StevenG

... or, maybe, the director made a mistake.

Off the top of my head - it depends ... If the person providing the statement will always make it when there is a 6 showing, the probability is 1/11 as there are 11 combinations showing a 6, and only one is the (6,6). On the other hand, if the person picks one of the numbers randomly, then the answer is (I think) 1/6.

I have seen countless quantitative/Blackwood mixups, and a suit response has meant that it was interpreted as Blackwood in every case I've ever seen.

I think we need to know what North was thinking. Why did he pass his opening bid? Maybe he'd "lost" an Ace or just miscounted, and was still thinking he had a 9-count when it came back to him. Who knows? The only basis for an adjustment that I can see is that he might have fielded a misbid. And yet, I don't see any clear alternative to pass, whether North is fielding or not. 4♠ is out of the question after West's bid. 4♦, perhaps? It wouldn't appeal to me, whereas defending 3♠ with declarer in a presumed 5-0 fit looks much more tempting. The only way to deal with repeated Ghestem (or similar) forgets is to log them. Once there is evidence that it can be bid as per convention card or as a single-suiter, then you can (in the EBU) rule illegal agreement. But one hand, by itself, proves nothing.

I'm actually rather curious about this assertion that nobody has challenged. My experience is that players of a certain class or better always play in tempo when they have got the ace, because they have anticipated the problem. A fumble suggests they haven't got the ace and hadn't anticipated the switch to the suit. I certainly improved the accuracy of my guesses at the table in tournament play working on this hypothesis. For players below this class, a fumble usually means nothing at all.

Since SB noticed the card being put back, presumably he also noticed its replacement coming from a different part of CC's hand.

Maybe people who aren't going to post don't bother to log in, even if they have an account.

I have never come across anyone in the UK of the supposed standard who plays (or has even heard of) FIT. Maybe this pair do, but you cannot just assume it without investigation. Once again, it, seems, you have decided on a ruling and are now having to jump through hoops to justify it.

Shouldn't you poll peers to work out what are the logical alternatives? You need players who 1) choose to play pinpoint Astro, and 2) are prone to forgetting that they actually have a defence to 1NT. Having found those players, I would be very surprised if they did not all say that 3♥ is a completely impossible bit that can only show that the wheels have come off.

Perhaps the importance of skill level is overrated for BBO. I think there are two main distinctions between players, serious/social and chatty/silent. If a profile said something like serious/chatty and named a basic set of systems played (SAYC, Acol, etc.) without delving deeply into conventions, it would be much easier to find a suitable game. Extending this further, you could set up tables as social/chatty/SAYC and only allow people whose profiles matched.

Still non-forcing in club bridge around here.

Even at MPs?

I'll oppose the consensus. For me, 3♣ shows 5 clubs and an opening hand, and denies four spades. I'm not letting them play in 2♥. Partner's going to have to guess whatever I do; I'd rather give as much information as I can.

The problem is that the economic value of the job to the employer is less than the cost of paying a living wage.

This thread is yet another case of people playing that all bidding should be optimised for IMPs scoring. Why? My face-to-face bridge is nearly all MPs. The EBU club of which I'm a member plays, I'd estimate, about 85% MPs to 15% IMPS. The non-affiliated club (of a reasonable standard for a non-EBU club) at which I play is 100% MPs. I'm not playing any tournament bridge at the moment (no suitable partner), but I intend to stick to Swiss Pairs (i.e. MPs) if the chance arises in the future. Anyway, I want to be able to bid part-scores accurately, because that scores well at MPs. I don't need to lunge at games just beecause they are games. I grew up with, and still only really understand, Acol and it is good for MPs with its plethora of non-forcing bids. I'm happy with that. So I don't play 4th suit forcing to game. It is bad at MPs. If I play IMPs, I'm aware of the need to bid games, so I make adjustments. But I don't see the need to build a system around bidding games if you are not playing IMPs all the time. If you are, then these methods do make sense, but I doubt that's true for people who play in clubs.

If you use the old Windows client, you can't see always someone's full profile. The web version allows for longer profiles.

