StevenG

The EBU live in a parallel universe. Players don't discuss the hands after the game; they hobble slowly to their cars and pray that they are stll awake enough to drive home safely. Both the movements suggested are seriously flawed for the case Vampyr proposes. Blackpool involves playing the same pair twice, which is worse than the problem it attempts to solve. I've never played a Bowman, but the first website I looked at describes it as "not a very suitable movement for an odd number of full tables". I do not understand why, when the EBU is desperate for non-affiliated clubs to join, it needlessly invents hoops for the more social clubs to jump through.

Is he a peer of the actual North?

I assumed that was 4NT for South.

Perhaps Nigel could tell us something about the players. A congress attracts a lot of good, experienced tournament players. It also attracts some local club players. From the description of the events, it sounds to me as though N/S are the latter, quite possibly even a casual partnership who agreed a convention card quickly. If I am right about this, the hesitation means nothing. It also means that 4NT for North likely does not exist. If I am wrong, and the partnership do know what they are doing, then things are different. I'd also like to know the scoring, IMPs or MPs, because that makes quite a difference.

Around here, many will go 2♦ (8 playing tricks or 18+, almost any shape (yech)) - 2♥ (relay) - 2NT - 3NT.

In my experience, 3♣ almost guarantees that they'll bid a making major suit game, whereas pass at least gives them a chance of messing up whenever partner is close to an opening.

On channels other than the BBC, one "pays" by having to fast forward through commercials.

I don't see how declarer making the wrong guess after an infraction, without knowing how the cards lie, nullifies the provisions of L50E3.

In this particular case, the lead of the King allows the contract to make by force. The lead of the two allows the contract to be defeated by force. Had East exposed the six, the lead would have been the King, so it is clear that the exposed card did convey such information as to damage the non-offending side.

Double dummy, the lead of a high club or the J♥ gives 9 tricks, all other leads give 8.

It's not easy to know what the LAs are without knowing what a double would mean in this partnership. Any database would surely have to contain the partnership methods and an estimation of their peers as well as the bidding sequence.

How do you get card advantage when they get dealt in the wrong order? Whenever my starting cards are all 4,5,6 I invariably lose (and it mostly seems to swap big cards for big cards at the start). If they come out sensibly I win more than my share against similar standard decks. (I started playing a week ago as a response to this thread. I've never played any game of this type before.)

I did say adv-, with the "-" there intentionally. My current club partner has an NGS of 55 or abouts whenever I look, but is nowhere near the standard needed to work these things out. I've been looking for a partner of the right standard to learn from for the last 15 years and it's impossible. Should I just give up completely?

There is a problem here. I don't play with Justin or Mike or Phil (or Timo). Double is obviously the right thing to do with an expert partner. But this is the I/A forum, and I can promise you it will fail dismally with an intermediate/adv- partner, at least in my part of Acol-land. I would still bid 3, despite having read the thread, for the logic Helene gives in another post. I know partner has only shown preference, and may have nothing. But I could have passed, so I'm still interested, and I would expect partner to raise on that hand. It may be crude, but it's practical, and it's the best I can do with the partners I have.

Why does it show that? To me, it looks as though partner, having shown spades has doubled a spade bid for penalties. I know I'm naive :( but I doubt my equally naive partners would understand the double either. A direct raise to 3♥ would show a strong hand and do the job much more safely.

Weak players often misbid. Therefore misbids become LAs for weak players. Therefore a normal bid can be ruled against if the player is weak. I really dislike that logic.

I suspect a significant number of posters (not me, though) check out all new forum content and are oblivious to whether they are posting in the N/B or the Expert forum.

I think you are completely wrong on this, Zel. Learning the LTC massively improved my bridge, because it gave me an insight into how to evaluate unbalanced hands. Now, I'm not stupid and I don't use it blindly. After the initial revelation, I slowly worked out what was good and what was bad. But I still do a HCP count and a raw LTC, and if the answers suggest different things, then I stop and think about WHY they are different, and that gives me clues as to how to reevaluate my hand in the light of an ongoing auction. I have a longstanding partnership with an essentially social player who uses the (raw) LTC without understanding what's going on. I had a longstanding club/tournament partnership with another player who generally bids well, but doesn't declare well and doesn't use LTC. On distributional hands, we find good contracts in the former partnership, but miss them in the latter. So, my belief is that LTC raises the standard of club-level bridge, even for those who do not make sensible adjustments.

5♣ is awful, in the context of an English club MPs. You'll get a bottom every time they (the field) can't make game, or every time they can make game but don't bid it, or if we can make 3NT.

Did he know that 1♦ might be natural? This will shock the cognoscenti here, but in 22 years of club and tournament bridge, I've never met Walsh. In fact, because I've seen it mentioned countless times on these boards, but never bothered to look it up, I assumed it was some foreign thing, essentially unknown in this country.

If you had full employment, would you need to strengthen the bargaining power of workers? Wouldn't the labour market suddenly start to give the workers power automatically?

What makes it impossible to follow are those situations where you have no explicit agreements.

I don't play in the Acol club any more, but I checked the hand and I know all four players at the table. I have never seen E/W play together, they have not played together before in that tournament in the last 6 months, and they haven't played together in any other game in the last month. It is highly probable that this was a last-minute partnership desk arrangement, and that East just took a flyer with a distributional hand.

What does "takeout" mean when there is only one unbid suit? Or if every suit has been bid? Does "takeout" mean "I have support for the unbid suits" or "I can tolerate you bidding any of the unbid suits"? If you do it on the same hands, then it's the same thing, even if your logic behind it is different.

Both, probably. No explicit agreement, and implicit agreement takeout. But, obviously, sometimes the bidding only makes sense if partner has a trump stack, so you make an ostensibly takeout double knowing it will be converted. And, sometimes on this forum, I see a double that I'd play as takeout described as one that "everybody plays as penalties". So do I have an implicit agreement that it's for penalties if I choose to convert, even though the sequence is undiscussed, and I've never seen it before? That's why I've never understood it. And how the hell do I bid in tempo if it takes me several minutes to decide what my partner's double is, and whether it's alertable?