L&E Minutes for March 2007

The minutes for the meetings of the EBU's various committees are published on their website. I always take a particular interest in what the L&E are doing. Here are some thoughts on the latest set.

2.2.3. Use of the term "self-serving".

In the previous minutes, the comments of a player who was deemed to have fielded a psyche were called "self-serving" by a committee member. That was completely inappropriate. I don't like the term at the best of times, but its usual meaning is for a statement a player makes about their own methods or style or thought processes which would help their case if true but is not backed up by evidence, and so tends to be ignored by a TD or AC unless it is particularly credible. This instance was completely different, since it was a player's honest attempt to put his side of the case on the basis of agreed facts. It is totally out of order to dismiss this as "self-serving" - how can you have a problem with someone arguing their case like that?

The committee added a new comment to say that they didn't find the arguments convincing - fine, I agree with that - but the original comment still sickens me.

3.2. Announcements for "Acol Two"-like openings which fail to meet the definition of "strong".

This has been a known problem since before the new rules were introduced - I certainly asked about it, and I can't believe I was the only one. The problem is that neither "strong" nor "intermediate" really describes the agreement accurately - it falls between the two. I like the approach that the committee decided upon, announcing as "strong or intermediate", but there remains the question of whether the regulation is actually going to be changed to put this right. Or, more generally, what should happen to two-level openings which do not fall neatly into any of the announcement categories. It seems like they've ducked the issue a bit.

[Update 17/7/07: I should have had more faith: it has now been revealed that they actually went ahead and made a change to the OB, coming into force this summer, to address this point. So in fact this is another job well done in my opinion.]

3.5. Correspondence on announcements and alerts in general

Yes, the introduction of announcements has been a PR disaster. The committee really needs to realise that it's not just enough to make the right decision, you also have to communicate it properly to the players. I'm really disappointed in the way it's been handled. A belated consultation about it seems like a reasonable start in trying to put this right, trying to get back the support of the membership. The problem is that this consultation has to offer (or at least appear to offer) the possibility of discarding announcements completely, which would be a huge step backwards of course. All in all, very depressing that it has come to this, though we can hope that the results will be positive.

3.6. Minimum strength for "strong" openings

Brilliant work from the committee here, in the most important decision of the year so far. It's such a difficult subject - some definition of "strong" is essential, but it's so hard to express precisely where the line should be drawn. There was no doubt that the committee had previously got it wrong, making the requirements too restrictive and disallowing many hands which are normal strong openings for many players. The new definition is not exactly a thing of beauty, and people might complain that it is too complicated, but it seems to come pretty close to allowing the right things.

Perhaps even more encouraging than the decision itself was the fact that they've clearly listened to the complaints, sat down and thought about how to do better, and come up with something. You'd think that was an obvious thing to do, but it seems that very often known issues are just ignored because no-one wants to think about what to do about it, or to listen to people that have thought about it. But this time they have. (Eventually.) More of the same please.

The only slight disappointment was the decision to wait until August 1st to implement the new rule. Once you've admitted you're wrong, why let people continue to suffer? In my opinion, the right time for the change is as soon as it can be published in English Bridge (I suppose April would be unrealistic, but how about June?). We saw this with announcements - they were publicised nearly two months before the rules actually changed, and that was too much time for people to remember and keep up their initial "enthusiasm". Particularly for a relatively minor change like this, it should be immediate as soon as it is publicised. Note that the announcement of the change went up on the website immediately and people would be entitled to ask why they should have to wait another five months.

3.12. Moscito

Evidently the L&E has received some complaints that Moscito is allowed in the NICKO (since this competition is now level 4). Well, I agree with the complainants. As I've said before, I feel the standard level for tournament play should be somewhere between levels 3 and 4, and Moscito is just the sort of thing I would leave out. I've played it myself, and I know the amount of disruption it causes. The whole of level 4 would be appropriate for most team events, but the NICKO is intended to be accessible to non-experts and so I do not feel that this is appropriate.

Now, the L&E has decided that "it was a Tournament Committee matter". Very amusing. While this is strictly true, it is the L&E which has caused the problem by getting the "levels" wrong and by recommending that EBU events should be run at level 4. To be fair, there's not much they can do about it now, but it would be nice if they admitted responsibility.

DBT11: Breaking Homogeneity (part 2)

The main idea of the previous post was that in an opening bid, the one-bid hands should be homogeneous, whereas the two-bid hands need not be. But there is still an interaction between the one-bid hands and the two-bid hands, even if all the hand types are very pure.

