[johnu]

 mikeh, on 2014-January-28, 17:19, said:

Roman was invented, in the strong variety, not because of its intrinsic merits but because the system in use (the Roman Club) couldn't handle strong 4441 hands. In other words, it was a patch for a problem, rather than being 'wow, what a good way to handle these hands'.

4441 hands are rare. 17+ hands are rare. 4441 17+ hands are very rare, which means that devoting an entire opening call to them makes no sense unless you see such hands as impossible to bid.

They can be difficult to bid, but generally speaking standard-based bidding methods can cope reasonably well with them, altho there will often be a need to make a slight distortion, such as bidding an appropriate number of notrump.

Mini-roman arises far more often, simply because 11-15 hands are more common than 17+ hands. However, standard methods should have no problem bidding these hands. Strong hands can be problematic because simple rebids may be non-forcing, and who likes to reverse or jumpshift with 4=4 shape in the bid suits, not to mention an unbid 4 card suit that may never be shown. These problems don't arise with the weaker openings, so using mini-roman is inventing a (bad) solution to a non-existent problem. FWIW, whenever I play against anyone with mini-roman on their CC, I assume I am playing against a weak pair, and I don't think I have ever been wrong about this.

As a historical note, mini-Roman, not surprisingly, also has it's roots in the original Roman Club system, starting out as a 2♣ opening to show a 12-16 HCP 3 suiter. Since almost everybody else uses 2♣ for some other purpose, 2♦ is substituted for the old Roman 2♣ bid.

I disagree that the primary reason for playing mini-Roman 2♦ is to handle the bidding of 4441 hands because they are difficult to bid, at least for those who know something about bidding theory. The main purpose should be to clarify that your other sequences show a real unbalanced hand, or a real balanced hand, or whatever your bidding sequence is trying to accomplish, as opposed to distorting your bidding when you have a 3 suiter.

[blackshoe]

 mycroft, on 2014-January-31, 11:31, said:

[Edit: I will note that one time I *do* in fact go full SB is when people play non-GCC conventions in a GCC game. It's almost never that I think it's bad, or that I don't have a defence - it's just that if I don't get to play my toys because of the GCC, they don't get to play theirs. It's amazing, when it happens, how often they "have been playing it with no problem for years."]

What do you do if it's a game where the actual convention rules are uncertain? Around here, club owners never say what conventions are allowed or disallowed in advance - they handle things on a case by case basis. You'd think that if you were playing nothing but GCC legal stuff there'd be no problem, but that turns out not to be the case. I've had club owners tell me "you can play anything you like", only later to say, in effect, "except that".

[Vampyr]

 blackshoe, on 2014-February-02, 17:22, said:

I've had club owners tell me "you can play anything you like", only later to say, in effect, "except that".

I know of one club where you can play whatever you like if you provide notes to be posted in advance. I think that ordinary things like FP don't require this. Variable FP might, though.

[Cthulhu D]

 blackshoe, on 2014-February-02, 17:22, said:

What do you do if it's a game where the actual convention rules are uncertain? Around here, club owners never say what conventions are allowed or disallowed in advance - they handle things on a case by case basis. You'd think that if you were playing nothing but GCC legal stuff there'd be no problem, but that turns out not to be the case. I've had club owners tell me "you can play anything you like", only later to say, in effect, "except that".

My local club has 'brown sticker and HUMs banned on walk in nights, for events refer to the conditions of competition' (which will always ban HUMs but not BS) posted on their website. Why don't club owners turn to the ACBL rules on what is and is not okay?

I see a bit of the same stuff though, people continually wonder if transfer responses after 1C are banned by that (no), but are surprised that an overcall of 1NT for takeout is.

[The It]

Unless playing teams, I generally play rough 2C/2D with my partner - shows that minor and a major 5/4 either way round and up to a 9 count in 1st/2nd but weak to intermediate in 3rd/(4th). Responses involve POC major suit bids and bids enquiring about the length of opener's major.

We've had some great hands with this:

I opened 2♣* and LHO came in with 2H straight away. This passed out, so dummy came down, I then proceeded to draw trumps and get the beer card in at the end. (I say the beer card, but due to being under the legal age to drink, I've resorted to calling it the 'lemonade card'). That was all the match points!

In the 2 years or so I (and three other people - all of whom I have partnered) have been playing this, we've had one proper ACOL 2C opener come up and unfortunately it meant we wrong sided the slam. That's one in however many boards I've played. It provides a lot of good results when it's opened on the right hand.


Jon

[fromageGB]

 Cthulhu D, on 2014-February-02, 23:57, said:

I see a bit of the same stuff though, people continually wonder if transfer responses after 1C are banned by that (no)...

Less than a year ago a club chairman here took me to one side and said I shouldn't really be playing transfer responses, and even though I explained it was the same principle as making transfer responses to 1NT, he wasn't satisfied until I showed him they were both EBU level 3, the acceptability rating at that time. He didn't seem happy, though.

The EBU are to be congratulated on the new level 4 regulation (level 3 has been abandoned), because a number of illogical constraints have disappeared.

