sfi

What are we talking - 10 minutes to review an incident, look at history and determine the appropriate response, and then take that response and log the action? At 300 a day, that's 50 hours of work each day. That's 7 people doing this every day, full-time. I don't know how BBO's finances work, but that's a lot of time, effort and money spent on really boring work.

I recently had a similar decision after opening 2NT and hearing partner bid puppet stayman. Holding a solid 6 card heart suit I thought it would be churlish to not show 5 of them. Sadly both hearts and NT both took 9 tricks. :(

The ruling question is a tiny part of this. Unless there is evidence South overheard something there is no reason within the laws to adjust. The public accusation is much bigger - this sort of behaviour is simply unacceptable. This last time I heard something like this at a club, the person doing so received a ban of several years. Whether or not the accusation is accurate I would expect the appropriate club committee to at least consider a life ban for the SB. Oh yeah, South's actions should be investigated as well. It looks pretty fishy.

Not quite sure why you would make that assumption. There has been precious little evidence supporting it thus far.

That's ... subtle. You also don't receive team invitations even if issued by name, and the table host is informed that the person is not online. That person needs to join the table and take their seat. Luckily (in our case) that person is generally sitting in the same room so we can sort it out.

How about double? Partner will bid NT with a stopper and then I can invite or bid slam as I see fit. If partner bids something else, maybe it's best to stop in 3NT. I thought about 3H but it's harder to convince partner to let us play NT when they don't have a stopper.

It sounds like their effective agreement really is 25-28, and the explanation supports this. I would find this range unmanageable, but it seems like 4NT is reasonable under these circumstances. How many 28 counts has South held in this partnership when they chose a different action?

To quote Daniel Jackson on BridgeWinners: Bidding 4S now is the sort of action that loses you good partners.

It was given as a fairly unenlightening 1NT - 3NT. But here we are only comparing the odds of one specific 4-1 break vs one specific 3-2 break. These odds are much closer, with SteveMoe correctly giving them as 2.8% to 3.4%. Easily close enough that it can be affected by other considerations.

Restricted choice only applies when the player would play randomly from equals given a free choice. Ken pretty much nailed it, but East isn't going to be choosing randomly. Therefore we really are only looking at the possibilities of 3 and 543, which are as you say fairly close in probability (with the 3-2 break holding a slight edge). Where restricted choice comes in is South's play of the 2. With K2, they only have one option. With K542, the 2 is not equal to the 5 and the 4, but some of the time they would play a higher card to conceal the 2. You don't need to try and work out the odds, which is hard to do without knowing your opponent, but it is clear that the chance of the K542 holding should be discounted to cater for this. (A poor declarer would play the 2 most of the time, a reasonable one would always play a higher spot card, and an expert may or may not hide the 2 depending on the rest of the hand.) The rest of the hand also needs to be taken into account. Is it likely declarer has a doubleton? A four-card suit? Can we beat the hand if declarer holds K542? Absent any other useful information, partner holding 543 looks like a significant favourite.

This is very similar to par contests which have gone out of fashion over the past couple of decades. One major problem with this type of contest is the complexity with setting it up and determining what is the "right" bid or play. For instance, you would get a lot of argument on many of your points in the sample hand: - Opening 2S is not at all obvious. 1S and 3S both have a lot going for them, and you have to cater for different styles when weighting bids. - Bidding 4S after opening 2S is very poor and should have points deducted IMO. - Unblocking a club is clearly good technique. - Winning the DA looks to be inferior to ducking one round, but it's hard to judge by how much when assigning scores. - The right spade play is not clear, but I think the finesse is more likely to gain than playing the top honours. Again, it's not clear how you determine how much better one play is than another. Imagine trying to go through all the hands for a tournament and making the scores for each action fair. It is going to be a lot of work for a very good player, which is why I haven't seen any par tournament for over 20 years.

Maybe for the winner, and I'm not convinced even for that. However, the big problem is the unequal weightings for each round, and your final standing in a Swiss event depends enormously how lucky you are in your draw for the last round. I've consistently stated that I would happily skip the first round of a Swiss tournament and sleep in. In exchange, the directors can assign me any number of victory points from 0-20. My claim is that the value of those victory points is essentially nothing and I would gain by the additional rest and lack of stress. Sadly the regs don't allow me to put this into practice - they remove whatever penalties are applied after doing the draw, so I don't gain the benefit of easier opponents. A Swiss is dreadful for accurately sorting a field.

