pholly

Playing with my erratic robot friends on an instant tournament, I had a good day and came 2nd with a little over 60%. The winner scored 92.6%, a score I haven't seen in over 50 years of bridge (most of it bad to average). I looked up his details, he was a novice! Should I retire now?

Thank you indeed for all your replies. It has been an education

The bidding went as follows: East opened 1C, south bid 1S, west passed and I bid 2C (unassuming cuebid) The director immediately banned my partner from further bidding. How did this happen? The bidding was not quite as it seemed. I opened the bidding out of turn with a pass as north (I was having a bad day!) but east accepted and bid 1C. After partner bid 1S, I was told by the director I could not make a bid unless it was less than an opening bid. So far so good. We play the unassuming cue bid as 10hcp and some support for partner so with 10hcp in my hand and it not being an opening bid, I looked at my options and decided to make an unassuming cue bid to see the strength of partner's overcall. The director said it was not unequivocally not an opening bid as it was actually unlimited and so barred my partner from bidding. I was thus left to play 2C which was the opposition's suit (which by the way did not fare well). This penalty seems absurdly harsh to my way of thinking and I wonder whether I just have to treat this as a learning experience or is there discretion to modify the penalty. I would be interested in the forum's views.

Hi - I noticed your comment on John Matheson's article on Gazzilli and wondered whether I could get access to it. I am in the (pre-)early stages of learning the convention and a simplified version sounds appealing! Cheers, Philip

Different partners prefer different versions of RKCB and I am trying to make sense of it all. This is my premise: the key card ‘asker’ usually is the one with the bigger hand or more particularly with the greater number of key cards though this is not always so. Nevertheless, the asker is more often than not interested in whether the responder has 1 or 2 key cards. If asker wants or needs 3 key cards, perhaps he should not be asking. This being the case, one has to cater for the situation where responder has only a single key card so as to be able to opt out of slam. Playing 1403 OR 0314, there is no difficulty opting out of slam if trumps are Ds, Hs or Ss as the key card response is less than or equal to game; but with Cs as trumps, playing 0314 doesn’t work as with only a single key card, the response of 5D is too high to avoid slam. Therefore clubs should be played as 1403. From this, one can see that playing 1403 is also satisfactory for all suits. The only contrary argument I can think of is that the asker more often wants to know in the main whether there are 0 or 1 key cards in partner’s hands. I have looked at this for some time and believe it is far more common to be searching for 1 or 2 (rather than 0 or 1) key cards when slam is being considered. I would be interested in other comments or arguments for one system or the other.

Thanks all - appreciate the input

What do members think the meaning of responder's jump is in this sequence: 1S - 2C; 2H - 4D I thought it cued diamonds agreeing hearts; partner thought it was a second suit. Thoughts anyone?

thx barmar - a simple solution!

Using Windows XP I tried to open the recent Vanderbilt archive, a .lin file, but received the depressing news that Windows could not open this file. Any ideas anyone?

Fred - unabounded joy! Yay - it works and many thanks. Thx to you also barmar for clarifying that issue. Now off to the vugraph . . .

Interesting observation - to the left of my post above I am said to have joined today (19th April) but in fact I joined years ago. I did try joining again for no good reason (I AM a technophobe) but was told my alias was alreadyb taken so I aborted the project. This is probably irrelevant but I am mentioning it just in case . . .

Six months ago, everything was fine on my PC (networked) running Windows XP Pro - no problems with bbo. Then one day I open bbo and hear a very loud, noisy repetitive 'clacking' sound and the screen shows a pop-up box saying: "Updating convention cards". This will go on forever. I can go to the main bridge room but am not able to enter a table. I can go to the vu-graph theatre and highlight a table but not enter it for viewing. Meanwhile the 'clacking' goes on and on . . . Our IT chap says he has changed nothing in head office (1,000 km away - I have sat connection) and I have downloaded the latest bbo version numerous times. In fact, I think the problems possibly started after downloading a new version. I hope some technophile can help this technophobe . . . getting desperate :-) Am bridge-deprived.