[mycroft]

Clubs can do what they like. I think that in most cases, "GCC unless posted" is a good way to assume; at least when I play my stupid systems (especially the ones that lean on the GCC pretty hard) I assume that. If someone has an issue, they can call the TD and ask if it's allowed in their game; I'm at least happy to stop.

Many clubs are a little relaxed; many more are stringent "for the newer players", at least in invitational games. My old club, for instance, didn't want any strong club or the like in their invitational games; but weak NT was okay (for some reason - idiosyncrasy is my guess).

[rmnka447]

 Vampyr, on 2014-January-31, 19:51, said:

Can you not, in your system, open1♦ and rebid 2♣?

No, not with a minimum hand. We adopted some parts from Kaplan's update of the K-S system. The germaine change adopted is an interchange of the 2 ♣ and 3 ♣ rebids. A 2 ♣ rebid shows at least reversing values while a 3 ♣ rebid shows a minimum hand presumably 5-5 minors or something close to it.

While such a change might sound ridiculous, it actually works out quite well. It gives us a lot more flexibility for opener to describe strong unbalanced hands. Playing weak NTs, minor openers are skewed much more toward strong hands ( about 66% of the time versus 25% of the time playing strong NTs). But the problem hand is the 1-4-4-4 hand where we're pretty much constrained to rebidding a 4 card ♦ suit.

[helene_t]

Once I ran into a pair that played
2♣ = 4 hearts (canape) or 6 hearts
2♦ = 4 spades (canape) or 6 spades
2M = Muiderberg

I think they didn't have any strong variants in those openings (they payed a strong club system).

I thought that was interesting.

[Zelandakh]

That sounds a lot like "Middlesex" Asptro converted to 2 level openings. I have heard some players swear by the idea of matching their 1NT defence and 2 level openings and indeed many 1NT defences can be converted to openings like this (where legal, anyway).

[JLilly]

Statistical considerations:

By my calculations, you get a Flannery distribution 2.8% of the time (5-7 hearts, 4+ spades, with # hearts > # spades).
You get a 6-card diamond suit 4.2% of the time.

The probability of 11-15 HCP is 34.0%
The probability of 5-11 HCP is 56.4%

There's nonzero correlation between distribution and HCPs (extreme example: if you know that you have a 12-1-0-0 distribution; the probability of having 15 HCP is zero), but, naively multiplying the probabilities, you get a Flannery opener .028*.340 = 0.966% of the time, and a weak 2D .042*.564 = 2.37% of the time. So the rewards of Flannery have to be about two-and-a-half times as great as the rewards of weak-2D for it to be superior.

Especially at IMPs, I can see Flannery coming out on top, since it's at once constructive and preemptive w/r/t making game. If your side has the points for game, you'll find the right contract, and if you lack a fit and 3NT is a no-go, you can easily stop in 3M. If opps have the points for game, you've eaten up half their bidding space. A weak 2D is unlikely to lead to a game.

On the other hand, in a 36-hand tournament, your partnership will probably never use 2D Flannery, but you're more likely than not to use 2D weak 6-card suit. 2D as weak 6-card suit is much more likely to block their game.

[awm]

A couple points on the frequency:

1. Flannery can actually help you when you open 1♥ also. You can bypass the 1♠ response on most (all?) four-card holdings, which can conceal declarer's distribution or help you find the right partial (say responder has a 4-6 hand). It can also help you find 5-3 fits (presumably opener will always raise on three after 1♥-1♠ since he won't have four without a lot of extras).

2. Most people will open a weak 2♦ on a five-card suit at least sometimes (it depends on shape and suit quality and vulnerability and position) but the assumption of six-card suit is likely to be overly restrictive.

[mycroft]

The Flannery players would say that yes, the rewards from playing it *are* 2 to 2- times more than were they playing it as natural and weak. In fact, first they say "we've never had a bad board when we open Flannery"; then they talk about all the advantages they get when they open 1♥ (especially now that Kaplan Inversion is illegal - yeah, since 199mumble, but still).

Those that don't play Flannery acknowledge all those benefits, but you are correct, the frequency is pretty low, and I wonder how much worse they are when they get a 6-card diamond suit and 5-10 high.

[TresAces]

My partner and I open 2 diamonds showing 18 or 19 High Card Points. It has no other meaning and does not describe shape. We alert it as such. The partner responds withi6 point steps to show his./her High Card Point Count. 2H shows 0-6, 2S shows 7-12 and 2NT shows 13+ HCP. The opener uses this information to determine whether to proceed to game or explore slam. The 2H response says proceed with caution, 2S says game pointss are there, 2NT says explore slam. If the responder bids H or S in response to the 2D opener, the opner then bids best suit looking for a fit, or 2NT if no good five card suit. If opener bids 2NT as second bid, responder treats it as though it was an opening NT bid and bids stamen or transfer, or in the case of a very weak hand, passes at the 2NT level. Either partner might have distributional points to add to the HCP already established and push the other partner toward game or slam. I don't know that our system fits any of those named here: Mexican, Flannery, etc.