At matchpoints it clearly is wrong to play a strong 2C opening, as you say. Many years ago we had an auction in a BAM event at the US nationals that started 2C (weak) - 3C (majors) - 4C at both tables. I suspect we found the only two pairs in the room playing a weak 2C opening. At imps I think you lose too much if you give it up. First you no longer have a way to bid these hands when they do come up (and my guess would be once every couple of sessions for the partnership), which means you probably will be losing about 6 imps per hand assuming you guess right half the time. However, you also affect your one-level openings by skewing those decisions. It might be responding on a poor hand, cooperating in a slam try when it's not quite right, or so on. That might be worth 10 imps a session. Assuming my math is right (big assumption, I realise), whatever you replace it with needs to gain you 26 imps over a day's play to compensate. Maybe playing 2C as something like 4-4 in the majors has that level of positive expectation, but that's just another guess. I seem to remember some analysis of conventions used in international matches back in the 90's. The one statistic I remember is that Wilkosz 2D gained an average of 3 imps per hand where it came up (although lack of familiarity with it may have skewed that), but there may be other useful numbers in there as well, if the analysis is still floating around. Finally, if playing teams you'd need teammates who buy into the small gains that offset the noticeable losses. The psychological element shouldn't be discounted.

I'm not sure this is quite as standard as you suggest. Agreements that jumps to the three level on this sequence show a hand interested in slam is entirely playable, fairly common, and even the default treatment in many places. In fact, if you aren't playing some sort of checkback agreements you actually need these jumps to be forcing. Otherwise you don't have any way to force, and that is clearly worse than not having any invitations apart from 2NT. So your treatment actually requires conventional agreements which may not be suitable for a beginner class.

Asking people to reply to the thread rather than simply responding to a poll seems to lead to a much higher participation rate. It's a small demonstration of commitment, but could be enough of one for this purpose.

kubiresmo 5.5 - 4.5 sfi http://webutil.bridgebase.com/v2/tview.php?t=ARDCHALLENGE:e91f73d0.dfa1.11e6.90ac.0cc47a39aeb4-1484979717&u=sfi the it 5.5 - 4.5 sfi http://webutil.bridgebase.com/v2/tview.php?t=ARDCHALLENGE:de8aeb76.dfa1.11e6.90ac.0cc47a39aeb4-1484979699&u=sfi

Chuck11 5.5 - 4.5 sfi http://webutil.bridgebase.com/v2/tview.php?t=ARDCHALLENGE:23913d91.de7e.11e6.90ac.0cc47a39aeb4-1484854402&u=sfi sfi 5.5 - 4.5 jexa_ http://webutil.bridgebase.com/v2/tview.php?t=ARDCHALLENGE:78a5f060.de7e.11e6.90ac.0cc47a39aeb4-1484854545&u=sfi jkr_1993 6 - 4 sfi http://webutil.bridgebase.com/v2/tview.php?t=ARDCHALLENGE:28de9fb8.de7f.11e6.90ac.0cc47a39aeb4-1484854840&u=sfi

brigimon 6 - 4 sfi http://webutil.bridgebase.com/v2/tview.php?t=ARDCHALLENGE:7bcd7317.de6e.11e6.90ac.0cc47a39aeb4-1484847678&u=sfi sfi 6 - 4 smerriman http://webutil.bridgebase.com/v2/tview.php?t=ARDCHALLENGE:94879204.de7d.11e6.90ac.0cc47a39aeb4-1484854162&u=sfi eblenner 5.5 - 4.5 sfi http://webutil.bridgebase.com/v2/tview.php?t=ARDCHALLENGE:0b85f1b2.de7f.11e6.90ac.0cc47a39aeb4-1484854791&u=sfi

What DinDIP isn't telling you is that his partner is a system curmudgeon who is comfortable with trading off theoretical advantages for the practical ones of natural bidding and ease of memory. In short, don't encourage DinDIP. ;)

Quick note to the rest of group 5. I'll have more time starting next weekend, so will play my matches in the second week. If that causes problems for anyone, send me a message.

1) Yes 2) No What other target are you aiming at when you pull? 3NT should be playable at least.

That's just crazy talk. It's only recently that you could use a devastating weapon like 2D = single-suited major.

Take the double of 3H and the 4D bid. One of them must be reasonable if N-S had agreements. Similarly, the redouble of 3H and 4D. The second could have been avoided had North asked about the redouble. But I can't imagine that happened. If I had to take the place of one person at the table and weren't allowed to ask about the meaning of any bids, I think North did ok.

The only truly bad call, in the sense that it shows a poor understanding of evaluation, appears to be 3H. Others seem to be internally consistent with what they thought was going on, although I don't have much sympathy with either redouble. You can get these sort of results when people are playing without agreements. They are unfortunate, but calling them bad bids is probably not accurate.

LOL! This reminds me of the Multi-defence notes of a top american pair. I was told that page 29 included the chapter heading "Doubles in fourth, sixth and eighth positions." In comparison, my notes with the person I play most with in major events stretch to a very wordy 16 lines. And our Wilkosz 2D opening gets a full page and a half.