Responder has to choose a call before it is known what hand type opener has. In making this choice, he will be mostly concerned with catering for opener's one-bid hand types. But inevitably, his choice of call will also affect how the auction goes when opener has a two-bid hand type. For a start, it may affect the amount of bidding space available. But also, and more importantly, responder's call provides information which hopefully will be of use when opener has a two-bid hand. In order to have the most effective methods, we would really like to arrange things so that the information responder provides in trying to cater for the one-bid hands also happens to be the information that would be most useful to opener when he has a two-bid hand.

The Swedish 1C opening is a very good example of how this can be achieved. Suppose that opener's left-hand opponent overcalls 2D. Now responder will initially play opener for the dominant weak balanced hand type, which means that the methods used will be very similar to if the opening bid had been a weak 1NT. He will therefore be bidding or doubling on the following types of hands:

• Any hand strong enough for game opposite a weak balanced hand;
• Any hand with a good long suit, wanting to play a part-score in that suit;
• A hand suitable for a double. If double is take-out this means a hand with decent values, short in the opponents' suit.

He will not be bidding on mediocre hands without a long suit: these will be passed unless they are suitable for a take-out double.

This information is exactly what opener needs when he holds a two-bid hand. When opener has a strong hand like this, it is usually more important for opener to describe his hand, rather than have responder describe instead. So opener does not want responder to bid in front of him unless he has something particularly useful to say. The main thing that would be useful for opener to know about is if responder had a good suit of his own. And as we said above, this is indeed one of the hand types that responder will be bidding with. The characteristic auction for Swedish Club is something like 1C : (2D) : 2S. Here the 2S bid simply shows a hand which wants to play in 2S opposite a weak balanced hand, but the information that responder has at least five spades is also very useful when opener is strong.

This only works because the one-bid hands in the 1C opening are so well defined. In a standard system where 1C could be a weak unbalanced hand, responder would need a rather better spade suit in order to bid safely at the two-level. But in Swedish Club any half-decent five-card suit will do, such as KJxxx. If we had to pass with this sort of holding, then not only would we have difficulty in getting to a 2S part-score when that was right, but it would also be much harder to describe the hand accurately on the next round if opener turned out to have the strong option. Note also that if responder has a hand good enough to compete over an overcall, it is almost certain to be good enough for game if opener has a strong hand - this makes the continuations very easy. In summary, the weak option and the strong option of the Swedish 1C opening go particularly well together because in each case opener wants to know when responder has a moderate hand with a good suit. Of course, responder will also be bidding with strong hands of any shape, or with a hand suitable for a take-out double; again this is useful information if opener happens to have a two-bid hand. But really you see the biggest advantages of the two-way 1C opening when responder is able to show a suit.

We can contrast this with a similar-looking two-way 1C opening which shows either a minimum hand with 4+ clubs, or a strong hand of any shape. It would be very easy to build a system around this bid. And the one-bid hands here are nicely homogeneous, so responder does not have any immediate problems. However, it does not work so well, the reason being that the hands that responder will take action on have changed. In particular, he is going to be bidding on hands with moderate club support. Knowing that responder has four clubs (say) is really of very little use to opener when he has a strong hand - he is much more interested in 5-card suits, particularly major suits. And because opener's one-bid hand types no longer promise tolerance for the majors, responder will be much less willing to introduce a major suit into the auction. While we were happy to bid 1C : (2D) : 2S on a spade holding of KJxxx opposite a Swedish 1C, we would have to pass or double if the weak option just showed clubs (unless the hand was strong enough to force to the 3-level). So opener will get much less information about the majors: information is skewed towards the club suit.

The 1C opening showing "either clubs or a strong hand" is not particularly widely played. A more popular convention is a 2C opening bid which shows either a "weak two" in diamonds or a very strong hand. This has a very similar problem. If responder plays for the dominant weak hand type, then he will want to be raising diamonds on many hands with 3- or 4-card diamond support. However, if opener has a strong hand he is not interested in 3-card diamond suits at all. Indeed, a diamond "raise" may take away space that opener wanted to use to show his strong hand. Admittedly, on any given deal responder is likely to be able to guess whether opener is strong or weak. But there is much more uncertainty than you might imagine, and the price for getting it wrong is high. Furthermore, even if responder is able to work out what is going on, the partnership agreements still have to cater for both hand types, and this reduces the amount of space you have. Really, the two hand types are not particularly compatible, with information that is extremely skewed towards the diamond suit being of little use to a strong opener.

