csaba

I would. If 2 1/2 quick tricks was good enough for Culbertson, it's good enough for me ;)

A feature I miss is the ability to go to the table of a player. I can park the mouse pointer over the name of a player and it would display "PlayerName is playing at table 137 in the #foobar competition". If I want to kibitz, I have to find #foobar competition, then the appropriate table. It would be much easier if there was a clickable action to "Kibitz this player", but currently only Private chat (left click) and "Set status" (right click) are available. Perhaps rightclick could pop up a menu with both "Set status" and "Kibitz"

> 6) Which strong club system do you prefer, and why? A customized Precision variant. I never got to play Pierre Collet's Beta (relay system) > 7) Since you have played your strong club system, > do you find that it has significant practical advantages > over natural methods, Yes. The advantage of Precision is not the 1C opening, that's one of the weak points. The advantage lies in the increased number of limited openings. The standard range of 12-21 openings is too wide for comfort. If you look at Master Solvers Club in BWS, one of the recurring themes is handling goodish hands in the 16-18 HCP range, especially if an immediate fit is not found. In precision you open 1C and make a minimum rebid. Against weaker players it increases the advantage because they don't compete enough. Against strong players it increases the bidding accuracy when they don't have the cards to compete. > How good a player/bidder do you have to be to get > an advantage playing a strong club versus a natural system? It has been said that the intermediate/advanced players benefit more than the experts, the reason being that experts can overcome the limitations of the (natural) systems easier. Another reason is that for many intermediate players, this will be the first time to seriously look at more than just the first two rounds of bidding. > 9) How difficult is it to learn to play Precision? > It seems to me that it isn't that much more difficult > than natural systems, for someone with a good > memory, who is willing to hit the books for a bit. > Do you agree ? The original precision was designed to resemble natural systems as much as possible. Some of my friends are teaching their grandchildren bridge with Precision as the initial bidding system (in our club in Romania the majority of players play some sort of Precision, even scratch partnerships). Personally I disagree with Precision as a starting system because I consider that the basics are better explained with a natural system. Natural and Precision have different "mechanics" but are based on the same principles. People who understand the reason behind a natural system have no problem should they wish to switch to Precision.