forcing. Chapters 2-3 and
Chapters 11-onward are appropriate to both 1 forcing and two-over-one.
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These notes define the Big Club system that I play with John Strauch and Ed Barlow. For value I think you have to make the decision to play the system.
Chapter 1 and Chapters 4-10 define the big club - 12-15
notrump system and includes changes to one-of-a-suit auctions
that occur as a consequence of 1 forcing. Chapters 2-3 and
Chapters 11-onward are appropriate to both 1 forcing and two-over-one.
I strive for completeness in these notes. You simply have to recognize that some agreements are aimed at 1/10 of a matchpoint or 1/10 of an IMP. At the same time, I do not have the memory for agreements that win the last 1/100 of a matchpoint or an IMP.
Notes like these have been used in bridge discussion groups since the fifties, and have produced strong partnerships for me. Each discussion group has used different technologies, and the format has evolved accordingly. In the fifties it produced a set of notes for the system I played in the Bay Area. In the late sixties I moved to San Diego, and we started with two-over-one, switched to the Blue Team club, and then developed the current big club system. We had another group in the mid seventies when my wife, Doris, moved to San Diego. The last series of groups started in the early nineties, and that evolved from the presentation of my two-over-one notes, to the use of many peoples notes, and then to using the computer to verify or contradict our theories.
Around 1970 David Weiss and I wrote the great-grand-daddy of the current hand generation program. We used the deals for bid-em-ups , and I think they provide an efficient method for quickly forming a strong partnership. In the early nineties I taught the computer my version of two-over-one and the big club system. This produced deals to prove or disprove whatever theories we investigated on a particular evening.
The first approach was to look at 48 boards. (This is three repeats of the dealer and vulnerability of Boards 1-16.) What I often do is generate 21 * 48 boards, and use Ginsberg's double dummy solver for the appropriate strains and declarers. This answers questions such as holding "... " with the following bidding "... ":
better than 1NT? I do not know if commercially available programs do the above. If they don't, they should. You, or the authors of those programs, are welcome to my hand generator program and source code 4evanb@cox.net. I suspect the program is only Evan-friendly. A problem with my program is that an auction path is not implemented until I want it, and then I build it.
Another computation downloaded Ginsberg's 717,102 deals, and analyzed them to determine a better count Appendix 1. What, for example, an ace is worth, depends on the strain and the features included in the hand evaluation model. I find using a point count more accurate than given in Chapter 2 distracting. Look at the appendix when someone climbs on a soapbox and orates about the true value of a hand features.
The computer may be referred to as the senorita.
A team game investigated the subject of the discussion. The team game starts with board duplication. Each player was given a board and a hand record with three deals on the evening's play topic. He duplicated one of the three deals. Actually the table gets four hand records, and we specified the duplicator as dealer, second seat, etc. You were expected to choose the most instructive board of the set, and of course, could choose the board that best demonstrates that the evening's theories were wrong.
How bidding and play work at each table is that table's business. Whoever choose the deal might have suggestions. Table talk and looking at notes is allowed. Possible procedures are:
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