More generally, if the dominant hand type (the weak option) shows length in a particular suit, opener is going to get lots of information about responder's length in that suit, which is only going to be of use if opener's strong options have length in that suit as well. So again we see that simple natural bidding gets this right. For a standard natural 1H opening, responder is initially trying to cater for minimum hands with hearts, but if he supports the heart suit then this is still helpful to opener even when holding a much stronger hand. A more exotic example would be a 2H opening bid which shows either a "weak two" or a "strong two" in spades: here opener would be delighted to hear about spade support no matter which hand type he has (though these transfer pre-empts are problematic for other reasons, and clearly an immediate raise could make slam tries difficult with the strong type).

If you do want a wide variety of two-bid hands, then you are much better off making the weak option nebulous, or showing a balanced hand as in Swedish Club. While clearly the Swedish 1C opening has its flaws (the main one being a lack of purity in its two-bid hands, as discussed earlier), in terms of the interaction between one-bid and two-bid hands it's really as good as you can get.

DBT10: Breaking Homogeneity

Some systems have bids which are explicitly defined as multi-way bids. Perhaps the archetypal example of a multi-way opening bid is the "Swedish" 1C opening, which shows either a weak balanced hand (11-13 HCP, say), or a strong hand of any shape (typically played as 17+ HCP). Natural systems do not use this sort of bid; however, many opening bids still contain a wide variety of possible hand types. For example, playing strong NT and 4-card majors, a 1H opening could be anything from a minimum balanced hand to a very strong 1- or 2-suiter. Clearly these are very different hand types, so the bid can be thought of as a multi-way bid in much the same way as the Swedish 1C is. The only difference is that the hand types in the natural bid are not separated by such a clear dividing line.

In either case, the important thing is to make sure that the various possible hand types go well together.

The One-Bid-Or-Two principle is very relevant here. If opener has a pure two-bid hand, then he will be able to reveal which hand type he has with his rebid. But if he has a one-bid hand, he may be unable to add anything to the initial description except to deny a hand suitable for taking a second bid. So, although responder's bids must cater for all the possible hand types opener can have, it is opener's one-bid hands which you need to be most concerned about. The opening bid must provide sufficiently good information about the one-bid hands that responder will know what to do. This does not necessarily mean that responder must be able to place the contract immediately, but he must at least be able to control the auction.

The easiest way to do this is to make the one-bid hands homogeneous. That is, while the opening bid as a whole may be a multi-way bid with a variety of different options, it is a good idea for all the one-bid hands to be covered by a single hand type - or perhaps by a small number of homogeneous hand types. The reason is simple: responder needs to know immediately what he should do opposite a one-bid hand, and a homogeneous opening bid is the best way of providing immediate information. All of the ideas about what makes a good homogeneous bid apply here.

For the two-bid hands, homogeneity is not so important: it is possible to have different rebids showing different hand types. The Swedish 1C opening is an excellent example of this. The one-bid hands are very homogeneous, consisting of a single hand type (11-13 HCP balanced), whereas there is much more variety in the two-bid hands: any shape is possible for the strong option. Many other well-designed multi-way bids work the same way: they have homogeneity in their one-bid hands, but it does not extend to their two-bid hands.

One problem with this sort of opening bid is a lack of flexibility. The different hand types are very clearly separated. So, if opener has a hand which is supposed to be treated as a two-bid hand, it is important to follow up by actually making the rebid which shows the hand. Unfortunately, as we know, not all hands are "pure" examples of one-bid or two-bid hands. A balanced 17-count is certainly not a pure two-bid hand. But if you open a two-way 1C, then this hand is treated as belonging to the strong variant. So if you are unlucky enough to have LHO overcall 2S, say, and responder raise to 3S, you will be in a difficult position. If you pass then partner will play you for a weak balanced hand, but there is no safety in making a free bid either. The lack of homogeneity between the different hand types is the problem here.

So this sort of bid works best when the "strong" hand types are genuine two-bid hands - as pure as possible. Ideally, they should either have overwhelming high-card strength (20+ HCP should ensure that the hand is a two-bid hand) or be very distributional - though in the latter case you need to be careful that you can actually describe the shape well with your rebid. (Single-suited hands are best for this.) In practice, most systems will have to allow some dubious hands into their strong options because of a lack of better places to put them, but clearly the strong option in our favourite example (17+ HCP, any shape) is already rather light, and anything weaker than this would be really asking for trouble.

