zenko

Playing wk NT: if you open 1M with 5332 15-17 - you really need Gazilli (which you need anyway IMO, it one of rare conventions I really like) or something similar, that solves your problems fine if you open 1D - you are kind of screwed, your options are to respond 1M with 3 cards if needed, or even better move bal hands to 1C opening (which is good "modern" idea anyway) if you open 1C - you play 1nt response 8-10, and 1C-1D semi-artificial (to include 4clubs333 or even maybe 5clubs332 hands 5-8 range), or even better you can play transfer responses to 1C (another good "modern" idea that works even better in WK NT system), then you have no rebid problems AND you rightside everything

To quote the Mickey Rourke's advice to William Hurt in Body Heat: " I got a serious question for you: What the f... are you doing? This is not s... for you to be messin' with. Are you ready to hear something? Any time you try a decent crime (or play Kickback), you got fifty ways you're gonna f... up. If you think of twenty-five of them, then you're a genius... and you ain't no genius." BTW, yes, I am driving stick shift too

Hi, Can't find any info about vugraph broadcast from Louisville NABC. Will there be any? Please excuese me if the anwer is already posted, Best regards, Daniel

Not to open is plain wrong, unless you are WAY behind and in desperate need for some swings.

Neither, by revoking declarer won a trick (i.e. he "ruffed") so the penalty is 2 tricks, not one, and the correct ruling is 6S -2.

Unless its against your religion playing for your own money is by far the best way to become a better player. I used to play club games making side bets, say a dollar per one percent score difference. If you bet against enough pairs a 40% session can really teach you a lesson.

So team matches do not count as tournaments? If not maybe they should, that way you can build your history for free. Nevertheless, I am very much in favor of this, turney/team organizers need as much support as we can give them! Now if we can somehow make them use the team match organizing feature on the web version that would awesome. I love playing team matches but often give up on waiting for one. I suspect many people gave up on organizing matches because of so many runners. BTW it would be great to be able sign up for team match while playing on a table. Maybe the solution is to add an additional semi-automatic chat "type" that can be used only for advertising for team matches, that you can choose to enable or not, in similar fashion as starting of vugraph, or notification if your friend logs in. That way I do not have to sit idle waiting for the right team match for me to come along.

Hi, The web environment bring the worst out of many, so first thank you for trying to help the game be more civilized. Regarding completion rate I have 3 questions: 1) my board completion rate seems too high (100%), since I do recall sometimes not finishing a hand due to connection issue, joining a tourney and such. On another hand my tourney completion rate (93%) seems too low, once in a blue moon I do not complete a tourney because lost connection and by the time I get back the sub is already in my seat, but thats no more than 1 in 50 for sure. I wonder is it because I sometimes play a team match that gets shut down in the middle? That seems unlikely since the hands played up to that point are not even available to look up later. 2) What happens if you get kicked out of a team game/table, for whatever reason? Does that count against your completion rate? 3) When hosting a table what is a reasonably high completion rate setting to use? I.e. what is a average/median completion rate? Also I would suggest posting somewhere, at least periodically, the overall statistics, for this and many other reasons. For example those who are below average might that way get shamed into changing their ways, when they realize that "everybody is doing it" rationalization for behaving badly does not really hold true.

Asking players to rate themselves is bound to give you inaccurate results, what I consider "complex" someone else might think of as simple and vice versa. Still, to try to assess own style is somewhat useful practice, and the whole thing would work much better accompanied with example hands, sort of like when you talk with your financial advisor and he gives you risk tolerance quiz. Done right, that kind of tool would be highly useful for bridge coaches and advance class teachers. BTW bridge in general is lacking sport-science related research materials/tools. If bridge is any other sport there would be already several analytical studies available on, for example, reasons for current Levin-Weinstein dominance in top-level pairs events.

I'm sure 4-6 GF isn't a problem. If someone can enlighten me as to the extra value to a system Keri offers (or Gladiator for that matter) then I'm willing to listen and suggest it can or should already there for any established partnership in any given situation - whether it be some form of Lebensohl (or similar) in competition - or various Stayman sequences with continuations (to give but 2 examples). Bridge is not (an exact) science - you show what you have and partner can react accordingly. Like Yogi Berra said "You can see a lot just by observing" If you care to read what many of us wrote here you will find a lot of features of KERI that do not exist elsewhere (or do exist but are underdeveloped), those features clearly add value, the only issue is is that value worth the trouble of learning it and how much it annoys you to get occasional anti-field bad result because of KERI. Charlie Parker used to talk bad about alto sax all the time until he really tried to play it, after that he did not want to play any other, maybe you would feel the same about KERI if you give it a try.

