MaxHayden

Precision normally does well when it gets to take advantage of its range-limited openers. A forcing pass essentially eliminates this benefit except when you are sitting in the first seat. Forcing pass systems also tend to be *more* precise in their bidding than precision. So you don't have much of an edge when you are 1st seat vs them being 1st seat either. So you are getting less mileage on the bids that work best and still bearing the cost of the ones that are a weakness. Could be 100% wrong here. But the effectiveness of a bidding system partially depends on what other people are allowed to play. So the prominence of some systems can be the result of other systems being restricted. But maybe players from outside of ACBL-land will have better perspective on this. I play precision, I play with the 2♦ bid. I tried the unbalanced diamond system from Marshal Miles and didn't like some of the sequences. But the precision 2♦ is still a kludge. I wish there was a better way to handle it. But AFAIK, there isn't. ^This seems to complicate bidding 11-13 hcp balanced hands e.g. 5332. The website you linked says to just pass them. Maybe that works on-net, but I'm not a fan of the idea in abstract. Most of what you are saying has been discussed above, but you seem to have misunderstood some of it. (Poss. language barrier?) Canape and 5CM are both alternatives to "4-card majors"; they both try to solve the same problems by communicating more information about major suit distributions. They use different methods, but they seem to be informationally equivalent. And in any event, my question is historical. How did we get from Alberan's system to the Italian ones? Their ideas are different enough that I don't think someone just made up Neapolitan Club after reading Alberan. As far as the Italian systems themselves go, the "not competitive" argument was discussed above. I don't think it is convincing. "Not popular enough for people to keep using" is *very* convincing. You can use negative doubles and the like for analogous situations in canape, but if the two are equivalent (or even if canape is slightly better), you'd be better off using 5-card majors just because that's what most of the conventions and literature are focused on. Both Kaplan-Sheinwold and Roth-Stone had the forcing 1NT response. I can't find an early 5-card major system that does not. Do you know of one? I'm aware that in "standard american" people swapped to 5-card majors but kept the non-forcing 1NT from Goren. But my question is *why*. Thank you for the suggestions, but I have read both of these.

To clarify, my original question was how did we get from Alberan's system to Blue Team's very different take on canape. Alberan's system, cleaned up with modern conventions would be pretty similar to modern 2/1 GF. It would have to be. His system focuses on showing shape at the expense of strength. I do think they are equivalent more or less. Maybe someone who has played the original can chime in? I'm honestly not that familiar with blue team and find a lot of what they changed confusing. I would think that you could make a strong club version of Alberan's system, but I'm not sure it'd be worthwhile. I do think it would help with a lot of post-1C auctions where people use 4 card suits, bypassing longer minors. My main complaint with stock precision is the 2D opening because it seems to be a waste vs multi or mini Roman. In general,the other complaints don't really strike me as valid. As for the Italian systems, I wonder if you could clean up Roman and make it usable... I'll add this, from playing around casually, strong club systems don't do well against forcing pass systems. The cert bids and others generally negate the advantages and make the interfere over a strong club opening that much stronger.

As a basic 2/1 book Grant/Rodwell is fine. But it assumes you already know a lot of material. I don't see why that couldn't be a standarized presentation from the outset though. Who holds the copyright to Root's books, maybe we can just update them?

Have we gone any further in this regard? My conclusion from back then was that we were approaching the problem incorectly. Instead of evaluating a single hand additively,we needed to evaluate the hands as a combination and treat constructive bidding as variance reduction. This seemed to give results that made sense --the difference between your longest combined suit and the shortest combined suit is the biggest impact -- so trumps and splinters. Then controls and etc., just like normal bidding except we could probably improve some corner cases. I'd have liked to teach TSP to help beginnes get some better guidance starting out, but that it really only worked well for suit contacts meaning you'd have to teach normal HCP for NT and build a bidding system that accommodated this. Plus there was no easy way to convert TSP to HCP in your head. So BUMRAP+531 it was and the other TSP adjustments had to be learned as judgement calls. Plus there wasn't a straight forward way to calculate BUMRAP without some elaborate rule or lots of fractions: e.g. As adjustments for card combinations. But there is a book from MasterPoints honors series about optimal hand evaluation. Is it any good? Has there been any further work on this topic?

Thanks. I had only looked at WJ2010 and WJ2005 so that's probably the problem. I'm still curious about AMBRA. Does anyone have anything that can enlighten me? I can read the system notes and gradually incorporate pieces, but that's not the same thing as understanding the thinking behind it. (You have this with, e.g., Roman Club -- the descriptions of the system are just bid sequences. There's a very straight forward logic to them, but the book never explains it. The whole thing drives me crazy. It's like we *want* the game to be hard on people.)

I've tried finding something in this vein but I can't. I want something of equivalent quality to Lampert's books and Bill Root's Common Sense bidding. Hardy's Standard Bidding and the ACBL software is way too ponderous. If there isn't something that teaches 2/1 is there something that teaches something comparably modern? I'd love something that teaches Rigal's Precision. But if someone found a way to construct a very simple relay system, I'd be down for that as well. Essentially what I want is something that teaches reasoning about the game and some basic principles instead of a giant bidding tree that needs memorizing. Is it really too much to ask that someone take Lampert and Root and just update the point ranges and bidding rules? Dorothy Truscott has an entire book that does just that, more or less. And Root's conventions book has plenty of material to update his bidding book with. Several people have said the Polish Club is fairly natural. I don't see how, but I'd be willing to try teaching with it if I could find a quality work. IDK, but accessibility to the game seems like a major barrier. The same holds for card play. Kantar's Introduction books are great, but there's not much by way of follow up. The skill jump to the more compressive books is pretty significant and Watson is slow as hell. I really do think that something like LC Standard or a very simple Precision is less complex than SA or even Goren. But I don't see such a book in the wild. So maybe I'm just wrong. If anyone has ideas, I'd love to hear them.

