Blofeld

I've played that for a while, but it's brown sticker, not allowed for 'sure'... <_< Interesting, it's allowed in the EBU (so long as your strength for both the weak options is about the same) as all of the weak options deny the suit opened.

I mentioned both of them! Edit: Oops, no I missed Adams. Had meant to include h2g2 in my list. Stories of Your Life and Others, by Ted Chiang, is an absolutely fantastic set of short (speculative fiction) stories that I read recently. Probably makes my list.

♣J. Assuming that your labels of LHO and RHO are confused. They may have an unprotected club control here.

1N (though of course as a passed hand this isn't even semiforcing) on #1. 2♣ on 2 seems pretty straightforward. Describe your hand and all that.

A few of my favourites: Gödel, Escher, Bach : an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. Probably my favourite single book. Anything by Tolkien The Amber sequence, and Lord of Light, by Roger Zelazny Dune by Frank Herbert Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson I'd also second the recommendation of Dawkins.

Bidding 4-card suits up the line is a system without a great deal of merit: one would almost certainly be better playing 5 card majors. The main advantage of 4cM openings is that on the hands with a 4 card major, you can mention it immediately ... So, modern Acol style is to open a 4 card major in preference to a minor (though with both majors or both minors tend to open the lower of the two). This method certainly has disadvantages, but it's a hassle to defend against. I'm always very happy to find that my opponents bid 4 card suits up the line ...

I like Cherdano's argument here. What about total-pointing versus the double-dummy par, though? The odds are then precisely the same as for standard total points, but the variance on cards held, while still present, is lower than normal.

To those advocating Russian scoring, etc. : Given that this is all computerised, if you want to score against par it surely makes sense to score versus the par (double dummy) contract on the hand, as this is (presumably) actually findable. One could then play either total points or IMPs against the par contract. Sure, cards would still be somewhat arbitrary (double dummy analysers never take a 2-way finesse the wrong way, for instance), but there would at least be some balancing measure. I think best to let GIB declare sometimes, just to give players the chance to relax as dummy one hand in 4. Or possibly give players the option to take over declarership from GIB?

Obviously concealing them all is optimum for reducing I (be it A or U). I think that concealing LHO's and CHO's bids is a compromise to help speed things up, so that you can use at least the time that RHO is thinking to plan your next bid.

I disagree with your estimates of the likelihood of slam by orders of magnitude. First, the point count approach. Laying aside the fact that there certainly exist hands where I would open 1♠ on more than 22 points (for fear of being unable to describe them properly after a 2♣ opening), we reach the maximum of 30-31 HCP. This is, I agree, unlikely to be enough for slam unless one player or other has a shortage somewhere. But singletons (even doubletons on the right hands will suffice) are hardly "extraordinary distribution". My instinctive guess is that the proportion of hands starting 1♠ : 2♠ where one would like to be in slam is much higher than your suggested one in a thousand. I generated a few dozen hands which would start with this auction, and a cursory inspection suggested that around 6 made slam odds-on: around one in 10. Quite probably my method was biased towards slams, but I don't think it could be tremendously so. Could anyone with the means run a proper simulation here? Then I would think that proper bidding can find a decent proportion of these: is half too optimistic? (incidentally your measurement technique of looking at the travellers is flawed; everyone may be making 12 tricks because two finesses are both on: this doesn't make the slam a good one). Possibly my intuition is out on this. I'd like to hear others' opinions.

Can't see what one could balance with on #1. Would bid 2♠ on #2 even at IMPs. I've no idea what to do on the third one though. I suppose as it's matchpoints I'm not leading a diamond. Heart safe?

If you think that partner won't expect this hand, why didn't you start with 4♣? I think 3♣ is probably best, but I wouldn't mind 4♣ in this situation. Whichever I try, though, I'm saying my piece and then passing.

