[benlessard]

Its been said many times

its a matter or agreements
agreements are under-rated
what could i do ? we have no agreements at least none i can remember
i know 7 is cold but im happy enough at 6 imagine if my partner passed 4♠
do we play ruben/lebensohl on this ?


Game-over game ,massive preemption, unclear forcing pass auction are truck-load of "great IMPS clearance sale"



One thing that has annoyed me many times is the lack of agreements on rare but IMPS costly bidding sequence.

In fact when looking at poll there is always at least 1 hand where you know you have a problem right from the start and you already thinking "will it be forcing ?" or "i should bid slam rightaway its the practical bid"

Years after years these hands happen over and over and we do nothing or very little.


3nt Gambling---4♥----pass-----???

is 4♠ forcing ?

a q-bid?

is it natural ?



1s--2d--3d---4d--

Forcing pass ?

if it insnt

is 4h Forcing ?
last train ?
a q-bid?
Ace or king
is it slammish or just says 55


and what about X ?





Anyway im sure it would be a very profitable and interesting to all work together and write those agreements once for all.

I much prefer to have agreements that arent perfect then no or unclear agreements.

And when youre lucky enough to have agreements did you put them in writing ?

Because if not what will happen if the hand come 2 year from now ?

will you remember ? will partner remeber ? Will the agreements still stand if you havent discussed it for a long time ? "Yeah i know we've discussed it but since it never happened i thought we had giving up on it"

Writing and re-reading them once in a while is the only way to go.



Ill start with one that i like.

When there is 1 and only 1 bid under our Main suit its show extra and is artificial.



pass--1d---1s---3d weak----

3h is unexpected xtra values



1s--2d--3d---4d--??

4h is artificial showing im bidding 4s but have xtra (last train)



1s--2d--2s--3d--??

3h is artificial. showing im bidding 3s but im not only competing.


1s---4d----??

most would play 4h as being natural and NF

but i think its much better to give up on this and use 4h as art vgood raise to 4s.

Or a good raise with a d controls.


Anyway my plan is to write down agreements, sticks to them for better and for worse and after 5 disaster in a row change them

comments ?

[whereagles]

benlessard, on Jan 31 2006, 01:18 PM, said:

Years after years these hands happen over and over and we do nothing or very little.

Because to agree these matters takes time, trouble and a pard willing to discuss things with you. It's not easy to find time and/or patience to study agreements, and even less easy to find someone willing to hear you.

Yes, it's annoying, but it's also very human. There's not much you can do.

[han]

I think that this is the wrong place for this thread, so Ben will probably move it. I think that most serious partnerships will have agreements on most of these issues, except perhaps on the (3NT)-4H-(p)-4S auction, which I expect many haven't discussed but play as natural and non-forcing anyway.

I'm not very interested in making a large set of agreements that many people can play. I'm sure that good partnerships make lots of such agreements and do write them down. When you are only working with two people then you don't have to compromise as much.

[luis]

If you have a partnership start with some meta-agreements, things that can be applied to different bidding situations, specially to competitive auctions. As your partnership evolves you can try to specify some common or problematic situations.

As an example with my pd we started with the gross meta-agreement that "doubles are never for penalties", with this in mind we had 0 missunderstandings about doubles and they only scored a doubled partscore against once in the last 2 years of regular play. Since this agreement wasn't super-optimum for some specific situations for example after our NT is overcalled we sat down and developed the bids after 1NT-something.

Maybe it helps you maybe not

I think Ben (Inquiry) has a lot of interesting ideas on meta-defenses.