JanM

That is going to slow down the play in ACBL tournaments even more than the players manage to slow it down at the moment. For if, when a player takes any action in the presence of unauthorized information, it becomes ipso facto a logical alternative that Law 16 therefore means he may not take, he will sit there for quite some time wondering what to do. Is Bertrand Russell a member of the ACBL Laws Commission, by any chance? Law 16 says that you can't choose from among logical alternatives one that is suggested by the UI. It doesn't say that you can't make a bid that is a logical alternative. The suggestion was made that a bid actually made by the player at the table might not be a logical alternative, and that is what was addressed by the ACBL Laws Committee.

A logical alternative is defined in 16B1b, and my English expert thinks that the person at the table cannot constitute a "significant proportion of such players" on his own. Now if a well-known London player who has appeared on T-shirts showing his prowess were to make the bid, it is possible that the peer group would be only one, and he would be its only member, in which case I might agree. But in that case, peer has the meaning most often used in clues to Private Eye crosswords. After this morning's ACBL Laws Committee meeting, in ACBLand at least, any bid that is in fact chosen by the player at the table is a logical alternative. The committee had a very easy time agreeing on this.

As one of those "nice pairs playing a short club" I can assure you that in ACBL tournaments, the opponents will be allowed to play whatever they want over a 1♣ opening bid that can have 2 clubs. At least, at NABCs & GNT and things like that - I haven't played at a club game recently.

I'll be there for the whole thing also. Will be in the Vanderbilt area from Monday-Friday either playing or doing Vugraph.

One point about what might be suggested by a slow double is that assuming this occurred without screens, the DBLer's partner often has additional information from the doubler's body language while s/he was thinking. That information might well be subconscious, not something of which the player is aware, but it's surely there. My law's expert says that any bid the person at the table makes must be a logical alternative because it was actually made by a "peer" of the player involved.

You can open the LIN file in a text editor (not a fancy one like Word though - it puts extra garbage in) and edit to your heart's content. It takes a little while to become familiar with the format, but then it's very easy to fix things.

One suggestion that was made for a way to choose the second US team for the Bermuda Bowl (in the one year out of four when two teams are chosen in one year) was to have the regular team trials and also have a pairs trials and then the team that had lost in the team trials finals would play the pairs trials team (which might have been the top 3 pairs or the top 2 and their choice from some subset of the remaining pairs). I think the main reason that suggestion failed was because of the logistics - either you run the two trials at the same time, in which case there are issues about dealing with "drop ins" to the pairs trials from the team trials, or you have to hold them separately and then have the playoff match either at a third time or at the end of the pairs trials, giving the teams trials runner-up an advantage because they aren't tired. Nick's point that having all of the competitors in one city makes life easier is a good one. With our players spread over a large country, the costs to the players as well as the organizers of two separate trials is very large. Of course, a way to achieve the same thing would be to hold trials online, but although we're trying to do that in some cases, the participants in the Open, Women's and Senior trials aren't yet ready to have those events online.

ACBL Knockouts are 64 boards, not 48. One of the advantages of playing only 48 boards a day, as the WBF does, is that the day doesn't have to be so long. But the disadvantage is that either the event isn't as formful because not so many boards are played, or there have to be a lot more days.

I agree with Frances - 4NT on this auction is initially assumed to be a minor 2-suiter, but 5♥ over partner's 5m shows that it was a slammish 5♥ bid. Sure it would be nice to be able to do everything, and there will sometimes be hands where you want to know about keycards, but when the opponents take away so much room, you have to choose what you think will be most useful most often, and we've chosen Takeout. For me, Double would be "values without support" and partner could bid over it with a lot of shape but would usually leave it in.

Just one quick comment about the number of boards played each day. In the World Championships, they play 48 boards a day, not 64, yet we still find that at the end of the tournament the play often isn't as good as it was at the beginning. Playing all day every day for anywhere from 6 days (Vanderbilt) to 2 weeks (Bermuda Bowl) is very tiring. Add in the possibility of someone being sick or an emergency arising so someone can't play, and it's REALLY hard for a 4 person team to do well. Also, although part of the reason the Vanderbilt & Spingold end at 1 or 2 am is that there are sometimes people who play too slowly, part of the reason is just that it takes longer with screens. Instead of the normal 7.5 minutes per board without screens, these events are usually scheduled at 9 minutes per board. That means a 16 board quarter takes about 2-1/2 hours, the half takes over 5 hours, because you need a little break between quarters to compare and maybe regroup. Add in a 2 hour dinner break (in the Senior KO in San Diego, the dinner break was only 1 hour and as far as I could tell no one liked that) and you have a 12 hour day. So if play starts at 1PM, the normal finishing time is 1AM. That means (at least for those of us who can't go instantly from high adrenaline, high focus to sleeping) that the players are getting to sleep at the earliest at 2AM. It really is a grueling schedule for the pairs who play both the final segment and the first one the next day. As a Vugraph operator, I "play" all 4 segments in a day. I don't have to think. I don't have any pressure about trying to win the match. And I'm usually exhausted at the end of the day. Is it any wonder that the players, even if they play "only" 1/2 or 3/4 of the boards are tired?