No, my point is that population growth is a big problem in a society that seems to me to be dysfunctional, consuming more than it creates. If population increases, and our productive capacity doesn't, we need to import more, and our balance of trade figures demonstrate that we cannot pay for these imports by exporting. Effective we pay by selling our companies to foreigners. This is not sustainable. Immigration is a cause of population growth, so it needs to be curtailed, as things stand at the moment. I don't differentiate between people; to me the effect on the economy of a returning British citizen is the same as that of an equivalently skilled foreigner. Also, increasing GDP by increasing population is pointless. In practice GDP per capita is barely rising, even though GDP itself appears to be gaining significantly. I don't even consider GDP to be a good measure of economic well-being, since it conflates genuine wealth-creation (manufacturing, agriculture, etc.) with economic activity of no real value. (No, that's not the right word, but I can't find a way of expressing what I mean. Of course a hospital employee is of value, but it is social value, not economic.) An increase in GDP driven by the service sector is, I believe, an illusion.

I can't, of course. But when I said "middle-class", I didn't realise it was an insult, let alone an insult in the same league as "racist" and "xenophobic". Since you seem to find it so, I apologise.

And that is a statement with which I wholeheartedly agree. But since I changed to my current position on EU membership about 15 years ago (because I thought about and analysed the issues, and came to a conclusion that, at the time, seemed counter-intuitive), and have been reconsidering the evidence ever since then, it had no bearing on my vote.

I know what posters have said about themselves over the years I've been reading, and occasionally contributing to, these forums. That is rather more than nothing.

Both ridiculous and offensive.

Except, of course, that in the long run the immigrants age too, and we have an even bigger ageing population.

I don't really know. It's probably a mixture of two main factors. Firstly, Luton is significantly closer to London, therefore attracts a lot more of the problems emanating from London, whereas Bedford is more of a rural(ish) market town. Secondly, and this is probably more important, Bedford was historically a lot richer than Luton. We had a huge engineering industry, now gone. But we also had the Harpur Trust, a charity concentrating on education. A century ago, Bedford School and Bedford High School were close to the best independent schools in the country, while charging only a fraction of the amount. Bedford was full of retired Army officers (and coffee planters, etc.). We were very stable. It probably also helped that the Italians were easy to absorb, and that made the non-white immigrants who came a few years later much less intimidating.

I find it interesting that the posters on this who are so pro-immigration seem to be middle-class people who move around from country to country to their own advantage, without in any way considering the impact of their lifestyle on the inhabitants of those countries they happen to be living in at any one time. Meanwhite the British, who can see what is going on in their own country, are wrongly (and offensively, in my view) accused of racism. The seems to be an implicit assumption that the people of a country have a moral duty to degrade the quality of their own lives (which quality has often been built up by sacrifices made by their ancestors) for the benefit of others who have no reason to live here other than their own immediate economic advantage. I do not accept that assumption. I grew up in, and still live in, what used to be one the the most diverse towns in England. We had Poles who came here during the war and stayed, the infant school I attended had a large contingent of Italians who had come to labour in the local brick industry; large numbers of Commonwealth immigrants were arriving at the same time. And, again, people of Indian origin who were forced out of Idi Amin's Uganda (many of whom still a marvellous job running our local convenience stores). And there have never been any significant racial tensions in Bedford. In general we get on well and respect each other's culture. We are not xenophobic. But the country has changed. In the '50s & '60s when we encouraged mass immigration, we were a manufacturing country running a trading surplus. We are now reliant on the services sector and running a huge trade deficit. We have appalling productivity compared to other advanced countries. Boys growing up could have reasonable expectations of learning a trade and earning a reasonable living. Now they look forward to nothing more than juggling multiple jobs with irregular hours. On a personal level, the local services we all rely on and take for granted are slowly disappearing. It's not just post offices, libraries and refuse collection, it's major things like hospitals. The problem with immigration is population growth, not immigrants themselves. There would be no problem with immigration if net immigration was zero, if we were simply losing people with a skill set surplus to requirements and replacing them with others with skills we need. That's a win-win for everybody. But we are not coping with the increased numbers. Yes, to some extent that's political. We could have state housebuilding, but we don't. Small governemnt has been the ideology for the last thirty years and more. But a political failure doesn't change the reality for those that have to live with it. Similarly, our employers have forgotten how to train people. Why train local people when you can poach someone with the appropriate skills from a lower-wage country? It's bad for everyone. We don't get trained, our young people see no future; meanwhile, the other country loses a worker it has paid to train. I feel we have to sort our own problems out at a structural level and that is politically difficult. Making things worse in the long run with the quick fix of more immigration is not - for now - the solution.

Where do the children play?