sathyab

A bit unlucky and didn't think it through fully. I doubt if declarer is bidding 5♦ at MP with 2 small spades and ♣Jx[x]. But having said that I wouldn't be too critical of him. He did try to reason it somewhat, while a lot of other players may have gone up with the Ace or played low without giving either play much thought.

What was the form of scoring ? I don't see you mentioning it was IMPs and the Hand Viewer doesn't show it either. At MP the play seems quite sensible. As others playing in 4♠ will be making at least ten tricks, making 3nt on the nose will be worth few Matchpoints if any. The best chance for ten tricks is either a club at T2 or a heart and it figured the opening leader was more likely to have led from the Ace of hearts.

You meant 6♦, I believe. And yes, if you were looking for something authoritative on RKC, you could do a lot worse than listen to Eddie Kantar ;)

We've underbid our hand so much that we can't do anything but pass now. Yes, it does appear that we start with three obvious losers in the majors. But we had an opportunity to bid 3♦ over 3♣ and we didn't. You don't always have this shape when you overcall 2♦ and the ♣Q doesn't always have to be well placed. If we had acted earlier we would not be worrying about whether we should take any action over 4♥, or worry a lot less, in any case.

I'm suggesting that essentially natural bids should remain natural, but convey new information. If we already know about ♣K, a 6♣ bid that would normally say "I have the king of clubs" would now say "I have the queen of clubs". If we already know about ♦K, a 6♦ bid that would normally say "I have the king of diamonds" would now say "I have the queen of diamonds". Or, if you play it this way, a 6♦ bid that would normally ask "Do you have ♦K?" would instead ask "Do you have ♦Q?" Thanks for the clarification. What prompted me to seek the clarification was the use of the word "style" in your follow-up. The problem here is due to the structure of RKC and follow-up bids following a series of cue-bids, rather than anything specific to a particular style. If you substitute responder's 4♦ by 4♥, then anyone initiating RKC over partner's 4♠ will wind up with the same problem of hearing the wasteful 6♣ response and wondering how best to proceed next. Your idea that the meaning of the natural response to the conventional 5nt bid be different in light of prior cue-bidding, is an interesting one, but not mainstream. For instance, Eddie Kantar has not made any mention of it all, but does suggest the use of SSA (Specific Suit Ask) following the responser to RKC, which requires you to skip a queen-asking bid when relevant for instance.

There're other situations where there's duplication between controls shown by cue-bidding below game and information you gather from conventional responses to RKC and follow-up bids. In such situations are you advocating i) that the conventional responses be modified to not duplicate information that's already known OR ii) some kind of a spiral scan scheme which can avoid asking for information that's already known but usually at the expense of skipping a precious level of bidding OR iii) avoiding conventional bids altogether and continue cue-bidding until you jointly figure that the limit of the two hands has been reached ?

I think the failure to shift to a Diamond by East is probably because he's reluctant to lead away from his King. May be East expected that his partner would get in with a high heart before declarer went after clubs or produce two club stoppers. It'd be clear for West to shift to a Diamond whenever he got in. If South held something like Kxx Hxx Qx Kxxxx, he's risking giving up an overtrick unnecessarily by a Diamond shift.

Partner has X available, but he is the one with length in clubs. If he doubled here, he risks his partner bidding 3M when he doesn't have Diamond tolerance. If responder had 5-5-2-1 he'd somewhat stuck, not anxious to defend 3♣, but not sure if bidding 3♦ on a worthless doubleton is better.

That's like being grateful to a driver who expressed his appreciation using just one finger.

So you don't have any problem with SPAM at all then ? SPAM is worthless garbage sent by people and companies that you don't know. One liners are simply someone's opinion, they cared enough to share their opinion... Whether it's right or wrong, rude or considerate. If you don't find them valuable, just read on or you can ask them to elaborate, I'm sure they would be happy to. The companies or individuals who send you SPAM might disagree with you. They care to share and boy do they share :) They'd tell you the same, just use the DELETE key. So then next time the prince of Nigeria e-mails you asking for your help in transporting 10 million dollars, you can e-mail him back and ask him to elaborate on why he thinks you should do so, and to explain why other alternatives are wrong :). I might take you up on the idea. Replying to a Nigerian price might be as productive as asking a wtp'er or LOL'er to elaborate. He could have elaborated if he wanted to, but he didn't. What part of "wtp" or "LOL" do you not understand ?

