WellSpyder

Hooray! Finally I have some idea what to do as either a player or a TD if this sort of situation arises. Thanks to Lamford for raising this thorny issue again, and to RMB and Pran for setting out the EBU L&E and WBFLC attempts to clarify the law. It may not be perfect, and one can argue about whether it is what the law actually says, but at least I now understand what they are saying and it seems workable in practice.

Is this intended as an answer to the question above? If so, I'm not sure it is likely to be very acceptable politically.

No wonder we see lots of Norwegians playing in English events....

Imps or MPs? (Not that I will enjoy making this decision either way....)

What do you mean by invitational values here, Ken? For me a 2M response to the X would be about 8-10 HCP and a 2C response normally 11+. The 2C response would have to be weakened a long way to allow your inference about advancer not being 4-4 in the majors.

This is the Brexit thread. How did you resist the temptation to use that as an example of what happens if you rely on the views of the majority of voters rather than their elected representatives?

I agree with the approach that says there are 3 small singletons and only 2 singleton honours, so it is better to play for the small card to be the singleton. In fact, if you are going to play for the honour to be singleton then I think you should start by cashing a high honour rather than taking a finesse.

I can certainly imagine some mourning after...

For me, "cue-bidding" your own void is exclusion RKCB.

Another woman answered that they had agreed when they got married 20 years ago that he would make the big decisions and she would make the minor ones. So far they hadn't needed any big decisions......

Who do you mean by "they"? If you read Aberlour10's [sorry, cherdano's] post carefully it seems clear that he is referring to England as the inferior team.

Sounds like oppo weren't actually misled by the explanation, so whether or not there was MI probably doesn't actually matter this time.

So do we need to abandon the idea of democracy? Or perhaps replace the nineteenth (eighteenth?) century idea of a minimum property-holding requirement to be eligible to vote with a twenty-first century minimum intelligence requirement??

I found myself thinking about this a couple of days ago. Mr Cameron's response in a similar position with the Scottish referendum of a result apparently too close to call shortly before the vote was to promise the Scottish people more independence within the UK if they voted to stay in. But of course there was no chance the EU could do something similar for the UK, given the policy-making process - even if they wanted to. (With hindsight, perhaps it is a pity they did not do this when Mr Cameron was trying to renegotiate the UK's relationship with Europe before calling the referendum.) Arguably, a good outcome now given the apparent strength of feeling in a number of other countries against the EU as it is, would be for the remaining EU countries to negotiate a revised form of association - maybe we could call it a "European Community" rather than a "European Union"?? - and see whether the UK would like to be part of that club. But I don't see any chance of that happening.

Classic policy-making. Someone says something they have not really thought through to get themselves out of a political difficulty, and finds years later that they have changed the world....

I don't think I have presented the fact that Brussels works in a different way from London as an argument against cooperation at all. I agree that would be silly. But I think it is equally silly to assume that any way of doing something is as sensible as any other way of doing it. I have worked in different departments within the UK, too, which have very different bureaucratic cultures, and I have clear views about some of them being more effective from the point of view of serving the public interest than others.

I'm sure there is something in your comment that political cultures are simply different (or, more specifically, administrative cultures, since my point was intended to be specifically about officials rather than politicians). I'm not sure that is the whole story, though. I think the culture of the UK civil service changed between, say, the 1960s and the 1990s, partly perhaps as a result of Mrs Thatcher's attempts to roll back the frontiers of the state, and the notion that public spending is a "good thing" and that "government knows best" became less embedded in how things were done. What I saw of EU administration felt like a step backwards. I'm a bit confused by the point you are making about parliamentary oversight of government, though. Surely you are not saying that is undemocratic or a bad thing, are you? Isn't oversight of the government by an elected body exactly how democracy is supposed to work? (I'm sure I have misunderstood something since your posts are always well-argued and thought-provoking.....)

Very interested to see someone else articulate this view. Having been a UK civil servant for around a dozen years, and also been involved in a number of meetings with EU officials in Brussels, I found myself feeling quite strongly that there was a difference of approach between UK civil servants trying to do their job as best they could and EU officials seeing their job as being about personal aggrandisement. No doubt this was and is very unfair, probably on both sides, but it certainly has an impact on how desirable it feels to be "ruled from Brussels".

Sorry, Mr Ace. I did try to make clear in my edit that J looked like a good card to play. I don't think anyone would be likely to think that the hesitation was a deliberate attempt to show partner that it wasn't from J10x or J109, but that isn't really relevant to the issue of whether UI affected the outcome. I think johnu is right that if North is of a similar calibre to South then he is likely to find the right play here without any potential help from UI. One other issue that hasn't been mentioned is that we don't know the earlier play on the hand. Was there an opportunity for South to switch to spades earlier in the hand with a more attractive holding like J109?

Of course he understood the situation - but perhaps he only gave it the thought necessary to reach the conclusion he did because of the UI from his partner's hesitation. Maybe a non-Turkish expert would have returned ♣K rather than ♠J so that he did not need to rely on his partner finding the right play? [EDIT: Perhaps that was a bit uncalled for! Of course West is the concealed hand, and giving a ruff and sluff would be fatal if ♠K and Q were the other way round. In that case J may be required to retain a trick in the suit when West has the ten and North the seven...]

Sorry, I over-simplified the 1♦ response in trying to get on to explain that we still play sort-of transfer responses (which I think you said was one of the reasons you wanted to remove 4M from the weak version of 1♣). In fact we use the 1♦ response for most 0-7 hands OR 8-11 balanced. Now opener rebids 1M with either 11-13 and 4M OR 16-19 and 5M, so we have no problems finding 4-4 major fits. Putting 8-11 balanced hands into 1♦ also means that when the bidding goes 1♣- 1♦; 1♥/♠ - 1N; P we can still have 13 points opposite 11, so it is much less easy for oppo to double on modest hands than if we had a maximum of 7 opposite 13.

Interesting. I also play a Precision/Swedish Club hybrid, but we have gone the other way by moving weak hands without a 4-card major out of the 1♣ opening into 1♦. This makes the 1♦ opening bid a bit more nebulous than in Swedish Club, but it is much better defined than in most modern versions of Precision, normally showing at least 3 diamonds (occasionally exactly 3=3=2=5 shape), and either 5-4 or 4441 if rebidding a major. Knowing the weak version of 1♣ contains at least one 4-card major can help a lot in competitive auctions, and also means that there is no reason for a 1♣ opener ever to have to rebid a 3-card major. (In response to 1♣, 1♦ is a standard Precision-style negative, and 1♥ and 1♠ are inverted Precision-style 5-card positives.)

Personally, I wouldn't expect partner to treat pass as forcing over a raise to 3♥, 4♥, 5♥, 6♥ or 7♥. I'm sure it would be nice on occasion to know that pass was forcing, though....

Now there's a thought! Of course it might be relatively rare that you have a hand where you know what to do on the rare occasions when partner DOESN'T have a 6-card major. But if you do, what could be more perfect than having this convention available??

Ah, sorry. I have confused the issue by tacking my latest comment about not having many game hands in a recent match onto the end of a previous thread in which I moaned about not enough points in an earlier match. I'm afraid I don't have the details of the earlier match from last June any more to check how teammates got on with all the big hands. Bit well enough, though, I suspect, or I probably wouldn't have noticed how much things seemed to be out of our hands....