Tomi2

yes but it comes more frequent in auctions like 1♠-4♦ splinter where you have only one bid below passing game

polish players like to upgrade a lot, in fact I feel, that more 14 counts are opened 1nt than not, last time I saw one of the top pairs opening on a flat 14 count with no 5 card suit, no good intermediates and some doubleton ace... but few of them actualy claim to play 14-16. Some do, Brewiak-Sarniak, polish venice cup pair, or Tuczynski-Jassem, polish juniors come into my mind. they alert their 1NT and 1CL opening as "one point fewer than normal"

before Jassem came up with his wj05 thing one could easily respond 1nt with that normal 8 count. now the 1d response can have those 7-8 balanced hands among all others that make game with the strong 1c opener, but its more frequent now that game still is on, so both have to worry. 1♣-1♦-1M becomes ugly when you hold 8hcp with 3 card support in partner major, you could well have 28hcp and an 8 card fit (seldom 9) or 20 and 3-3 in this suit... so you try to find one more bid. but then again with good 5 or 6 points you would also want to bid one more time. imo this leads to some unconfortable spots for this hand: i would open this 1♦ and strech the 1♦ openers to 21 in polish club. you get your suit in befor opps or partner can preempt you and as you see, partners preempts start with a 1d response

hope this tool will never get an english name because I would have to change my lost of the most useless and destructive conventions then. this tool allows opener only to split his hand, black or white - either he signoffs or his hand is good enough so he uses this step to find out about aces... no chance to use the few free steps to make some ambitious in between call, like a cuebid, or some sort of last train, meant as "your splinter fits ok, but I am not sure if we have enough power to make 12 tricks" never had a problem to find out keycards starting with 4nt. after the keycards have been shown one can play a bid of 6 in partners shortnes as ask for void "bit 7 with void and 6 with singleton" your keycards bring you maximum 5 tricks in your slam, that leaves 7 tricks comming from other high cards, extra length extra shpae etc. and you need a way to sort this out deciding if you belong in game or try for slam

hi lho: 1♦ pd: pass rho: 1♦ me after a short while: TD rho now claims he wanted to bid 1♥ my question now: if this would be a case of unintended bidding, technical bidding box error etc. would rho be allowed to change his bid according to §25 or does §27 apply because he was unlucky to grab a non-legal bid so his change to a new suit would force his pd to pass? Does §25 also apply after some seconds or just if the player who made the wrong bid finds out himself (directly)? to this secific case there was the problem, that the responder had a flat hand with only 4hcp and 6 hearts. In his (polish club) system he would have to respond 1♦ to a 1♣ opener by pd. So there is doubt if the call was really unintented or if he has mistaken partners opeing, how should a director find out what the reason for the 1D bid was?

"Bob Hamman is partnering Bart Bramley... Zia seems to be alone at the moment" would be more than logical when Zia partners Welland now, who played the last events with Bramley - since Zia and Roy often play together in various events

to 5: (1sp) - pass - (pass) - double (2sp) - ? you give up to option for makig a responsive double / to just show your points to have the double for the hands, where you had the trapping pass AND partner cant reopen once more. Had a long discussion about this after my last tourney but I belive that NOT penalty is best in this seat to 8: playing 2nd double after the penalty double on 1NT sems pretty much standard these days back to 5: (1he) - 1NT - (2he) - pass (pass) - ? you wait for the day when you have 4 heart tricks and two aces? what about 42(43) with only a single heart stoper but within the range of 1NT or 3244? to 1: 1sp - (pass) - 2sp - (3minor) pass- (pass) - ? 3(45)1 you sell out to 3 clubs? let's go to 4, you open 1club (12-14 bal or stronger hands, may include bal hand with 4dias) 1cl - (x) - xx - (2 or 3 he) 4135 and 16 hcp, good luck, make it 4144 I think bridge is not a game of such rules, because they either cant cover all situation or it will be too many rules

I do not think bridge is a timed event, imo the time limts are just there to prevent "endless" team sessions and to make a pairs tourney run in some way... but its not the aim to find somebody who plays the best bridge in xy minutes (only in speedball this is) if you want to play timed events, then come to Germany - here our tds apply those penalties for slow play as often as possible. this leads to beeing declarer in 4hearts doubled and td saying "you have 48 sec to finish this board" this leads to endless td calls "opps are playing slowly and i want to prevent the penalty fo us" OR "we have not called but THEY were playing much slower than us" - both create a very friendly atmosphere at the tables and fastens up the events... or some see others leaving the playing area late - call td "didn't you see they were late? we got that penalty, why did you miss them?" ah yes, and if you have a car accident and miss one segment of 16 boards the td picks his calculator to estimate the 27 VP ((16*8.75-5)/5) penalty for you and you can start regaining the imps by going into the 2nd session with -3*16 imps (sry, have no calculator here)

totaly agree to this - there have been lots of very interesting deals this week and I have spend lots of time skyping with some of my reg partners during the vug, every time the auction/play took longer, we had time to discuss the boards (how would have the auction gone for us, what cards would we play, what signal would we give..."

