david_c

I'd pass. The hand just doesn't seem strong enough opposite a passed partner, even with these well-placed diamond honours.

Partner has doubled for take-out and you have five cards in one of the unbid suits. This really shouldn't be a problem.

I wonder how many of these "strong jump-shifts" were passed out. :) Do the results become positive if you factor those out?

An immediate hook is quite attractive though because of the possibility of a misdefence if it loses - will LHO find a trump return? I wonder whether this might be the right practical line depending on who LHO is. No doubt that your line is better in theory though. The immediate hook works only if EAST didn't give count on trick one. If he did, the ♠ back kills any chance other than some extraordinarily and almost mathematically eliminated squeeze chances. Hehehe, yes I realise that of course. Still I don't think many people at my local club would play a spade back, signal or no signal. But the possibility of a bad diamond break would probably put me off anyway. If I had the ♦T rather than the ♦8 I'd be really tempted ...

An immediate hook is quite attractive though because of the possibility of a misdefence if it loses - will LHO find a trump return? I wonder whether this might be the right practical line depending on who LHO is. No doubt that your line is better in theory though.

There's nothing wrong with having scores which don't add up to 100%. However, I think it would be normal to give A- in a pairs event. In an indy you might expect A+.

Who would be declarer in a diamond contract? This might make a difference to the likely opening lead.

I like NFBs in situations where my opening bid usually shows a balanced hand. Take the auction 1♣ : (1♠) : 2♥ as an example. If we play Polish Club then I like 2♥ to be a NFB, but if we play Acol then NFBs are not so useful. Better minor is somewhere in the middle, and I would be happy with either treatment. In contrast, after a major-suit opening I don't like NFBs at all. But this is assuming the methods have to be natural. If your partnership can handle transfers, I think that's much better, no matter what your opening bid means. ["Switch" is great, particularly after 1m : (1♠).]

I think you can afford to start with five clubs (pitching two spades and a heart) and still keep both the simple and double squeezes intact. So I'd probably do that, and follow up with the AK of spades. With any luck, one of the opponents will show out on the second spade and I'll know what to do. This is much less likely to happen if I play only four rounds of clubs first.

Don't be silly, you can't fit this many people round a watercooler :P Come back soon Justin. I hope you can forgive Rain's slight over-reaction: deleting the link might be a little paranoid, but it is a touchy subject after all.

I don't agree: this is conventional. The meaning of "convention" is defined in the Laws and clearly applies to this 2♦ bid because it promises a major. I think it is natural and conventional. The opposite of natural is not conventional, but rather artificial. Oh, my head hurts! OK, after thinking about this for a few minutes, and a brief pause to lie down, I agree that "artificial" is the opposite of "natural" but it seems there is disagreement about whether it is natural (the ACBL definition appears to say yes; the EBU definition - which makes more sense to me - says no). Whatever, it is most certainly conventional, so it can be regulated via Law 40D.

I don't agree: this is conventional. The meaning of "convention" is defined in the Laws and clearly applies to this 2♦ bid because it promises a major. Isn't the precise wording that any "catchall" bid is allowed? I suspect that a transfer 1♦ opening would not be considered a catchall. It's not entirely satisfactory that such a poorly-defined term is used as part of the reguations, but I think the interpretation is fairly clear in this case. [Edit: it's "all-purpose", not "catchall" - thanks to kfgauss for the correction. Same point applies though.]

We tried this for a while but gave it up. There are a few situations where you definitely don't want to play it, the main one being partner's suit. Remembering these exceptions can be a problem, and defining exactly what is meant by partner's suit is not as easy as you might think. And we seemed to be gaining no obvious advantage from the method in other situations, so it didn't seem worthwhile at all.

That's a disclosure issue, not a system regulation issue. It should be dealt with under the disclosure regulations.