That's reasonable, I suppose. Not my preference, but I can hardly enforce my preference on the world. :P This is nothing but rhetoric, as I suspect you know. Knowing what partner's bids mean is not the same as knowing partner's hand. :) Agree that this is a problem. It is also a good argument for being able to see your own alerts: if you can't see what the explanation is, then you will not be able to correct it if it's wrong. This is not that big of a dilemma as you make it seem to be. People should not use an FD file out-of-the-box without having a look first that it actually reflects the methods they are playing. This applies to regular partnerships. If they want to use FD they have to make sure their CC is correct. If they don't that constitutes false disclosure which doesn't confirm to the rules (Claus, this should finally make you happy). Even if there is a large agreement between a pair's agreements and the FD card, there is potential for slight discrepency, which can be picked up upon if one can see one's own auto-alerts. I may be remembering the same incident as David here: we sat down opposite each other, having not played together much. We agreed WJ05 (with a couple of changes, such as Keri, which we would of course alert when they came up), and loaded Gerben's FD file for this. We had a sequence (1♦ : 1♥ , 2♥ ?) where FD alerted the final bid as showing 4+ card support for partner. David and I both noticed this and separately let the opponents know that we thought it might sometimes only be 3 cards. As it happened it was 4 cards, but it is this sort of thing that one wants to be able to catch. It seems unreasonable to say that we can't use the CC in the first place because we haven't checked that we agree with the definition of every single call: we were after all playing methods pretty close to those defined on the card. --- Claus, it's perfectly possible to provide full disclosure to opponents just through sufficient self-alerting. Before FD, this is what I mostly did (not enough room on the little CC to cover all the situations that come up).

I think I would bid 2♥ but just try 3♠ if partner bid 2.

Takeout doubles (of all varieties), without a doubt.

I haven't discussed it with my partners, but thinking about it I reached the same structure as Han as a sensible system.

Interesting. I have never seen anything ethically wrong with referring to system notes[1]. I suppose that this is because memorising things doesn't really seem an interesting part of the game. Things are much more interesting if one has agreements[2]: these can be arrived at and memorised, or one can use the fabulous method of remembering things outside of your head that usually gets called 'writing'. Sure, memorising things isn't very hard, but just because something is easy doesn't mean that we should force everyone to do it. So I suppose my vote falls for continued use of FD: we get the large advantage of seeing what opponents' bids mean, and I see knowing what one's own bids mean as not really an issue (and sometimes an advantage: helps provide a decent game of bridge, and may help with teaching). [1] It is of course legally wrong, but that's an entirely different kettle of fish. And (for various reasons) I agree that letting people refer to system notes during live play would be a bad idea (though not a terrible one). [2] Actually if opponents have agreements: I get very little satisfaction out of good boards that come about because opponents couldn't remember/agree on what they were playing ; things are interesting when trying to dig oneself out of a hole. So my vote is really for the opponents to be able to see what their bids mean, but not me and partner. But this is asymmetric. So I'm not sure which is the lesser of evils.

No, one can actually right-click players' names to assign them to seats in team games.

Yeah, double and pass whatever partner produces. Sometimes partner will pass 3♣. Occasionally 3♣ may even go down.

If aiming for a winning pair, can you do something like a swiss movement? Even if a real swiss movement is impractical, could you run the second session so that the best pairs from each section in the first session play together in a section? Then even if you didn't have an entirely accurate total ranking it would be more accurate at the top than otherwise.

Personally, I would appreciate some way to regulate the volume of BBO (relative to other applications. I know that I can adjust the overall speaker volume). Is there already some way to do this? If not, would it be possible/hard to add one?

Presumably he thought partner would understand until partner passed 3♣. Not my choice, but ...

Pass seems to make sense.

I'm not sure that I'd want to be in this slam: it looks like it needs the hearts to come in to make, and something else might go wrong.

I would bid 4♠ at *. Having taken a view with 3♠ instead, I would certainly pass at *** - the opponents have been put to a guess and there is no guarantee that they're in the right place. I would probably bid 4♠ at **, but I can understand the arguments against.