Typically, if the one-bid hands are going to be homogeneous, this would mean that there is a particular hand type which responder will play opener to have until proven otherwise. We would call this the dominant hand type. Obviously the dominant hand type in the Swedish 1C opening is the weak balanced hand, but the term also makes sense for natural bids. For example, playing a standard 5-card major system, the dominant hand type in a 1S opening bid is a minimum hand with precisely 5 spades. More generally, the dominant hand type would usually be the most frequent one-bid hand type that opener can hold. We can state a general "homogeneity principle" in these terms:

All the one-bid hands in an opening bid should be as

close to the dominant hand type as possible.

The idea from a previous post that the "average" length (or strength) promised by an opening bid should be as close as possible to the minimum length (strength) is really just a special case of this. But we can now see that the average should be taken over only the one-bid hands. Two-bid hands do not need to be close to the dominant hand type, provided that they are pure two-bid hands. With an "in-between" hand you have a slight problem - it may work adequately well to treat them as two-bid hands, but it would also be helpful to have them be fairly similar to the homogeneous one-bid hands, in case the auction prevented opener from showing the precise hand type.

Bids which have a wide range of one-bid hands, or where there is no single dominant hand type, are much more problematic. But they do exist, with the most obvious example being the multi-2D opening bid. A multi-2D shows a weak hand with either hearts or spades (possibly with other strong options which are genuine two-bid hands). Although the strength promised is the same no matter which major suit is held, clearly in terms of distribution this is not a homogeneous bid. In a case like this, you have to find particular reasons why the bid "works" - why should responder be able to cater for both hand types at once? In general there is no guarantee that it will be possible.

There are a few reasons why the multi-2D is an effective bid. In particular:

• It is a pre-emptive bid, and will hopefully cause even more problems for the opposition than it does for opener's side.
• It is highly likely that responder will have at least as many cards in the other major as he does in the suit that opener actually holds. If opener has hearts and responder has 3-card heart support then the partnership should probably be playing in at least 3H; provided that responder has at least three spades as well, he will know that it is safe to bid 3H because his support for a spade suit would be just as good.
• If this is one of the rare deals where responder is actually shorter in the other major, then the opponents will almost always have a fit there and probably ought to be playing in that suit. If they do bid that suit, then this will let responder know what is going on.
• Because opener has a long major, if the hand belongs to opener's side, the most likely denomination is opener's suit. So responder will not often need to find out much more information than what opener's suit is. If opener's suit was a minor there would be much more information needed, and this would be difficult to get since you are already a step behind by not knowing what opener's suit is immediately.

But the important thing to note is that these points are very specific to the multi-2D bid. If you were to think of a different multi-way bid which did not have homogeneity in its one-bid hand types, you would have to try to find different ways to justify it. In many cases, the bid simply does not work. If you ignore the homogeneity principle you have to be very careful indeed.

DBT9: Homogeneity is Bad!

A homogeneous bid is good for giving immediate information to partner. However, you must also make proper use of your ability to refine the description of your hand later.

It would be very silly to play a system in which no hands were ever opened 1S. After all, we only have a very small number of opening bids to work with, and not to use one of them would be a terrible waste. That much is obvious. But in a similar way, suppose that in your system there are no hands which, after opening 1C, would rebid 3S after the auction started 1C : (1D) : pass : (3D). Surely that is wasteful as well. In order to make maximum use of the space available to you, you would really want to make sure that not only are all the opening bids given meanings, but also all the rebids as well.

This is why homogeneity is not always a good thing. If you tell partner all the important information with the opening bid, then that's great for helping him make an immediate decision, but it leaves you with nothing else to say later.

Of course, it is not always possible to make full use of opener's rebids. If you expect partner to pass your opening bid a large proportion of the time (as for example with a 1NT opening), you cannot expect to have the chance to rebid. So the rebids cannot be defined. Having this sort of opening bid in your system effectively decreases the total amount of space available to you. This may be a problem that you are willing to accept (I quite like natural 1NT openers myself), but it is still a problem.

The difference between one-bid and two-bid hands comes up again here. Opener's high-level rebids can only be used on two-bid hands. So, if you want to make full use of the space available in each opening bid, then these opening bids must each contain a fair number of two-bid hands.