Serves them right for not playing suit preference signals in the trump suit. If you're convinced that West can't have x-2-x-1 hand by his failure to bid, then the point you made that even if they get a ruff, it'll probably at the expense of a natural trump trick, is valid. To make sure there're no trump suit preferences, you need to lead a spade toward dummy at T2.

Because an incoming phone call disturbs you from your day whereas you read the forums at your own leisure? Because phone calls are directed at a particular number whereas forum posts are simply laid out for the public to read? Because the forums are free to use??? I honestly can't imagine going through life spending much time worrying about stuff like this. Is this why people have so many heart attacks and so much stress in life? Sure I'm glad to have the convenience of caller id. But if it vanished tomorrow I wouldn't be lobbying to get it back. I would happily go through life answering the phone and accepting what comes. Here's a thought. Decide whose opinions you like. Set up an email list with only those people where you send them any problem you like. Rinse and repeat. Enjoy. Mailing lists do not scale well when the number of participants rises. They're being replaced by news groups even for intra-company communications. Mailing lists are used mainly to communicate critical messages while others are posted to news groups in several companies in Silicon Valley that I know of.

That's the choice a user can make, if he has the tools to do so. At present, we don't have such mechanisms available.

I'm not sure what you are suggesting. If I start a thread, no one that I have can post to that thread? If someone I have blocked is quoted by someone who I do not have blocked, I can only read part of the post? That would likely make it difficult to figure out what is going on in the post. Or does the whole post get blocked because someone I have blocked is quoted? What of someone else quotes the quoted part? I don't have the solution figured out in exact detail. But this is a well understood problem in computer science: a cluster of nodes where a sub-set is either trusted or distrusted by another sub-set of nodes. Companies working on social networking have to go to elaborate lengths to solve this problem. But there are cheaper solutions which get you reasonably good approximate solutions. Better yet, why not use Facebook ? I'm new to Facebook, but I know that users who have your permission in a given network can write to and read from your "wall", which serves as a semi-public bulletin board.

I think the solution is to ignore posts that are in a format you don't like. Filtering posters doesn't solve anything imo. Other people will still quote people you have blocked, and posts that are in reply to those people will make no sense to you, or may even be misinterpreted to have a totally different meaning. I think that would be sticking your finger in the leak in the dam and watching six more leaks burst out. I mean let's be real. Some people don't like any short post. Some don't like LOLs. Some don't like lots of bold or italics. Some don't like bad grammar. Some don't care about the opinions of young/old people (take your pick). Some don't like lots of emoticons or yellow smiley faces. Some don't like curse words. Some don't like tough problems posted in B/I. Some don't like crazy bidding ideas as the solution to problems. And for every person that doesn't like any of those things in particular, there are probably just as many who don't care and even more who like them. Read the posts you want to. Don't read the ones you don't. If you accidentally read one you don't like, you should accept that you have lost 15 seconds of your life and move along to the next post. Any solution beyond that is making a mountain out of a molehill. In the solution that I have in mind, other people can't quote any one that you have blocked in a given thread. Someone has to take the trouble of starting a new thread and manually duplicating all the replies in the new thread. People do have preferences about who they'd like to hear from. That's the reason Caller-Id was invented. As a society we're moving toward a model where we exert our preferences in every thing we do. Why should the forum be an exception ?

So you don't have any problem with SPAM at all then ? SPAM is worthless garbage sent by people and companies that you don't know. One liners are simply someone's opinion, they cared enough to share their opinion... Whether it's right or wrong, rude or considerate. If you don't find them valuable, just read on or you can ask them to elaborate, I'm sure they would be happy to. The companies or individuals who send you SPAM might disagree with you. They care to share and boy do they share :) They'd tell you the same, just use the DELETE key.

So you don't have any problem with SPAM at all then ?