Perhaps, but there are only a limited number of teams in the Bermuda Bowl and I am confident that if any Zone "lost" a team because the defenders were automatically allowed to defend, there would be an outcry.

Rats! I was already making plans to go skiing in nearby Squaw Valley on the day of the bye I was anticipating we would surely have as the #1 seed :) Thanks for the info about 2010 USBC byes. Fred Gitelman Bridge Base Inc. www.bridgebase.com Not to worry - I think the predictions are for just a few teams over 64, so lots of first day byes :). Heavenly Valley is prettier than Squaw.

what about team USA2 for the BB 2011? That will be selected by the 2011 USBC.

Oops - ACBL always gets me when I go to their website to look for something quickly - it's the defenders who get the 1 seed, and when I quickly went to the "bracket sheet" on the ACBL website for last year's Vanderbilt I thought that was you (I know, memory failing, you'd think I could remember from a year ago). So I don't actually know who'll have the 1-seed, as the Katz team won't have 4 players playing together in this year's Vanderbilt. As for the Trials bye situation, you don't actually have to read any Conditions of Contest to find out that your team currently has a bye to the Round of 16 and will probably have to make the Round of 8 in the Vanderbilt to earn a bye to the Trials Round of 8 - just go to the usbf website and click on 2010 Open Trials.

Having the #1 seed in the Vanderbilt or Spingold (it's pretty irrelevant in the Reisinger) is helpful in the first few rounds of the event. If any of us were to be seeded #1 in Reno instead of Fred's team, which will in fact be the #1 seed, we'd have a better chance of making the third or maybe even fourth day of the event. But after the Round of 32, the field is sufficiently deep that high seeds don't get easier matches than lower seeds. And teams don't get Trials Positioning Points until the Round of 16, so a high seed may improve a team's chance of getting Trials Positioning Points, but not by much. In order to get a serious bye in the Trials, a team needs to do better than the Round of 16 in the Vanderbilt & Spingold. For example, the Nickell team won the Reisinger and reached the Spingold Round of 16. They have earned a bye to the Round of 8 in the Trials. To earn a bye to the Semi-finals, they will have to reach the Vanderbilt Finals. Yes, teams with byes in the Trials have an advantage over teams without byes, but byes are based only on performance over the previous year (last year's Trials and the three major NABC team games). Everyone who hasn't earned a bye is in exactly the same position as you or I - we get to enter the Trials (well I don't any more because I'm too busy with administrative tasks), if our team does well enough in the Round Robin we get to advance to the KO. If we play well enough to beat all the other teams, we get to represent the US.

I second that (although with a slight amendment - Linux/Unix/MacOSX instead of just Linux). Seems like I have to go back and look for help with running BBO on the Mac from time to time.

I never feel old :)

Slightly off this topic, but also about suit symbols and Word and maybe someone here will be able to solve my problem (which I've given up on - I'm not using Word for bridge notes any more). When I upgraded to the latest version of Word, it decided not to recognize suit symbols any more. If I opened an old document (or someone else's) with suits symbols in it, I got open boxes <grrr>. If I try to do "insert" and put in a suit symbol, it looks as if I should be able to (there's a chart that has suit symbols on it) but when I click on one and then on "insert, even in Times New Roman, which should have suit symbols, I get a box instead of the suit symbol. I have uninstalled and reinstalled Word, tried to point it to the Times New Roman that does suit symbols just fine in Pages (guess I should "confess" that all of this is on a Mac :)). Nothing works. The only way I can read a Word document that has suit symbols is to open it in Pages, where the suit symbols are fine but sometimes the formatting isn't. I'm way too cheap to print notes in color, so I just use outline for the red suits, by the way - it works for me :).

If you will be in Reno and not playing on one of the days between Tuesday & Sunday (March 16-21), consider helping with the Vugraph broadcast from the Vanderbilt. We'll be covering one match in each of the Rounds of 64, 32, 16 and the Final, two matches in the Quarterfinal and Semifinal. Vugraph operators have the best seat in the house, and it's pretty easy to be an operator, although you need to be familiar with play on BBO. I find I can train most people in about 15 minutes. To volunteer (we do pay a little, but not much B)), email me at marteljan(at)gmail(dot)com and let me know when you think you will be available and your contact information. I'll have email at the tournament, and I'm used to people not knowing until the day before whether they'll be available. Thanks!

What are ACBL-style team games? In the UK we use Bridgemates for Swiss teams, multiple teams and knockouts. Is there some format in the US that is not conducive to the use of Bridgemates? Don't quote me, and I'm not sure, but I think the problem is that ACBL-score, which most clubs and tournaments in ACBL-land use to score their events, hasn't been set up to take Bridgemate input for team games.