Limiting the strength of your opening bids is bad from this perspective. An extreme example would be a 1H opening in a Strong Diamond system, which might show about 8-12 HCP with 4+ hearts. Hands in this strength range are hardly ever going to be two-bid hands. So after any reasonably high-level competition you would have to make disproportionate use of pass. The other rebids may get used very occasionally - and would therefore be very descriptive when they do come up - but the vast majority of hands will not be further described. To put it another way, there will be fewer sequences in your system available for the genuine two-bid hands (because none of them start with 1H), so these will not be described so well.

In contrast, a "standard" 5-card major opening, with a range of 11-21 HCP or so, makes much fuller use of the two-bid sequences (arguably too much). The beauty of this bid is that it is on the one hand a nice homogeneous bid (partner knows about the 5-card suit immediately) but there is also plenty of potential for making descriptive rebids.

It's important not to confuse this with arguments about the frequency of the opening bid. Indeed, trying to analyse systems by looking at the frequencies of their opening bids is very unreliable. For example, suppose you were to play a 1C opening showing a balanced hand with 10-13 HCP. Then this has a frequency of about 15% in first seat, much higher than standard systems which typically have 1C openings with a frequency of 10% or less. However, this 1C consists of a single hand type with no two-bid hands, and so hardly any of opener's rebids are utilised. So we might say informally that "you are not opening 1C enough", but really this argument is not about pure frequency at all, rather the number of different hand types in the opening. You could easily add, say, all 20+ HCP hands to this 1C opening. Indeed this could result in quite a respectable system, as we shall see later.

DBT8: Homogeneity is Good

Let's consider a particular opening bid, say 1H. A bidding system will typically require somewhere between 5% and 10% of hands to be opened 1H in first seat. Of course, if you were to choose 5% of hands at random, they wouldn't make a very good 1H bid: we have to choose them so that the opening bid provides useful information to partner. Particularly useful is if all the hands which are opened 1H share a property (or properties) in common, as then partner will be able to make deductions without having to wait for further clarification.

For example, suppose that our 1H bid promised exactly five hearts. Then if partner holds an average hand with four hearts, he can deduce that it is likely to be safe to compete to the three-level in hearts. This is based on the Law of Total Tricks, which admittedly is far from infallible, but is a good guide when you know exactly how many cards your partnership has in the suit.

It is fairly unusual to have a bid which shows exact length in the suit. More common would be a bid which shows five or more hearts. In this case, partner would still be justified in bidding to the three-level on an average hand with four hearts, but now if opener turns out to have more than five hearts there is a fair chance that bidding only to the three-level would be under-competing the hand. Similarly, if the 1H opening could occasionally be only a four-card suit, if responder still bids to the three-level there is a danger that this will be too high. Of course, there are many other factors which affect how high we should be competing, but trump length is very important, and so the more specific the information responder has about suit length, the better his chances of getting the decisions right. This is just part of the obvious general principle that a homogeneous bid - one where all the hands opened with that bid have some property in common - is good for providing information to responder. And the more specific the property is, the better.

Let's think a bit more about this 1H bid showing length in hearts. As mentioned already, in most systems the bid does not show exact length: rather there is a range of possible lengths. In this case, there are two properties of the opening bid which become important:

• The minimum length promised by the opening bid; and
• The average length promised by the opening bid.

For example, in Acol, where the minimum length for a 1H opening is 4 cards, the average length is close to 5. (I'm deliberately being a bit vague about what I mean by "average", but usually this would be interpreted as the arithmetic mean.) But other systems can have very different numbers - even if you consider only 4-card major systems, there is a lot of variety in how often 1H is opened on a 4-card suit.

This poses a problem for responder. If you are in a position where you have to make a decision without further help from opener, then you will have to decide - do you play opener for the minimum length, or for the average length in hearts? Playing opener for his average length will be right most of the time, but if he turns up with fewer cards than the average there is a danger that the partnership will be too high, or even playing in the wrong denomination. Whereas, if you anticipate opener holding his minimum length, you may very well be under-competing. There is not really any good solution to this, you are forced to hedge your bets.

But this is much more of a problem for some systems than for others. The key is this:

It helps to make the minimum length for your bids
as close to the average length as possible.

This is how you avoid responder's problem of what to play for.

And this explains the big advantage of playing 5-card majors.