You have point as long as you play the same NT range as the most of the field, so when you end up in the wrong contract using normal methods you will probably have a lot of company. But if you play ranges that are anti-field you need methods that will offset that, otherwise you might be the only one ending up in say 3N with xx opposite Jx in a suit, etc.

I play it in wk NT structure, and it works fine, probably better than it would with strong NT, but you do need to memorize quite a bit. I am not sure did anybody mentioned it so far, IMO one of the main advantages of KERI is 2NT F rebid by responder after any transfer acceptance that lets bid effectively with both 5M-4m and 5M-5m hands, among other things. I am aware that similar feature can be incorporated in regular NT structure ( I think Brogeland have something like that in the system he plays), but you need to fiddle quite a bit to make it fit.

If completely artificial responses are not an issue, the optimal space-conserving structure is one based on Fibonacci numbers tree, since it is mathematically the most efficient one. Curiously enough it is also the easiest one to remember IMO, once you grasp the basic principle its a breeze. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_number

Playing is not time efficient way to learn card play technique because truly instructive hands simply do not come often enough, and when they come you often do not notice it unless you do very diligent post-mortem sessions. So at the beginning I think you should listen to Zia's advice and focus more on reading books (but avoid advanced systems books since that's not really useful, at lest not at this point). Playing comes more in play later when you are good enough to start forming ambitious partnerships. Also regarding partners for start it is smart to be as promiscuous as possible, especially when it comes to playing with better partners, you can learn a thing or two form each of them, and also that way you will learn what is kind of "normal" bridge style/system in your neck of woods which is very important. Regardless what system you are playing it is crucial that you also have a very good understanding what your opponents bids typically mean, as well as to asses what will "the field" do with your cards.

Regardless what are you intention you are barking at the wrong tree IMO, what you should really focus on is how dependent is your signaling method on declarer playing a honest card. With limited number of small cards, playing UDCA you are more exposed to declarer messing up your positive/even length signal (by hiding the smallest card), same way by playing standard, he can spoil your negative/odd signal which is kind of a wash. When it comest to playing "small" small card its a wash, but the key advantage of UDCA is "high" small card play situation, with worthless holding it is usually safe to give the clearest negative signal possible by playing the highest small card you have, while playing standard with valuable holding you often have to compromise an not play the highest small card you have, to avoid weakening your holding too much, which sends muddled signal to your pard.

I object to stated argument that "primary theoretical benefits is splitting up your hands into 3 relatively equal (by frequency) ranges". The key issue is to force opponents to compete honestly over pass and to remove the pressure from passers partner to act with marginal values. In order to achieve that pass should far more often show weak hand than strong, so instead of 0-7 or 13+ it is much better to play it say 0-10 or 17+, or something along those lines.

Agree, I played that a lot and it worked very well, you are not that sensitive to interference and I do not recall ever going for a big number

I can't imagine prism signals being illegal, their weak point being that they give declarer the same information as the defence. I would guess that information is more useful most of the time to declarer than the defence? Never found them complex, once you unwrap the terminology they are usually presented with. Would be very interested to hear from anyone who has used them for an extended period. I have been using them for quite a while, I do no recall ever that it helped declarer. Grated they rarely make a difference for defence too, (usually you have to have 3 small trumps to use it, and even then often it does not matter), but when it does help it helps tremendously, often in high level contracts. It takes a bit if an effort thou, so if it feels like distraction and you primarily play matchpoints it is probably not worth the trouble. For starter I would suggest trying straight up Vinje parity trump echo and if you like it go ahead and try to upgrade to Prism. Ty for the reply. My basis here may be off, but it was mainly because of slams that put me off prism signals. Because it can give the declarer very similar information if he bothers to work it out. My belief was that I expected him to have more options open to make use of these signals? The biggest gain I imagined would be the oppositions unfamiliarity with the signals? Well that helps for sure, in a sense that declarer has to process info that he is unfamiliar with, but there is far more to it. The key is that the information available from bidding is usually not symmetrical, meaning declarer usually knows from bidding much less about defenders hands than vice versa, and without those clues it is usually much harder for him to figure out the defender's exact distribution (say is it 2335, or 4333, trump being a 3 card suit). Of course, in general do signals help declarer too much is a good question and that applies to these signals too, but nobody says you have to signal honesty if you feel it might help the declarer more. Good thing about it is that if you decide to false card Prism signal it is often quite easy for the other defender to notice that you can not have the distribution that you are showing, and not so easy for declarer, again because of that asymmetrical info from the bidding, as well because of other clues from carding. Say for example when leading 3/5 pard leads the 3 and you have (and hide) the 2, and then he Prism signals showing even number of cards in that suit then you know he is false carding, but declarer can not know that.