I hadn't heard of that experiment, but my initial reaction when I read the OP was that the reason you're not doing as well with memory at bridge as at chess is that instead of counting in a way that relates to what's going on in the hand and what you need to remember, you're trying to count the way we count cards at blackjack, where the order of play and who played what is irrelevant. So it's a pure memory effort. OTOH, if you watch the plays in context, with a picture of the whole hand and what's going on in mind, it's much easier. Eventually it becomes almost second nature to think "oh, the opening leader didn't ever bid and led the 6 of diamonds - either s/he has long diamonds or a singleton or doubleton, or maybe thinks the other suits are bad to lead" and then continue that sort of thinking as the hand is played out. Another point is to be sure to stay focused. That sounds simple and obvious, but I'm willing to bet a lot of money that the ability to stay completely focused, even when the hand looks boring or you really want to think about whether you could have made/defeated that tricky slam one or two hands ago, is what separates the greats from the merely good. One very good player (my recollection is it was Dick Walsh, but I'm not sure - memory going on me) suggested that you repeat the opening trick to yourself, more to get yourself started focusing on the hand than anything else, and I find that does help. After the opening trick I say the cards over to myself and that usually gets me started on the right track.

Another possibility is that Apple will decide to implement Flash on the iPad - I know that so far they haven't, but I'm hoping that there will be enough interest in websites that need Flash to get them to change their mind. I didn't care about not having BBO on the iPhone because the screen is really too small anyway, but if it was available for the iPad, that might be a reason to get one :).

Law 68© specifies that a claim should be accompanied by a statement of the order in which cards will be played. Here declarer didn't make any such specification, so that is an "offense" which can be penalized by a PP under 90B.

This is exactly the sort of comment that will make committees unhappy to continue posting minutes. Surely you know that what they meant when they said "the both majors convention" isn't allowed on the Midchart was that it wasn't allowed as a possible meaning of a weak bid showing a 5 card Major and a 4 card side suit, not that it wasn't allowed when the side suit HAD to be spades. Of course whoever wrote the minutes could have done a better job, but to start picking at how things are reported is really not going to endear you either to the committee members or to whoever is responsible for producing minutes.

You're right, but the NABC schedule is already incredibly "crowded." If you added a day to the BRP or Reisinger you'd make it even more difficult to schedule things. Personally, as someone who has no chance of winning the Reisinger, it's still probably my favorite event (if only I could convince partners and teammates of that). I love the fact that the NAS is opposite the Reisinger, because it means that the Reisinger field, even the first day, is about the best NABC field you can find (and I don't mean for the first day - I'd happily bet on the players in the first day of the Reisinger against the players in the final day of the BRP). So if what you enjoy is playing against the best, you can do that by entering the Reisinger. If you play well and are lucky, you can make the second day and play in an even better field, and if a miracle happens and you make the third day... The Vanderbilt & Spingold aren't the same, at least for someone like me, who's been around for a while and won some things, (it would be the same for someone who plays a lot). I'm seeded somewhere in the middle of the field, so in order to play a match against a top-seeded team I probably need to win at least two and often 3 matches. As for the Women's events, I have mixed feelings - I don't happen to like them, but I don't see why those who do shouldn't be entitled to have them. That's the same way I feel about the mini-Spingolds, btw - if I were eligible for them, I wouldn't want to play in them, but I don't see any harm in them and they make the "main event" smaller, which IMO is a good thing. The Open BAM and whatever the 2 day Open pair event at the beginning of the Fall NABC is called are probably stronger because the people who want to play in the Women's events can do so. Certainly they are stronger because of the concurrent Senior KO. I don't much care about masterpoints and I know that they aren't a good measure of ability, so I don't have an opinion about the numbers awarded for the different events. Surely everyone knows that the "real" events (essentially Justin's list) are under-rewarded in terms of masterpoints. That's why for Trials byes and seeding, there is a whole separate schedule of Positioning Points that are awarded only for the Vanderbilt, Spingold & Reisinger. But most of the players who play in the "real" events don't care about masterpoints, so it doesn't matter. Having attended a lot of Women's committee meetings, I know the argument for more masterpoints than seems right given the number of players who enter those events. It is that the top women mostly play in the Women's events (that's certainly true for teams, and pretty true for pairs - Sabine & Daniela are an exception. I remember counting the number of women pairs in the first day of the first Fall Open pair event one year and comparing it to the third day of the BRP - I suppose it was distorted by the fact that I was counting myself, but the number was about the same, I don't remember how many any more, but about 3). If you want to do something about the Women's events, maybe one place to start would be with the WBF, which is about to add a "Girls" event to the Junior Championships, perpetuating the division by sexes. So long as there are Women's World Championships, it's going to be tough to change the ACBL Women's events. I've even had people argue that we need to encourage more women to play in the NABC Women's events in order to prepare them for the World Women's events or we'll lose our strong position in those events. I happen to disagree with that argument, but it's definitely out there.