Friday 21 September 2007

The Monkey Option

Congratulations to the 94 EBU members who managed to vote for

"2-level suit openings should all be alerted"

in the EBU's online survey.

I would like to think that they were making some ironic statement about the deficiencies in the EBU's polling methods.

9 comments:

MickyB said...

The EBU were actually being very clever by including this option...now they know to disregard the answers that these people gave to the other questions.

Anonymous said...

I've got a feeling I voted for "all doubles should be alerted". I got the impression that the options for doubles were all retarded on purpose, so more people would vote for the status quo.

I am amused to note that in total more people voted for "all doubles" or "no doubles" than the EBU's option.

DavidC said...

Yeah, the doubles question was awful - four of the six options make no sense (but still got nearly 50% of the vote between them), and the other two I strongly dislike.

I can understand why people might vote for one of the silly options there though, because some of them look quite sensible at first. Option 5 (alert everything apart from take-out) looks sensible until you think about what it means for doubles of NT bids: you might wonder whether it is implied that the rule would be different for NT bids, but no, that's option 6.

I ended up not voting for any of the options, but on reflection I think it would have been better to vote tactically for "no doubles alerted" :)

Martin Carpenter said...

It's also 'interesting' to see no doubles alerted running well ahead of all doubles alerted ;)
(ok I guess it requires a little less work....).

Either is probably more workable than the substantial vote for announcing ALL 2 level openings though!

Interesting to me to see that announcing 1NT ranges has become popular so fast.

DavidC said...

Actually I think "no doubles alerted" is a serious suggestion. That is the rule that the WBF uses, and it's also been adopted by various countries, for example Scotland (as of this month). And if you live in a world where no-one plays any unusual doubles (which is likely to be the case in most clubs) it's probably the best rule available.

Paul Gipson said...

The no doubles alerting appears to be working well in Scotland. The folks in my local club (all intermediates) are happy, it works well at national events and, I'm told, the local congresses too.

Anonymous said...

Would you mind sending me your email address? I've taken an interest in some of your notes and have a few questions. My email is dastraube@AOL.com

Robin Barker said...

I'm fascinated - where are detailed results of the survey?
Like DavidC, I did not vote on doubles question - and I agree that a tactical vote against the stutus quo may have been better.

DavidC said...

The survey results are at

http://www.ebu.co.uk/survey/default.asp