5-card suits are much more common than 6-card or longer suits. So when you open 1H or 1S showing 5+ cards, the average length is still close to 5. The distinction between minimum length and average length therefore does not worry responder: he can happily play opener for a 5-card suit. From the point of view of homogeneity, a suit opening which promises 5+ cards is about as good as you can get, short of showing the exact length.

4-card opening bids are much worse in this respect. Assuming that you still open 1H or 1S when the major suit is five cards long, the average length for these opening bids is going to be closer to 5 than 4. This means that responder will find it difficult to judge hands with support for the major. (Of course the corresponding advantage that these systems have is that you get to find major-suit support more often in the first place.)

The worst possible case is if you play 4-card majors, always open your longest suit, and tend to open the lower of two 4-card suits. Then virtually the only time you open 1S on a 4-card suit is when you have precisely 4=3=3=3 shape. Here the average length is over one card more than the minimum length. Indeed, I would hardly say it is a homogeneous bid at all: it basically shows either a 4=3=3=3 hand or 5+ spades, and this is very bad news for responder since the first hand type is not particularly great for playing in spades at all, whereas the second type is excellent for spade contracts. How is he supposed to know what to do with spade support? I hope you would not be so foolish as to play this system - the balanced hands are so rare that it's much better to take them out of 1S somehow and guarantee five cards as the minimum. If you're going to play 4-card majors, you need to open them on four cards as often as you possibly can. This brings the average suit length down much closer to the minimum. This is another good reason why if you are playing a strong NT, it makes sense to open 1H or 1S on minimum hands with a 4-card major even if holding a longer minor.

The same principles apply when we are considering the strength promised by an opening bid, rather than the length. That is, we would ideally like to have a precise description of strength, but if forced to use a relatively wide range, we really want the minimum to be as close to the average as possible. For an opening bid which promises 12+ HCP or thereabouts, this usually happens fairly automatically, since hands with higher HCP values are less frequent. But it doesn't always work that way. For example, if you play a short 1C opening and a weak NT, the 1C opening is very often a "strong NT" hand type. This means that the average strength (perhaps it is more helpful to think of the mode here) is not so close to the minimum. Of course this analysis is rather too simplistic, as there are some definite advantages arising from the "multi-way" nature of this bid - opener is known to have either real clubs or extra strength - but having the most common hands so far away from minimum strength should still be a cause for concern.

System Regulations

As you can see from this blog, I am fascinated by bidding theory. However, when it comes to actually sitting down at the table and playing the game, I do not believe that people should be allowed to experiment with unusual methods without restriction. System regulations are a necessary part of the game.

In an ideal world, two things would happen:

• People would be allowed to play whatever methods they thought were best; and also
• People would have the opportunity to come up with the best defences to all of their opponents' methods.

However, in practice these two things are incompatible. In most events, players do not find out what their opponents' methods are until just before they begin to play, and if these methods are sufficiently unusual there is not enough time to discuss an adequate defence.

So if the two objectives are incompatible, what do we do? The anti-regulation lobby would have us believe that freedom to choose our methods is the most important principle, and that opponents should try to cope with this as best as they can. I do not agree with this: if forced to choose, I think the right to be prepared for opponents' agreements is the more important. This may well involve "generic" defences which work against a variety of possible conventions. However, it is not reasonable to expect people to have generic defences for everything the opponents might want to throw at them.

Fortunately, system regulations offer a compromise. The people whose methods are disallowed might not see it as a compromise, but really it is:

• Players may only play methods which are permitted by the system regulations; but
• Players must be prepared to defend against all the permitted agreements.

From this we get the important principle of what the convention regulations should be:

The permitted methods should be precisely those things which it is reasonable to expect pairs to be prepared to defend against, given the amount of time available for discussion.

So for example, in a duplicate pairs event, there is virtually no time for discussion at all, so the permitted methods should only be those things which players are expected to already know their defences to. Whereas, in a knock-out teams event where players can find out their opponents' systems in advance, there can be a much wider range of agreements allowed. Of course it also depends a lot on how good the players involved are: there can be much greater expectations on players in a top-level event than those in a club event. So the principle of having multiple "levels" of system regulations, depending on the event, is a good one.