Isn't this the converse of the problem that Flanery exists to solve? The original French version's rule is that if a major is 4 cards, you open it before showing a longer suit. If the major is 5 or more cards, it is named second unless it is the only suit. So 1S means either exactly 4 spades with a 5 card or longer side suit. OR 6+ spades. I.e. specifically *not* 5. And if you are playing with a 12-14 no-trump, then you also know that partner either has extra strength or a singleton or void. The competitive bidding rules have to be adjusted as well. In standard, what happens if you open 1 club and get over-called 3 diamond? It's the same issue, it just crops up in a different place. And negative doubles and the like can deal with them just the same. The two situations are about equally as likely and worth equally as many points. That's what I meant when I said that the systems were equivalent in a strict way. (Which could be the issue -- if they are strictly equivalent, there's no benefit to using the less popular one.) We could go through a bunch of cases if we had sets of example hands. But you know the over-caller has 6+ clubs and limited HCP. So you can make a reasonable inference from your distribution to figure out what is probable for your partner and 4th seat. If you have a lot of clubs, you know that the over-caller has a misfit and would bid accordingly. If you don't, then you probably have diamonds-hearts, a negative double would communicate that. And partner will be able to find a fit in either or he'll repeat the spades to tell you it's a single suited hand which you can then raise to game if you have the values. Or if his 5-card side suit was clubs, then he'll leave the double in place and you'll play for penalties. You could probably do some adjustments with Blue Team Club's no-trump structure and opening bids to get a similar result. (Because the real problem is that the ambiguous nature of their 1NT bid has resulted in inferences about 1S being convoluted.) Is this the system in Bill Root's common sense bidding? Or is it documented somewhere else? Thanks for the book suggestions. I'm curious as to what those major flaws were. I'm starting to think that hrothgar may be right and that it's just network effects. Really? I've look at some write-ups and it seems like it's much more involved than just teaching precision. Is there something I'm missing?

Well, Alberan cites ACOL as inspiration and says that it is clearly better than what they do in the US because of limit raises and such. So they can't be completely separate because he's basing his thing on theirs. If anything the LOTT (and the widespread misunderstanding and misuse) would argue for Canapé since it makes it harder for your opponents to use it to interfere. Can you give me an example? It seems like the two systems are equivalent in a very strict way -- equal expressive power but different (opposite) problematic areas. It seems to me that most books in ACBL land teach that 2/1 is 10+ and 1NT is 6-10. So even if that's not what people are teaching today, my question stands. This was a thing people did, but I don't know where it came from or why. (See Bill Root's book for an example.) My point about the Goren thing is to show how widespread the agreement on the connection was. And yet, tons and tons of books were written teaching "5-card majors" with a bunch of older treatments from Goren's 4 card major system. And for what purpose? If you are teaching a new player, why teach them that double raises are forcing when you know you'll come back later to tell them invitational, same with the 1NT forcing response, 2/1 GF, etc. I don't get how "standard American" came into existence as a thing. No system that was widely documented used that combination of features. So how did they end up being the standard to begin with? What is the point of *not* just teaching the bare bones of what people use? Or at least what they were using until people came along and taught them to use some combination that didn't exist or even make sense. You miss my point. There are books that do this and discuss the gory details of what you have to agree to. Compare an entry in Root's convention book (or similar) with what you find online. I'm looking for something like the former but with modern ideas instead.

I have some questions about the history of bidding systems. (That weren't answered by reading Wenble's _The Evolution of Bidding Systems_). 1) The history of Canape-style bidding. I have copies of some Pierre Albarran books. The his version of canape is similar to ACOL but with a different (better) way of showing distribution. It looks like a reasonable alternative to 5-card majors. But how did we go from there to the Italian systems? And why did professional players eventually drop canape entirely? With so many competitive bidding situations and the demonstrable effectiveness of ambiguous/multi-way bids, I'd think that canape would be having a resurgence, especially at the highest levels of play. So why isn't it? 2) Origin of SA's non-forcing 1NT response. KS, RS, and the like all used a forcing 1NT in concert with 5-card majors. Goren himself says they go together; his 1985 New Bridge Complete is a simplified 2/1. So where did SA get the idea of using 5-card majors with a non-forcing 1NT? (And why don't we just teach it the "correct" way?) 3) Good books/write-ups of more recent developments? The book doesn't cover modern stuff in much depth, obviously. But it had enough to make me realize that I've been lax in keeping up. Is there a good book cataloging recent conventions like Gazilli and Kickback? One that lets me explore and appreciate AMBRA without having to parse through system notes and back out the underlying reasoning from a table of bidding sequences? Something that explains how SEF differs from standard American? (I keep hearing that they are similar, but that SEF makes some minor changes with significant payoffs.) Thanks for the help!