http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~forster/bridg...nski/index.html

I can't imagine prism signals being illegal, their weak point being that they give declarer the same information as the defence. I would guess that information is more useful most of the time to declarer than the defence? Never found them complex, once you unwrap the terminology they are usually presented with. Would be very interested to hear from anyone who has used them for an extended period. I have been using them for quite a while, I do no recall ever that it helped declarer. Grated they rarely make a difference for defence too, (usually you have to have 3 small trumps to use it, and even then often it does not matter), but when it does help it helps tremendously, often in high level contracts. It takes a bit if an effort thou, so if it feels like distraction and you primarily play matchpoints it is probably not worth the trouble. For starter I would suggest trying straight up Vinje parity trump echo and if you like it go ahead and try to upgrade to Prism.

"Would have likely" in this context means close enough to nothing that is should be disregarded. "Would have likely" simply can not be grounds for denying non-offending side a shot and grand. And even if they make that bid, who is to say that would make the grand slam out of reach for them. 7 bid and made on both sides is the only fair verdict.

The original post told us what north would have done, so you have no reason to judge otherwise. Not quite. The original post said: North-South play 3 level transfers showing invitational+ hands over interference, so N would have likely bid 3♦ showing 5+ hearts and invitational+ values if E's bid had been alerted. I do not see anything definitive in this statement, "would have likely" does not mean anything really, nor should be basis on any ruling, especially since we have no idea how did the poster came up with it.

Why on earth would he bid 3H invitational with such a shabby 5-card suit and 5 cards in the other suit? To preempt his side out of diamonds? He might end up playing 3N (or even 3H!) when 6D (or even7D!) is laydown! If the ovrecall was 1S that makes it somewhat tricky to get to 7, but now when responder can "show" H on level 1, grand it is at least "logical alternative" contract, probably even 50%+ reachable . My ruling is 7 made for both sides.

Your are certainly allowed to violate your agreements, as long as you are aware of potential issues (say partner bringing something like xxxx, xxx, xxxx, AK). IMO, as a "young" player it is beneficial to play freewheeling style, and then gradually cut-of what is proven not to work, if you play too tight early you never really get over it. Having said that , those who chronically play "solo" bridge are probably better off sticking to poker or chess, which would fit their personality much better

It doesn't really matter if you can or cannot conceive of a reason why I asked about the 2. Frankly, I don't understand why the directors asked me that at all. I asked a question and was lied to. They could have answered using the generic ad truthful style I suggested. Instead, they lied to me while I was declaring and I took a losing line based on their lie. I don't think the line is unreasonably bad. It's certainly not nullo. Frankly, considering how many high cards I was missing, I'm not sure I would have believed them if I had asked about the 5 and been told (truthfully) that it showed a club honor, since that would place the overcaller with, well, the hand she overcalled with. I could have asked a different question. Why does the existence of a superior question give the opponents the right to lie about the inferior one? Keep in mind that the person looking at kx of spades in the slot was the one who said "it shows a spade honor". It is impossible that she didn't know this answer could screw declarer. Again, i ask, where in the laws does it say that if a better question exists than the one actually asked, the opponents may lie to declarer without consequence even if they know their lie was likely to cause declarer to go wrong? Of course you opponent deserve score adjustment plus 30 lashes with wet whip, I think everybody who wrote in this tread agrees with that, so please do not equate my reluctance do give you adjusted score with me having any sympathy to your slimy opponent and his action. To decide do you deserve a better score I first need to know something that you so fair failed to clarify: did you or did you not catch what card your opponent played on the trick before? If you did, then you get your adjustment and a lecture about the proper way to ask such questions. If you did not, you will not get your adjustment, and you will get either stern warning (in case you did not do it on purpose, which I tend to believe happened), or if I have grounds to think you did it on purpose (unlikely, but not impossible) you will get your disciplinary committee hearing scheduled right after your opponent's.