gordontd

Sounds good to me.

If you don't transfer to spades, you don't give yourself the chance to find a slam if partner breaks the transfer.

If we were satisfied that it really did show five spades, then one might argue that passing 3NT was suggested by the slowness of the bid, and that 4S should be required of the South player.

Why are you surprised?

Actually the term appears in the Laws on several occasions, though not in the definitions.

It's easy enough if it's a weak-NT system, so that a 2NT rebid is now GF and then a return to 3m is Staymanic.

It's not standard where I play. Why would you assume the alternative is two GF raises?

Actually I believe one of them is a Dane living in Norway. I played and directed 52 boards in the same games as two of them yesterday. If seedings were given for competent play under the influence of alcohol, they would have been severely under-seeded.

How do you show your invitational hands that don't have a four-card major?

I would favour the first sentence of the first ruling. Unless it's a two-winner movement, or it is suspected that they've done it deliberately, I don't understand why anyone needs to get worked up about it. I don't think ruling 3 is legal. Artificial scores are for when a result can't be obtained on a board, which is clearly not the case here.

I think I might not categorise you as inexperienced, Michael :)

In my experience, there are a few things you can be fairly safe assuming with any but the most inexperienced partner. They include Stayman over an opening 1NT (though not necessarily over an overcall, especially if you partner is a rubber bridge player), some sort of Stayman over an opening 2NT, and the Unusual NT. When playing with inexperienced partners I always start by asking "transfers or no transfers?" If the answer is "no transfers" I ask "what about Stayman?" To return to your question, we have the EBU regulation quoted above telling us to alert things that we intend to treat as alertable, even if not specifically agreed. I often say something like "we have no specific agreement about this, but I think the usual treatment of this call would make it alertable", or "we haven't specifically agreed this, but I think it follows from our other agreements that it will have an alertable meaning".

I play with a great many people with very limited discussion of methods, but I would never expect this call to be anything other than an enquiry about major suit length. I would alert it as such, but state that we had no specific agreement about it or the continuations.

It's not in response to an opening 1NT - it's announceable. It is alertable in response to an overcall, or to an opening 2NT, both of which are situations when ordinary Stayman is not universally played. But announcements are popular, and maybe in time they'll be extended to cover these situations.

We have a popular format that's widely used by counties for their Championship Pairs when they consist of a qualifying round followed by a 7-table Howell for the top 14 pairs. It's described in the White Book:

I think we tend to use "at fault" in this law as meaning something close to "responsible", because there are times when things happen that are not really the player's fault, but are certainly not any other player's fault, and for which the player is only person who can be held responsible. So, if I became ill and missed a board while having to get some fresh air to try to recover, I would expect to get Ave- for it. It's not really my "fault" that I'm ill, but it's my responsibility to be at the table at the correct time, and unless another player or director's action prevents me from doing so, then it's my "fault" in the context of the law. I don't think it would really be workable otherwise: we'd have more people arriving late because of traffic/transport, people arguing that it's not their fault that they can't play faster, and possibly even arguing that it's not their fault that they're addicted to nicotine and need to go out for a cigarette!

She's already lived in at least one of those places.

If you click on the yellow box, it'll tell you what the bid was alerted as showing.

What protection do you think you will get when the 4H bidder has QJxxxx, ATxxxx, -, A and you've failed to make the obvious double?

I find that sort of thing tends to happen opposite a psych, which rather adds to their downside.

There is a habit of lumping these together as one system, but there are quite fundamental differences between, for example, Standard French & Standard American. Their NT rebids are quite different, which when combined with the French distaste for three-card major-suit raises by opener, has a big effect on major-suit rebids. I don't know about Standard German, but since I understand it's based on Standard French, I imagine the same sort of structure would apply.

How likely do you think that is?

I didn't have a television for more than 20 years, and every year I would get a letter from the TV licence people asking me why I didn't have a licence. Not having a television was always a long way down the list of possible answers. For many years I didn't bother to answer, because I didn't think the onus should be on me to explain my non-TV-owning status, and a couple of times I did see the TV detector van right outside my home. Probably there are those nowadays who find it as annoying that everyone assumes they have email - as indeed they should :)

It sounds as though North's hand would have been better described by opening 1♥, or maybe 3♥ or 4♥, rather than 2♥, but that's up to North. A point of terminology - East has overcalled, not "opened 2S", and as you say above would probably have been better making a takeout double instead. On the ruling question, I agree with mr1303 that the first hesitation implied extra values for the 2♠ bid and so suggested bidding more. However West didn't bid more at that time, so didn't take advantage of the hesitation at that point. Then there was a second hesitation, suggesting that East was reluctant to pass out 3♥ and now West did bid. If we believe that West's 3♠ bid was demonstrably suggested by East's two slow calls, then we would need to consider whether there was a "Logical Alternative"* to it. If we showed the West hand to a few players of similar standard to West, and gave them the complete auction without the hesitations, we would find out what they would do. I would be surprised if any of them would pass, and if not we would conclude that "Pass is not a Logical Alternative", and no adjustment would be called for. The whole thing just sounds to me as though EW are very inexperienced and would benefit from a sensitive explanation of tempo and the laws (as well as simple competitive bidding perhaps!) *L12B1(b) A logical alternative action is one that, among the class of players in question and using the methods of the partnership, would be given serious consideration by a significant proportion of such players, of whom it is judged some might select it.