JanM

OK, I'll bite, since my meaning is so different :) 1♣ - clubs or balanced 15-19 1♦ - 4+ hearts, can be very weak 1♥ - balanced 15-bad 17 or unbalanced with 3 hearts 1♠ - asks, can still be weak 1NT - balanced 15-17 2♣ - invitational checkback, responder has finally shown some values, but not enough to force to game; opener bids 2♦ with either 2 hearts or a minimum, 2♥ with most hands with 3 hearts, 2♠ with a good hand with 43 in the Majors, 3♥ with a really good hand with 3 hearts.

Although I agree with 2♦ now, I think I would have bid 2♥ last round. My agreement about the strong jump shift is that it can be any one of 3 hand types: a long, strong suit win a game forcing hand; support for opener with a decent suit; 17+ balanced with a 5+ card suit. This hand falls into the third type and I think it is easier to describe if I start with 2♥. I would make a strong jump shift even if my agreement for the HCPs in the balanced hand type was higher - this is worth more than 17.

It seems to me that you've mis-remembered or mis-stated the auction. If it really went: 1NT-P-P-2♣ on the first round, then your partner doubled 2♣ after you had passed once in response to 1NT, not after you had passed twice. I would have thought that partner's DBL in this position was generally played as penalty - good clubs. He's over the 2♣ bidder and it would be unusual for a 1NT bidder, who has already done a good job of describing their hand, to want to force partner to compete at the 2-level, when partner has already announced (by passing 1NT) that s/he has a relatively balanced hand. Opener with a 4432 good hand might think it was right for their side to be competing at the 2-level, but that seems less likely than that opener will have good clubs and good defense and think that it's right to defend 2♣ doubled. If 2♣x made, that's bad luck. If partner intended the DBL as takeout, I don't think that has anything to do with the fact that you passed (whether once or twice) but rather suggests that you and partner need to discuss things like this if you're going to continue to play together. I admit that I know nothing about the "proprieties" when playing online with a pickup partner, so I'm not going to comment on partner "storming" off (how does one know that a person "storms" online?)

FWIW I gave the S hand and auction (without the hesitation) to Chip, and he bid 4♥ with virtually no thought, commenting that if partner had as little as KQxxxx of clubs and out, 4♥ would have a very good play (hearts splitting and the A of clubs onside). Obviously the hesitation made 4♥ more attractive, but I'm not sure that 3♥ is a LA and even if it is, surely N would raise to 4, having already underbid. So I don't think EW were damaged (except perhaps for NS's failure to explore slam, but the hesitation clearly didn't suggest bidding less).

It's all relative. You are still cuter and younger than me. Well, I am sure about the cute part :( :) Thank you. Are you by any chance my husband posting under an assumed name? No, he knows he's younger.

This used to be an easy question for me, back when I was a cute young thing - I was under-rated, because I was a CYT, and women are generally under-rated, and I played with some good players so if I happened to do well, it could be attributed to my partner. Now that I'm an LOL, I don't know. There's still some of the "women are worse than men" thinking, but I'm fairly well known, and I've won a couple of Open NABC titles, as well as several Women's & Mixed ones, and in my opinion I don't play as well as I used to, so I suspect I'm over-rated now.

I'd say that 2♠ as a relay is so normal that both West and the director should have done a better job of waking South up. "What would N do with a hand where s/he just wanted to know what you had?" would be a good question for West to ask. And the director surely should have realized that the auction sounded wrong and asked S to leave the table so that N could explain. Failing that, shouldn't West still realize that partner is FAR more likely to have a lead-directing double of spades than anything else (the opponents had shown game-forcing values at the point East DBLd, surely it is much more likely that East has spade values than that s/he has a hand that wants to compete now but didn't over 1♦). And even if 2!s is "natural," it would be reasonable to play that DBL was lead-directing. By the end of the auction, West KNOWS that partner doesn't have hearts (S was the one doing the explaining and S told W that s/he had 6 hearts, so there aren't enough hearts for E to have length); I believe in trusting partner, but not when it's impossible for partner to have the hand that you think DBL should show.