So since, by the current poll results, 26 people like such answers outright, 8 people sometimes do, and 10 people don't, is it fair to say it's reasonable for people to keep doing it? Yes, people have spoken in this regard, although as I noted earlier, I am not sure you would get as many votes in favor of one-liners had the question been posed as "How would you like a dismissive reply to a serious post of yours ?". Had there been only one or two votes against one-liners the only practical solution would have been to advise them to grow a thicker skin and endure it. But that number is a sizeable minority, so we might want to look for a solution that accommodates both positions. In an unmoderated group such as this, the rights of those who post something that might be objectionable is protected, whereas the rights of those who don't want to see such objectionable material is not protected at all. You have to allow individuals to exercise control over replies to their posts. Making this a moderated group will solve some problems, but create quite a few of its own. I believe there is a better solution, below. Examples of this kind of control already exist. On both BBO and OKBridge, a host that serves a table can be selective about who gets to play or kibitz at his table. Chat from kibitzers can be filtered on a per-player basis. It shouldn't be too hard to extend this model to this forum.

I'm afraid though that you, Mike and other like-minded folks are in the minority on this issue. Look at the number of votes for option (1) in this poll so far. Most networks would have projected that to be the winner if this were a proposition on a ballot. May be we should have another poll that asks a slightly different question. "How would you like it when someone replies to a serious post of YOURS with a WTP or LOL?"

I think a good way to avoid offensive posts is to have an exclusion-list on a per-user basis. Sort of like an ACL (Access Control List) in some file systems. So if a user "x" wants to exclude posts from say, "jd", "jl", "fl" or "rc" for instance, he builds such a list and it would preclude the listed users from posting messages to a thread started by "x". You can keep the list confidential, so nobody has to know who they're except you. But after a while when you see that the forum is relatively free from posts from the aforementioned users, people might start wondering. The alternative is to use your signature line to accomplish it. Something like "the following people are requested NOT to reply to my threads. While the usefulness of your input may often be questionable, your offensiveness is rarely in question. Fortunately there are enough useful posts from others in the forum, that excluding you from discussion is not a great loss. Thank you"

That's shocking. Almost as shocking as Dick Cheney saying "I don't have any problem with water-boarding". (my first) LOL !

The other problem with WTPs and LOLs is when people who frequently use them get selective. Case in point: your recent post of a 3nt play problem in the Burlingame regional. In my opinion it was as close to a WTP as they get and there may be others who share that opinion. And yet most people didn't post one-liners, including the frequent-WTP-LOL crowd. It's hard for me to believe that they wouldn't have been derisive had someone else posted the problem. So while they're offensive quite often, they're not equal-opportunity-offense-dispensers.

I think what people find annoying is when the non-experts chime in with their "I agree" posts AFTER the jdonns and JLOLs of the forum have posted. It might be nice to know that you agree with a well known poster, but you don't need to announce it. If you can on the same wave length at the bridge table, we would be invincible as a pair :P

Yes Fred does participate occassionally, but very rarely do I see one-liners from him. I believe that the problem was non-trivial and quoted the expert's opinion just to prove that point. If he had said everything that awm said and told me that a direct 6♦ was the right bid I would had no problem with it. BTW, there was another post about a 6h slam from the same regional. I didn't play the hand, neither did my teammates. We in fact gained on the hand as my teammates (I was sitting out the round) only got to 4h, while opponents got to 6h and went down. But the line chosen by the declarer is an intriguing one, so I'm still thinking about how I'd play that if it came up again .I posted the hand because it's a useful exercise in trying to combine chances. I know that if someone else posted a similar hand I'd benefit from it.

You still don't get it at all, do you ? I'm not as concerned about whether a direct 6♦ is right or wrong, as much as the reasons behind it. If someone had said "Obvious pass" I'd put that post in the same category. What I really dislike is the trivialization of a problem just because you think it's obvious. I think there were a number of useful posts before some of the one-liners that pointed out some of the reasons which make 6♦ a better percentage bid. Those arguments are what I'm looking for. As for your suspicion about what I wanted to hear, I didn't even tell you what happened at the table for that often colors the issue needlessly.