ok, all problems solved - their team simply came and played - and we lost, but better losing at the bridge table than not winning because one had no chance to play bridge at all

it an online event, so hoped there would be some WBF rule we can refer to we are part of an groupd with 10 teams playing, 2 qualify for KO, 3rd also qualifies for an elite group next season. Our opps from today played only 4 matches till now and lost high against our "rivals" (Port Royal and Zagreb) (they scored 21 and 25). Our own average is also >20, so getting 18 vs a team that scored <9 average and even less against our "rivals". The organizers who run this league assigned us 18-0 automaticly for this, and now we try to work on a fairer solution because now in our opinion they have somewhere between 3 and 7 VP advantage here is the situation after 6 rounds Group D VP Munich 124 Port Royal 124 Zagreb 121 Riga 108 Puszczykowo 106 Paris 85 Haskovo 65 Kolkata 52 Ankara 3 35 Barcelona 25

can one of the experts around give me a link to the rule that says what one should do, when a team does not play all matches? in a round robin competition a weaker team will not play our match today and we get 18 awarded. but we have an average of 20+ and will miss at least 2 VP this way, our rivals won 25 and 21 against them thx

how would you handle this: RR match, 1st round, two times 16 boards, 2hours20min for each segment. team A plays team B but team B comes much delayed, so they compleatly miss the first segment. The reason (if relevant) is, that they had a car accident. the rusult in IMPS in 2nd segment is 49-20 for Team A how many VP and Imps would you expect A and B to have after this match?

ok. thx guys next questions: how do you bid forcing hands with diamonds if not with a penalty double and a new suit? don't you think that you could see you singleton spade and the vulnerability BEFORE you doubled? at the table 1NT was a psyche, and I bid this way beeing 100% sure this must be forcing. My main argument was that this bidding should be kind of treated as a 1 or 2 spades overall and not like 1NT. I have 2D and 3D directly to show differend hands with diamonds and when I start wth double and have only 1 spade, I must be prepared that one of my opps will bid 2 spades in the next round of bidding. So why not showing the key aspects of my hand first (the dia suit) instead of doubling for potential non vulnerable undertricks. Doubling pays off if we set their contract 2 or 4+ down. if they for down one in some contract we will likely have a dia partscore, if they make say 1nt for 4 tricks We are favorites to make 9 in 3NT ourselves... I still see no upwart to double and then run to 3Dia in this position with a hand that could have bid 2 / 3 Dia directly. What kind of hands do you expect for my bidding? my actual hand was: x Axx AKTxx Kxxx I wasof course sure 1NT was psyched and I dreamed of slam vs. the correct weak nt with partner. my plan was to pass if he bids 3nt now and to look for a better contract, if he does not. If 3Sp is my only forcing bid now, partner will have to bid 3nt even with hands, where his stopper is axx axx xx qxxx aqxx = 12 points and we have great chances to make 7 clubs I made 3dia with an overtrick or so now :(

Adam, what kind of hand do you give the 1NT bidder here?

[hv=pc=n&s=skq63hq83dj62cat4&d=s&v=n&b=15&a=1c1ndpp2s3dp]133|200|1Cl is polish, either weak NT (4dias poss, 2cl poss) or some hands with clubs (in this version 12+) or any hand with 18+[/hv] 1NT is natural, double for penalties. 2♦by partner instead of double would be natural, non forcing, 3♦as well. This auction now is not discussed. Is this sequence forcing? and if not, do you bid?

[hv=pc=n&s=saqj942hj75djt2c8&w=s853hqt6dkq976ck5&n=st7h82d4caqjt9743&e=sk6hak943da853c62&d=s&v=b&b=7&a=3sp4sppp&p=dkd4d8d2h6h2hk]399|300|D8 suit pref = heart switch<br>H6 meant as ud count in clubs (we use udca)[/hv] hope this works. This deal was played in the 2010 German Bridge Trophy, I was sitting east, our opps were Herbst-Herbst from Israel. After I won the heart I could not read partners card and thought it would be the normal "count" in hearts, so I expected Q65 with partner and decl having 7330. I tried a small spade expecting decl to make 7 spade tricks, one ruff and club ace. Partner tried to show his count in clubs in that trick, so I would know, that decl. has 1 club and partner Kx or xx. Since we play udca the small ♥6 shows even count in clubs... Returning a club and killing the dummy was the only chance to beat the contract. I think this is even one step further than the situation some posts above, because partner did not signal, he lead the "suide-suit-signal" edit: since my father never had a copy of BW in his hand this idea must have spread somehow to poland/germany. I was obv. also not reading BW when I was 5 years old ;)

my father once lead the 2 of hearts in the second trick, and later when I misdefended, because I did not know the count in clubs he told me, that he needed to play a heart but the small card he played was a count signal in clubs. I did not find tat out at the table, but I think it was a very good idea... is that such a signal?

is there any reason why Germany is involved in this discussion? all "non-germans" who represeted Germany in the last events a) live here for more than 50% of their life B) came here for non brdge reasons but because they live here and work here c) most of them are even German citizens

lol@this one they need a swing and get a nice shapely hand vulnerable? why not just bid normal and hope to be in the best contract on this one. what miracles must happen to make 1nt a winning bid while 1club could EASILY bring you 13 imps in a normal auction where you bid/avoid slam grand game etc...

"I forbid a club lead." i dislike taking advantage of this random rule anyway but this is a christmas individual. calling to and force lho to make a foolish lead won't make this evening better... to decide what site will play this contract better is enough advantage for me, i dont see why it should be played from my side. beeing dummy i could get a beer and enjoy the evening, but the club is located in cologne so i wont get good beer too, damn

glp

how about the German Bridge Festival in Bonn, Wed / Thu : Invitational Teams Thu : Open Pairs Fri - Sun : Open Teams btw, aren't you title holeder? :) http://www.german-bridge-trophy.de/

an EBL TD explained me, that rule of 18 applies only to 1-level openings. I played 2dia wilkosz in one international event (either weak twosuiter with spades or 8-11 hearts + minor) and after the event I asked if that was allowed - no

partner thinks we forced to game after his non forcing 2 clubs and then shoewd strong slam interest by 4th suit and 4 clubs and a cuebid, so probably he has a decent hand and asks for aces, I bid 5 clubs no matter if its 0 or 1 and expect partner to go down one. Then I ask myself, why I had forgotten to bid 3NT