They want people to finish in time to play in the weekend Swiss? At least, if I have my summer schedule right :). The Spingold & mini-Spingolds start on Monday. With 64 teams (or the equivalent), the event takes 6 days (the Spingold of course takes 7 or usually 8). That runs through Saturday and there's nothing to play in on Sunday, except an early start, rushed Regional Swiss, so the people in the finals are likely to go home, not what ACBL wants. Shortening the event and making it more like a regional bracketed KO in order to get a couple extra tables of entries on the last day of the NABC seems wrong to me. I didn't say it was right, just that it was probably the motivation :)

They want people to finish in time to play in the weekend Swiss? At least, if I have my summer schedule right :huh:. The Spingold & mini-Spingolds start on Monday. With 64 teams (or the equivalent), the event takes 6 days (the Spingold of course takes 7 or usually 8). That runs through Saturday and there's nothing to play in on Sunday, except an early start, rushed Regional Swiss, so the people in the finals are likely to go home, not what ACBL wants.

Maybe, maybe not. Many many years ago, when multi was pretty much never played in the US (long before there were approved defenses), my partner and I played a round against Fred Stewart & Steve Weinstein in the Reisinger. We sat down, they said they played that a 2♦ opening showed a weak 2 bid in a Major, and I, being somewhat into systems even back then, started to consider what we should do against that. They cheerfully said that if the bid came up we could look at our hands and decide what we wanted bids to mean. Saved a lot of time (no 2♦ bids that round), left us feeling very positive about them. I know, it's not according to the rules, and I wouldn't expect very many people to take that attitude in a National Championship, but I certainly agree with Gnome about online games, especially if the purpose of the game is to help us all work on our agreements; it's a lot more productive for both sides to know what they're doing.

Something very like this format was proposed for the 2009 US Trials, and was overwhelmingly rejected by the (very large and quite representative of the players in the Trials) International Team Trials Committee after a lot of discussion. At least some of the professional pairs said that they would not play in a pairs qualifying event under this sort of format. The ITTC chose instead to run what was essentially a double elimination KO (the teams that lost from the Round of 16 on played in the USA2 bracket). The winner of the USA2 bracket won the Bermuda Bowl, which probably will provide support for those of us who feel that a team trials is better than a pairs trials :rolleyes:

Two additional comments: 1. It would be very interesting to have data on whether the IMPs won/lost are primarily because the other table was in a different contract or because of the number of tricks taken. That's part of Richard's "bidding history" of course. 2. As Pavlicek points out, the pair at the other table has a major effect on results. I'd add that for results from Round Robins, team strategy is also important. For example, suppose you have a sponsored team where the pro pairs are a solid, down the middle pair and a more volatile pair. The right strategy for the Round Robin is surely to play the client pair against weaker teams, which will inflate their IMP score (note that client pairs usually do well on Butler rankings at the World Championships). More interesting is the choice of which of the other two pairs plays against which other teams. Both of them will play against the top teams of course. I think that most NPCs would tend to play the volatile pair against the weakest teams and the solid pair against the middle teams. That's because in the Round Robin you want to maximize your IMPs against the weakest teams, and you're most likely to be able to do that by playing the volatile pair against them. So for Round Robins, I'd expect to see the client pair do best, the volatile pair next best and the middle of the road pair worst of the three. Of course, this doesn't have much effect on Pavlicek's numbers because not many of the World Championship Round Robin matches have been shown on Vugraph, and none of the US Trials Round Robin matches are shown (we worry about security). But probably these results do include the European Championships, which are completely Round Robins, so the results for the European pairs may be somewhat a result of strategy decisions. For instance, I'd expect Lauria-Versace, a "solid" pair, to play against generally better opponents than Fantoni-Nunes, a "swingy" pair.

Nothing is "Brown Sticker" in the US - that's a WBF thing. Kaplan Inversion (whether 1♥-1NT shows 4 or 5 spades) isn't allowed under the ACBL General Convention Chart, but is allowed under the MidChart ("All other constructive rebids and responses are permitted" with an exception that doesn't apply here).

