gordontd

My guess is that it shows a weak 6-5 hand, although I can't think why he wouldn't have rebid 2♣ with that, which is what I presume would have happened without the double.

I don't, not least because they may not know that they also have the right to accept the lead, which they should be told before deciding.

Me too, but what's more surprising is that he didn't unblock by discarding ♦10 on a spade.

That's unlikely since the question came on the second round of bidding. The problem is to decide what alternatives now are logical for a player who thought 3H was a sensible rebid.

Hi Oleg :) I think you need to try to get hold of the players and see if they can remember what form they were played in, but what looks surprising is that they seem to have changed and then changed back again. Were they perhaps played in some other order than table order, maybe in a Howell?

If they are going to let me ruff a diamond in dummy, I don't have a problem - I can just discard a club from hand :)

A more obvious example is when an opening weak-two is raised: opener is not invited to continue, and responder can have a very wide range of hands, usually with three-card support.

I see people routinely taking back their original call in situations like this, even if only to re-instate the same Pass after consideration. I'm not sure where pride comes into it, and any information given away is unauthorised for delarer.

Is neither 2♣ nor 3♣ forcing for you?

There are implications from this comment.

This is quite wrong. Any comment to the effect of what West intended is UI, and in this case suggests bidding on rather than passing. Without seeing East's hand we can't tell whether Pass was a logical alternative to bidding 4♥

Why would he believe that when his partner was trying not to bid game?

The wording of the law is: which I think tells us to use your second meaning.

Lamford & Vampyr won their appeal.

I wasn't asked to rule. None of the players at the table commented.

It took me ages to find the auction - the title is not the ideal place for it.

I've several times seen the thing of people showing a card to make the bid, but I'm told that Bocchi has just sent the ♣2 through the screen on the tray to bid 2♣!

Looking at the scores in the other match after 16 boards, Frances was heard to wonder whether they had made the right decision!

So that players are compared with others who have played the same boards as them? Me neither - it works fine, but it does help to know from the start how may you are going to have.

I simply don't think this is true. I think they aim to create simple regulations that distinguish between expected and unexpected meanings without needing lots of exceptions. So we alert a strong, artificial and forcing 2C opening even though it's the most common meaning of the bid, because it fits in with the simple rule of alerting artificial ("not natural") calls. In fact the basic alerting rules for passes and bids are simpler than those for doubles (two rules instead of five), but the list of specific examples is longer for passes and bids than for doubles.

I have found out more. It was invented by Max Bavin for use when scores are converted to Victory Points to allow for the fact that a Victory Point scale should be affected by the size of the field as well as by the number of boards. Obviously when teams matches are Victory Pointed the field is always the same size, so this can be ignored, but for IMP pairs that is not the case. Using this divisor should mean that one VP scale can be used for each number of boards in a match, regardless of how big the field.

No, it doesn't change it - I was just intrigued to find out more about this unknown movement!

Except that they are dividing the geometric mean by sqrt(2), so the final results are all much larger than when dividing by either results or comparisons. I'll try to find out more about this.

No, it falls under wanting to have simple regulations without lots of exceptions. Of course if it's a situation no-one would misunderstand then you can't expect to get redress for a failure to alert.

r=results c=comparisons So I should really have written 12*11, not 11*12. There has long been friendly disagreement between scoring experts about whether one should divide by the number of results or the number of comparisons, but the truth, as you say below, is that it doesn't matter much unless the numbers are small and you try to compare results scored by the two different methods. Well since the scorer comes from England where "multiple teams movement" is standard terminology, it's hardly surprising that there's no need to explain it. However I think you are correct that no-one who didn't already know about this obscure scoring method would want to use it. The only document that I could find that mentions this formula does so in the context of a more complex discussion about constructing VP tables and doesn't really answer your question.