[roni57]

Bridge is such a nice game, but there are some rules that is making some people lose their interest altogether. The way the governing body discriminates between green/blue convention and red/brown convention! The brown card players have to provide defence and upload their convention and system notes days in advance (even online).the green/blue players are not obliged to do so. Everyone should be obliged to post their full detailed system notes for reference. I have been playing in local clubs and regionals in North America for 7 months now. I like playing in the Open category. So far I have never seen a single pair that has all the alerts written in their convention card (they indeed have a ACBL convention card and sometimes have scratches all over the place, which are impossible to read). So the regulating body allows a pair to have a hidden agreement? Let's say for a simple case, people who play a convention called "stayman" can have altogether different response structure and there are so many. How are opponents supposed to know what are their other alternatives? But as soon as someone plays HUM, they will jump into the picture and have the boards adjusted if green /blue players are injured. I play a "green system" now. I always have a cc along with five pages of alerts. But I know even those five pages are not sufficient for the opps, and can harm them in some way if they don't knowkthe other alternatives.
The reason they have a blue system is altogether a mystery. By all means it should be red/brown. Except maybe the lawmakers themselves play it and would like to continue playing it.
According to my understanding, if someone grows up learning a system, that should be a standard system. Yet a lot of people, mostly in North America, prefer to call 2/1 or sayc as standard. I started with strong diamond system, followed by 2/1 with modifications, yet I don't call either of those standard system.
It is high time governing bodies should do away with such discrimination between systems. All players must provide defence to their own system whatever be the color, and post the full system online and have it for ready reference for opps. And lastly, ban the word standard please!

[steve2005]

Welcome.
Not showing your 1500 pages of system notes is not the same as having secret agreement,
For most methods I would not want to use defense designed by the opponents.

[FelicityR]

Yes, bridge is such a nice game but systems/conventions and the rules governing them are just tied up with so many rules, bureaucracy and red tape that I now prefer playing rubber bridge with friends. We keep it simple, just a few conventions allowed, nothing too complicated, and it makes for a pleasant game/evening.

The good players will still win in the end because they are 'good players'. What saddens me is that intermediate/advanced players sometimes assume (rightly or wrongly) that their complicated systems/conventions will make them better players because they are more involved and adopting such methods will improve their game.

Ho hum...pigs might fly

[blackshoe]

Not sure where all these colors are coming from, if you're in the ACBL.