Several years ago (well, maybe more than several - 10 or 15), I created an ACBL convention card in Word. It actually takes the opposite approach to that being suggested by many of you - it uses a large size font and has minimal words. Things are in the same place as on an ACBL card, but those things that don't apply aren't cluttering the card. We have always received positive comments on the card, things like "it's nice to be able to read the convention card" and so far as I can remember no one has ever objected to the lack of detail. I am happy to give anyone who wants it the card, although at the moment I am unable to edit it because stupid Word won't let me do suit symbols (guess it would be off topic to rant at that!). The WBF convention card takes the approach of requiring a lot of detail (on the back) and having a section on the front for things that need to be discussed in advance. When it's filled out well, it's very good. But they are rarely filled out well. I've read hundreds of WBF convention cards, virtually all of them prepared for World Championships, where you'd expect people to try to do a good job, and it's always a pleasant surprise to find one that actually puts what belongs there in the "advance disclosure" box - some people include too much, some too little. For that reason, I don't think introducing a similar card in ACBL-land will help.

I definitely agree that it's important that your mind not be cluttered with previous hands. I think that the reason great players can remember a hand (with the proper trigger of course - that might be going through the hands in the order they were played, might be the bidding, might be the opponent, might be a situation) is that during the hand they really are storing all of that information (spots played to each trick) and then even though they "cleared" their memory for the next hand, it's there, in storage somewhere, to be recalled. Someone (I've forgotten who) once suggested that a good way to get "into" a hand at the beginning was to make sure to repeat the spots played to the first trick - focus really hard on making sure those cards are stored properly in your memory and then you can often stay on the track of remembering future cards. That helps me (not that I am in either Kit or Lew's class when it comes to remembering hands). It's also interesting that the context of hands can make a difference. I think I've probably told this story before, but when computer dealt hands were first being used, there was some sort of bug in the random number generator ACBL was using, so the same set of hands happened to be dealt for two tournaments about 5 or 6 months apart. Lew happened to play in both of them. I've always wished he'd write an article about it, but by now I suppose he never will. In the first event, he was playing with me in a Sectional mixed pairs. In the second event, he was playing with Evan Bailey in a Regional pair game. His pair was E/W in both events, but he sat in the opposite seats. The hand on which he realized that he'd played the set of boards before was one in which both hands were 4333 with the same 4 card major. Our bidding methods at the time allowed both pairs to uncover that fact and play 3NT. There were the same number of tricks in NT and the major, so it was a good board for our methods. Except that I was playing the hand the first time - I had xxx opposite AJx in clubs and forgot to lead a club toward the AJx in case the KQ were onside. They were, so we got a bad board instead of a good one. The second time the board came up, Lew was playing the hand and of course led a club towards his hand and made the extra club trick when the KQ were onside. I don't know the odds of this happening on two hands and both times in clubs, but of course Lew did and then he started thinking about the earlier hands and pretty soon he was able to go up to the director and convince him that the hands were the same as they had been a few months earlier. But until he happened to be in the same contract with the same "problem" for declarer, he hadn't noticed that the hands were the same. Another time that we played a set of boards that were created wrong was similar. This time, the dealing program had somehow rotated the suits - the spades from the first set of hands were hearts, the hearts were diamonds, diamonds clubs, clubs spades (or maybe the other way around). These two sets of hands occurred within days of each other. But the first set occurred in a matchpoint event and the second one in a team game. Chip noticed that the hands were the same when he had the identical problem about how to play a suit with the second set of hands. Once he started to think about it, he was able to realize what had happened. I'm sure I'd never have realized. And another time (I've had instances of the same boards popping up in different events a lot, haven't I?), when the same hands were dealt in the Summer NABC Women's KO and the Fall Women's BAM, my partner noticed after about 5 rounds of play, when she had the identical close decision about whether to invite game opposite a weak 2 bid. Up until then, the problems had been sufficiently different because of the IMPs vs BAM contexts that neither of us had noticed.