So, I am very much in favour of restrictions, provided that they are for the right reasons. The right reason for disallowing a convention is if it is considered to be so unusual that players would not know how to defend against it. Note that the important question is whether the opponents would know what their bids meant. There are some conventions which make life difficult for the opponents simply because they are obstructive - this should not be a matter for system regulations: provided that the opponents can understand the methods, they should be allowed. What really annoys me is when there is a convention which is not difficult to defend against (in terms of the opponents having agreements about what their bids mean), but which is disallowed for some other reason. This should not happen.

The other big problem with convention regulations is when they are poorly written. It is very important that the regulations are clear and consistently applied, since players must be able to know whether their conventions are allowed before turning up at the event. The worst possible thing is when different TDs have different views on what the regulations say. Fortunately, apart from a couple of well-known issues, the system regulations here in the EBU are largely free of serious problems, though there are a few little corners that I wish the L&E would get round to tidying up.

The EBU's system regulations are unusual in that they are extremely detailed. But in terms of how much is permitted, we seem to be fairly near the average. (North America, in particular, is much more conservative, whereas countries like Australia are more permissive.) In fact I would say that the EBU has got the level almost exactly right. If anything, the recent decision to use Level 4 in the EBU's competitions seems to me to allow a bit too much for duplicate events. I think it would be better for the game if the standard level for tournament play was somwhere between level 3 and level 4; the rest of level 4 would be allowed in teams events provided that those conventions were disclosed in advance.

At the very highest level, such as the world championships, I do think that agreements should be unrestricted. My argument here is simply that these events are planned so long in advance that players would have enough time to prepare for all of the opponents' systems. In other words, the "ideal world" scenario really ought to be achievable here. Some players might still complain that even with all the time available it is still not possible to develop defences which they consider to be good enough, but I think there comes a point where the organisers have to say: perfection might not be achievable, but there is enough time to be adequately prepared.

I've Learnt my Lesson

I can usually be relied on to have an opinion about any convention, whether I've actually played it or not. But I feel particularly strongly about the ones that I have played, and decided that they aren't any good. Here are some conventions that I would never agree to play again.

Kickback

Do not, under any circumstances, agree to play this convention. The idea is that you use the bid above 4 of the trump suit to ask for key-cards. However, if this bid is a suit, it's often far too difficult to distinguish it from a natural bid in that suit. You could have detailed agreements to try and ensure you always knew which was which, but no matter how good the agreements are there always seems to be more potential for confusion. Besides, I don't rate key-card asks as being particularly fundamental to slam-bidding, certainly not enough to warrant having all this extra space given to them.

Rusinow (leading 2nd from honour sequences)

Most of the time this is OK; however there are some situations in which you will want to lead unsupported honours, and then Rusinow doesn't work so well. You could agree to make exceptions, for example in partner's suit. But defining these exceptions carefully enough is not so easy, and the supposed advantages of Rusinow over standard methods seem to me to be far too tenuous to warrant all the effort.

Raptor 1NT overcall (showing a 4-card major and a longer minor)

I actually play this at the moment with Mark, but I wouldn't want to play it with a new partner. The problem is obvious - what do you do with a hand suitable for a natural 1NT overcall? Well, either pass or double, presumably, but I really dislike both of these options.

More generally, I really hate playing methods which give me difficulties on hands which "standard" systems would have no problem with. It's incredibly frustrating to be playing some clever gadget, and then have to admit that if you were playing standard methods you would have had no problem at all, whereas your gadget has made the hand unbiddable.

So my policy is to only play gadgets if they come at little or no cost. It doesn't matter if they have compensating advantages - if a convention puts me at a clear disadvantage compared to standard methods on a common hand-type, then I don't like it. That's why I won't play Raptor.

3NT opening showing a 4-minor pre-empt

The more traditional "Gambling 3NT" is OK, but when the minor suit need not be solid it doesn't work so well. There is more variation in the hand types, and so continuations are more difficult. Partner might not even be able to tell which suit is held. The convention would probably work well enough if you had enough time to discuss all the follow-ups and pass/correct bids. But for such a low-frequency opening you probably don't want to put that amount of work in.

For similar reasons I dislike any high-level multi opening. Even playing the multi-2D, which I've been using regularly for a long time and comes up a lot, I worry about all the unclear sequences that it generates.

Gerber

OK, maybe this one's too obvious. We all know Gerber is a bad convention. But I agreed to play it with my partner in the local league because he really wanted to, and I wanted to keep my partner happy. What I learnt was:

Never agree to play Gerber,

even if it's just to keep partner happy.