Roupoil

SEF is quite imprecise, but recommends a 6-card suit or a very strong 5-card suit, so I doubt A6432 would be ok. My friend thought that only franch bidders would be capable of passing 1S, when I considered pass to be normal. Over the 2S rebid, how stupid is it to play a double as really penalty oriented instead of extra values ?

Seems like we were both partly wrong. Well, suppose you bid 2C. LHO passes, partner bids 2H (normally invitational values and 5 hearts, with a sixth one North would surely have found an opening bid), and RHO takes the push to 2S. What do you do ?

[hv=pc=n&s=st4hakda876ca6432]133|100[/hv] I had an argument on this deal with a french friend about what non-french bridge players would do after a 1♠ bid by RHO. Everybody nonvulnerable, MP, partner passed in first seat. Of course we both know what a french bridge player would do since anybody not strictly following the recommandations of SEF wouls probably end up in jail here...

Indeed, the question might be to choose what to do over 5C. In fact, I can't know for sure what opener would have done after 4H in the auction I gave in my earlier post (at the table, something more brutal occured very quickly). He may be tempted to double (which will of course be respected by his partner), and may try 5C, giving us the last guess. These were the hands : [hv=d=w&v=n&n=stxxxh9xxdaqxcjxx&w=sjxxhaqdjxcaqtxxx&e=saxxxhtxdtxxckxxx&s=skqhkj8xxxdkxxxxc]399|300|Scoring: IMP[/hv] At our table, South bid directly to 4H over 1NT. Insane ? Well, everybody looked at him suspiciously, but passed, and the very suitable dummy and layout meant +620. Other table had also a very quick but not really spectacular auction : 1C P 1S 2H end of auction for a peaceful +170 but -10 IMPS for NS. Who's to blame for not reaching anything higher ?

Ok, so for all the 2!h bidders (whatever the exact meaning, the sequence will be the same ; for the others, I don't know...), you awaken everybody at the table : 1NT - - 2♥ 3♣ 3♥ 4♣ ? Just to check, what do you do now ?

It's been a long time I'm lurking in these forums, maybe it's time I start posting hands (or maybe not, we'll see...) : [hv=d=w&v=n&s=skqhkj8xxxdkxxxxc]133|100|Scoring: IMP (1NT) - -[/hv] So, West opens a strong NT and it gently comes to you, what's your plan (feel free to use and explain your methods). Do you change your bid if I tell you it's a 32-board KO match, and you were down 38 IMPs after the first set of 16 deals (this is the 6th board of the second half and nothing spectacular happened yet, though you might have gained some 5 IMPs back) ?

It really looks like the WBF site tries all the possibilities to give wrong scores. They forgot one segment yesterday, and today they put cumulative scores instead of segment scores... That's just ludicrous.

One more time, it seems like French are not European people for bridge matters. I would assume Smolen without discussion facing any adv+ French player (but of course, French people don't call it Smolen, but "chassé-croisé").

Standard in France is Ace for attitude and King for unblock/count. And I play Standard in this area. No good reason to it, just used to it and I don't remember having problems with it.

I think the 1:50 ratio just shows that there are much more people reading BBF than the regular posters, whixh doesn't strike me as specially bad... Being myself a lurker here for more than two years now, I can try to give reasons why I don't post more : I don't play enough good bridge to posts question in the A/E section, and I am not bad enough to ask in the B/I. More seriously, it just happens that I don't have enough time to post (and frequently that, when I read a thread for the first time, a few dozens of interesting answers have already been given and I don't feel I could add something to the discussion). Reading BBF is already very time-consuming, I think most people couldn't post as much as the frequent posters here even if they wanted to.

I was wrong in my previous post concerning the french Women trials : our world champions are participating, and the trials are just here to select a team to compete against them to represent France in the European Championships.

In France, it seems to change every year also. This year (for the next European Championships), there is a team trial for Open, Women and Senior teams. The Open trial is a quite lenghty one, with 18 teams competing but teams entering at various stages. The four best ones (in my opinion the ones which really have a real chance to win the trial) begin in the round of 8, and the last three rounds are matches of 120 to 180 deals each. For the seniors, there are 8 teams competing, and only 4 for the Women. There has been problems with the Women trials recently, and it seems our best players (the ones that won the Venice Cup in 2005 and finished third last year) won't be competing in this trial once again...

I was pretty sure to have read somewhere that the freely downloadable version was not the same that the one which won the world championships, ut I can't find this info anymore...

It is indeed totally Standard in SEF, though nowadays a lot of advanced/expert players use different Stayman (who said "less old-fashioned" ?). You still have to alert a Stayman which can contain hands with less than 8HCP in a club tournament if you don't want to declare war to your opponents...

Oh, thanks for adding me, I was indeed playing for fun. And to answer Fluffy's post, I already begin to think I might regret my big gamble : putting Brazil in the BB final :rolleyes: .