Do you mean including all of the spot cards? In one case (Lew, who really has an incredible memory for bridge hands - I remember a time when he was playing with someone with whom he'd only played a few times several years earlier and some auction came up and after the hand he said "the last time we had this auction you had ... (quoting the exact hand from the previous time)."), yes, he'd include all the spots. In the other case, Kit, no - in fact, I was discussing this with him and he vehemently denied that he could reconstruct the hands, until I said I didn't mean every spot card. ;)

Although the question you asked was how to persuade clubs to produce hand records, I'd like to suggest that another alternative, that might actually improve your game equally well, would be to work on your memory. Try writing the auctions down on your scorecard & then after the game go over the hands and see whether you can recreate the hands and the play. I know some people who started this sort of process by writing their own hands down on the scoresheet. I find the auction easier to write down and usually enough to jog my memory. One of the most important things all of us can do to improve is to do a better job of visualizing all 4 hands during the bidding and play. In fact, one expert I know suggested that the reason men are usually better than women (at the top level) in bridge is because they are better able to visualize things (males usually do better on spatial relation type tests for instance). I know that it takes me a serious effort to form a picture of the entire hand and that when I do so I play better. I remember one session I played with my former husband, before hand records existed, where I happened to leave on a trip immediately after the game. When I got home, he commented that he'd gone through the scores and had recreated all of the hands relatively easily. I know another expert who routinely goes through his scores and not only recreates the hands but writes up what happened and what he thinks he and his partner could have done to improve. I'm sure there are many reasons why both of these players are world champions, but the fact that they pay enough attention to each hand to be able to recreate the hands and what happened later is surely one reason.

Would that be Bulgaria 1 losing in the Quarterfinals and Bulgaria 2 in the Semi's :)

You can have both - 1NT-2♠-2NT/3♣: 3♦ = diamond splinter, might have a 4 card Major. Now opener can bid a 4-card Major to find the 4-4 fit, or bid 3NT with diamonds solidly stopped and no 4-card Major, or bid 4♣ to play in clubs. 3♥ = heart splinter, might have 4 spades. Opener can bid 4♠ with 4. 3♠ = spade splinter, 4 hearts 3NT = spade splinter < 4 hearts Similarly after 1NT-2NT showing diamonds. Obviously, you can't show diamonds with a club splinter here, so 1NT-3♦ is that (game forcing, 5+diamonds, club splinter, might have a 4-card Major). When I was first taught this method (back before the dawn of time), I was told that all you have to tell your partner is what 3♦ is and s/he can figure everything else out. I happen to be a big fan of splinter-showing. It just seems to make hand evaluation a lot easier. But I know there are others who prefer to show length and they'll argue that showing length makes it easier to evaluate. Maybe it's what you get used to.

On hand 1, I would have bid 3♦ showing a splinter, 4 spades and a raise to 3 or 4 (for me, 4♦ would be a void). But after the 3♦ bid I'd be on sounder ground that you were, since partner's bids are defined: 3♠ says "if you have a raise to 3, I don't want to be in game;" 3NT says "I have a slam try opposite a raise to 4;" a cue bid says "I have a slam try opposite a raise to 3;" and 4♠ says "if you have a raise to 3, I accept but am not interested in slam." I think that with your partner's hand I'd bid 4♠, but I guess that depends on how sound the raise to 3 is - certainly the QJ of diamonds are wasted values, and the major suit quacks are soft, so if someone suggested I should bid only 3♠ I wouldn't argue. Obviously, your partner didn't intend to make a slam try, but was trying to play 3NT opposite the diamond splinter. It doesn't bother me (at all) not to be able to play 3NT when we have a 4-4 Major suit fit and one hand has a splinter, so that isn't a meaning I'd ascribe to 3NT (although when the opponents DBL the splinter, 3NT is to play, but in that situation you know where the honors in the splinter suit are). By the way, I'd have thought that most people would have agreements about this auction - it's a fairly common one and one where a lot of IMPs can be won and lost. On hand 2, I started thinking I'd bid 4♠ which should show a doubleton spade honor, but Justin has convinced me that it doesn't show this good a hand, so I think I'd bid 4♦ and hope to be able to get to spades later if it's right. If partner bids 4♠ (which I think is a suggestion of a place to play), for instance, I can raise to 5 and have shown both my strength and shape. Hand 3 feels too off-shape to sit and I'd bid 5♣, knowing that on some hands it will be wrong. But I'm a terrible matchpoint player :)

As a member of the "on-site Vugraph team," I am confident that there was no delay. On Wednesday & Thursday I was sitting in the playing room monitoring the match on my computer while it was being played and looking for substitute matches that were playing at about the same pace - I am confident that I would have known if there was a delay; on Friday I was an operator and the audience feedback was in "real time."

