pcb

Thanks for you suggestions. Will try to get a copy of Commonsense Bidding. Mind you with us to Common sense is quite uncommon. But who knows - we might find some common ground. I think the biggest problem is that we are fairly successful in the C strata and often place well in the B strata. I suspect that is at least partly because we bid with confidence. I think that that's because our bidding is aggressive and our opponents make mistakes, my partner thinks it because we play well. It's difficult to change when two out of the three times a week we play against weaker players and we often do very well well. PCB

They say the difference between a serial killer and your bridge partner is that you can reason with the serial killer. My partner and I would agree with them (probably one of the few things we would agree about). Both of us learned to play (separately) about 40 years ago. I didn't play for the past 35 and while he has played a considerable amount of kitchen bridge during those 35 years his bidding methods didn't change a whole lot. And neither of us were experts back then anyway. Now we are playing duplicate and actually doing very well thank you. But apart from our occasional (read many) lapses in esoteric matters like remembering the bidding, card counting, and play of the cards, the part of our game that sucks is our bidding. We pretty much play Standard American with a few somewhat old and grotesque variations. Both of us are stubborn as hell (old goats might fit) and neither of us feel like putting an enormous amount of effort into learning a new system (SAYC seems about 2 steps too far). However it is somewhat embarrasing explaining to opponents that his 4 hearts opening means one thing whereas mine means another. Or that his 4 clubs opening is Gerber while mine is pre-emptive (not really but you're getting the drift). We need a book (2) giving a SIMPLE everyday interpretation of Standard American that we can agree on (which is a very tall order) but that is competitive enough to allow us to start consistently placing high in the "B" strata at tournaments. Any thoughts? And while you're at it - how do I move him off the firm idea that any jump shift over my opener should show opening points? And that Gerber is sheer genius? And that cue bidding was invented by the devil? Thanks in advance, PCB

Is GIB as limited as it seems? Is there any way to set bidding conventions? replay hands? Is there, at least, some way of examining what conventions it is using?

Hokay, After 35 years (maybe more) I might like to take up bridge again. As I'm beginning to realize things have changed a lot! I think I was an intermediate player when I quit. I played of lot of rubber bridge (I thought fairly successfully) and a tiny bit of duplicate (which we did not do well at - mostly my fault - I just got too nervous). Anyway I need some advice because it sure looks to me like bridge has changed quite a lot. For instance: What does the term "attitude" mean? As in "primary signal to partner's leads". (When I played we would have said attitude was the way one sat up when partner made a good lead (another term might be cheating). I don't want to get to heavy into unusual conventions - at least until I make up my mind whether I really want to get back into it. And my card memory has drastically faded (never was that good) so a) What's the best book out there now? :) What's the best software out there (and more importantly, what's the best value software)? Any other thoughts would also be welcome. Tx PCB