the C&C Committee. Still, the underlying cause of the problem is that the regulations need interpretation. A well-written set of regulations would not use terms such as "constructive" without also giving a clear definition. It's very frustrating for players that they can't tell what the regulations are supposed to mean without asking for an official interpretation.

I suppose Relay Stayman works a bit like that; it shouldn't be too difficult to play around with the responses so that opener is usually dummy in suit contracts. But you can't get opener to be declarer in 3NT whatever you do. Revealing lots of information about opener's hand does not seem to be a very good idea if there is any possibility that you might end up in NT.

Pass and pass again. I mean, both vul at total points? You couldn't make it more obvious ...

I don't see any problem with this. Certainly it is nothing more than a guess; but making educated guesses is an important part of the scientific process. What makes you think that? You certainly can't prove it. Why can't there be some mechanism in the brain for magnifying quantum-mechanical effects? Or alternatively, maybe it could be possible for a large collection of particles to act in a quantum-mechanical way? I believe there has been some research into this possibility, though I don't know what came of it. Maybe there is some element of dynamical systems involved, but that would still leave an awful lot to be explained, to say the least.

I'm sure it won't :) I can always blame my partner, blame my own bad play, curse our bad luck, and grudgingly admit that our opponents might have played well, but I don't have any complaints about the the organisation of the tourney. Thanks :)

All I can say is that when I read the book this seemed very "right" to me. I can't really explain why, just that it goes along with my intuition.

This was the first Homebase tourney I played in, and it was a complete disaster for me and my partner. This hand pretty much summed it up: I was North holding ♠ - ♥ A98 ♦ AK9532 ♣ AJ64 and opened 1♦ in second seat. LHO overcalled 4♠, and RHO raised to 6♠. What can I do except double? Credit to my partner for leading a diamond and thereby holding the loss to -1210 ...

Double is insane of course. The 4♥ bid promises no defensive strength. Maybe it promises something in terms of losing trick count, but that's irrelevant in deciding whether to double for penalties. After all, opener might have had an eighth heart, which would make it a clear 4♥ bid, but it still wouldn't take any tricks in defence!