Another problem with an immediate KO is that even if all the favorites win (assuming we know who the favorites are and that they don't play each other in the Round of 16 :blink:), some will have had an easier time of it than others. Thus some will be in better shape for the Quarterfinals than others. So even if you reduced the field, I think a Round Robin is a fairer start than an immediate KO. As for having even more teams - I think that would mean either having a longer event or dealing with separate fields for the Round Robin. Although separate fields seems fair, so long as they are "even," the fact that there is no good way to seed teams from so many different countries would be a serious problem - I would be willing to bet lots of money that most of the teams in the event would believe they were in the "tougher" Round Robin group, and that would make them unhappy. And probably some of them would be right. And a longer event ... well, it's already pretty long. People do periodically suggest something other than immediate KO for the Vanderbilt & Spingold. There is general agreement that the seeding of the bottom half of the field is fairly random, although the seeding at the top, where recent performance in the Vanderbilt, Spingold & Reisinger count heavily, is pretty good, except for foreign players (foreign players are given seeding points, but there's no very good way of figuring out how many a player should receive; then the seeding points decay, even if the player doesn't play in the NABC events, so we have some clearly "wrong" seeding of some foreign players). One of the reason that the format isn't likely to change is that both events have to use the same format (I think that's in Vanderbilt's will :)), so it isn't possible to experiment with something similar to the Rosenblum format in only one of the events. I suppose another reason is that the events are popular and the teams that make it to the end (whatever you define "the end" as - maybe the Round of 16?) are all deserving, so nothing seems to be seriously broken.

I was sent the statement (not a "recorder form" because it was Fred who filed the recorder form) by the person who wrote it, with an express statement that I could forward it to anyone else. I did not get it because of any confidential position I may hold (and indeed I do not have any confidential position with either ACBL or WBF, but everyone seems to get USBF confused with those other two organizations). I posted the excerpt only because I had previously stated that I thought Fred's opponents had not deliberately concealed their methods from him and the excerpt contradicted that statement.

That is somewhat speculative, isn't it? We don't know why Fred's opps behaved as they did. I have now read Fred's opponent's statement to the Recorder (I guess that partly answers the question of what is being done - the Recorder is investigating). That statement contradicts my speculation that they did not intentionally fail to disclose that they played penalty DBLs of 3rd seat non-vul 1NT openings. The entire statement is very long, but I believe this excerpt is representative and not out of context: I apologize for my earlier speculations.

One of the reasons we use RDBL as part of our escape mechanism when 1NT is penalty DBLd is having been bitten once by redoubling on a strong but unbalanced hand. After that, we came up with a system for handling hands like that after 1NT-DBL. Chip & Lew still play it, but I have given it up as too much of a memory strain :P. It involves transfers from 2NT through 3♦, with the transfer bids showing either a weak hand with the next suit or a good hand without it. So, for instance, 1NT-DBL-2NT is either a weak hand with clubs or a strong hand with diamonds + a Major (shown by 3♦ after opener's 3♣), or a strong hand with both Majors (after 3♣ by opener, 3♥ is less strong than 3♠), or a strong 4441 or (544)0 (shown by 3NT after opener's 3♣). The other two transfers are similar. As for the actual hand, I asked Chip what he thought, and he said he would bid 2♦ over the DBL, showing diamonds and a higher suit. He said that he did that not because he was convinced that 1NT would go down, but that because if he didn't bid now and the opponents ran, he would have no way of showing a 2-suited hand, and if he did compete, partner would expect more values (our Pass of 1NT-DBLD is to play, sometimes because we think we'll make it, sometimes because we have no place to go).