IMO that is how it should be. The conventions allowed in a midchart pairs event (say) should be precisely those which a good partnership will be able to defend against with at most a few seconds' discussion. (Because this is all the time you have in a pairs event.) Of course this is still very subjective. But it does imply that if you have generic permission for a type of convention ("any bid which shows 4+ cards in a specified suit") then this makes sense only if there is a defence, or a small number of different defences, which works against any convention of that type. [Or else there should be some other reason why defending against the convention is easy.] I suspect that when it was decided to allow any 2♦ bid which promised 4+ diamonds, the reasoning was "This will be OK because we can always use take-out doubles and cue-bids against it." But this has been shown not to be true for some conventions, so it is reasonable to disallow those. But of course, if this is what the committee has decided, then they should amend the midchart to say so.

South gets 100%, North gets another 100%, system gets another 100%. The rest is just bad luck :(

I think eleven pages sounds quite reasonable for a serious partnership. Multi is genuinely difficult to defend against. For instance, there are lots of sequences where you're hurt by the lack of a cue-bid and if you want to make sure your partnerhip doesn't have any accidents you really need to discuss how else you're going to bid those sorts of hands. On the other hand, transfer openings are not particularly hard to defend against. Most sequences will not need to be discussed because they are exactly the same as they would have been after a natural opening bid. (And I do mean exactly.) If you take Richard's defence to the MOSCITO 1♦ and add a vaguely sensible meaning for the 1♥ cue (let's say you play it as a "Raptor" hand) then what you get is more than adequate. I think these transfer openings are much easier to defend against than, say, a Precision 1♦ opening.

That's interesting, it makes me wonder two things: 1. Does there exist a playable system which uses this 1♥ opening and is otherwise already legal? (I can't think of one.) 2. Why would this defence not also be considered an acceptable defence to a MOSCITO 1♥ opening?

This was a problem faced by one of my teammates. He chose a small diamond, which was not a success: [hv=d=s&v=n&n=saq3hk3d9854cq985&w=s542hj84dqj762cj3&e=skjt9h7652d3ct762&s=s876haqt9daktcak4]399|300|Scoring: IMP[/hv] Declarer took a losing spade finesse, but subsequently guessed the hearts correctly and made twelve tricks courtesy of the very fortunate black-suit squeeze. A spade, heart or high diamond lead would have won us the match. Declarer has an interesting play problem on the ♦Q lead (any offers?), but as the cards lie he would surely have gone down.

I believe I'm also winning when West has singleton honour or Hx in diamonds, as long as clubs are 7-2.

That's good, up to a point. You can certainly argue that it is best for the membership that moscito should be banned. (I would actually agree with that in the case of pairs events.) But the complaints are not about the fact that moscito has been banned, but rather the way that this has been achieved. If some committee has decided that moscito should be banned, then they should be transparent about it and say so. And they should amend the midchart to reflect this. We know that there have been plenty of applications submitted over a long period of time; it is inconceivable that this can have happened without some sort of policy decision having been made. But it seems that what is actually happening is that if someone asks why they cannot play moscito they are told it's because no defence has been approved, which is a half-truth. I think this is dishonest.

I suppose you could play for East to have only two clubs? Draw trumps via the finesse, cross back to dummy with another trump and ruff a club, then exit in diamonds and hope that West can't get the lead twice in diamonds. Not great odds, but it is possible for West to have seven clubs on this bidding.

[hv=d=-&v=n&s=s542hj84dqj762cj3]133|100|Scoring: IMP[/hv] Here's a hand from our local league (intermediate opps). RHO opens 2NT (20-22) and LHO raises straight to 6NT. What's your lead?

But how do you know there is a consensus? I see some reports in the media which say this, but there are others which say the opposite. This is precisely the sort of thing which I would like to investigate for myself if I was asked to come up with an answer. And maybe I would find that it's true, that there is a genuine consensus, in which case I would go along with it. Though I would still not be entirely happy unless I could understand what was supposed to be wrong with the minority opinion. And while I certainly don't claim to know anything about climatology, a lot of the controversy seems to be about the interpretation of statistics, which is something that any scientist would be familiar with.

Absolutely yes. If there was an important question about nuclear physics which had scientists divided, I would not take sides without having read the research myself. And then if my lack of background in nuclear physics meant that I couldn't resolve the issue, then I would have to give up and accept that I did not know the answer.