[y66]

Do you and your regular partners maintain detailed written agreements for defense? How extensive are they? More than a few pages? When you discuss problems that come up at the table do you write up the resolutions or do you just remember them (ha!)?

[gnasher]

I doubt if I have more than half a page of A4 of notes about defence with anyone. Unless you have very rigid rules, it's quite hard to document agreements about what a particular card means in particular situation - it's mostly just a matter of judgement and shared experience.

[FrancesHinden]

We have about two pages written up in the system file, but if we wrote down all our agreements it would be rather longer (for example, I don't think I have ever actually written down all of our systemic opening leads but we both know them).

We discuss defence a lot. Probably more so than uncontested auctions. When we have discussed a hand that came up at the table, there isn't usually a 'resolution' that adds to partnership agreements, it's more a matter of trying to get sufficient partnership experience so that we always agree on what a sequence of cards shows.

[ArtK78]

Defensive agreements should not take much space. Just agree on a basic framework, such as Kaplan's book on defensive play, and then add your own specific lead and carding agreements. You could add some specific situations in which your personal agreements might differ from the treatment in Kaplan's book (or whatever other authority that you decide to use as the basis for your set of defensive agreements).

[awm]

Sam and I play the agreements described in the Granovetter book (a switch in time).

How much space in our notes we've devoted to defensive carding is sort of open to debate, since you could say any of:

(1) The entire Granovetter book is our "notes on defensive carding" so we have 100 pages or so.

(2) We should have just said "we play Granovetter carding with udca" in which case our notes would have only one line on defensive carding.

(3) Or what's actually in our notes... a summary of the Granovetter methods, particularly which suit is the "obvious switch" at trick one, which takes about two pages.

Of course, this is always the case with "system notes" -- you could play a very complicated system and your notes could be one line: "We play what it says in the Viking Club book."

Or you could play a very simple system and have a hundred pages of examples and specific sequences (i.e. there is an over-100-page book on SAYC bidding).

[pclayton]

Defensive carding is fairly important and a good partnership should have a sound understanding of what a card means in a certain situation.

Whether or not you actually document it is a matter of preference. If I were to document my notes with one partner we'd have 2-3 pages of notes. We play obvious shift, which has a changed a little over the years, and documentation is useful to keep up.

o