[mike777]

As usual many discussions on what should be disclosed as an alert in partnerships.
I raise this issue because I see comments such as "in my country this is very standard understanding or style of play" In my country, USA, my guess is 99.9% of the partnerships have no idea what the heck they are playing. . Please understand many of them claim otherwise but ask them a few details and it becomes clear they are lucky to be playing the same method of ace asking.

I am interested in hearing your best guess for the rough numbers of worldwide partnerships that have played for more than one year, have some detailed partnership agreements and play competive bridge.

My guess is this is a very small number. My guess is the vast majority of partnerships have little agreements and those that have detailed agreements play little bridge together. Example Hamman and Wolff are no longer together as are many other famous pairs.

My guess is around 5,000 pairs. Keep in mind only 78 pairs made the finals of top usa open MP and maybe 64 -80 teams play in top usa imps matches and many of those pairs are not really long term partnerships. The rest of us play with very few detailed agreements and almost none that are posted here in the forum. But only a guess.
I think back when I played often in club games and tourneys and it seemed most of these partnerships were not long term and the few that were had a few basic agreements but again only a guess. Most seemed to play sayc or 2/1 but with no idea what the heck their agreements were, even at the top levels.

Perhaps in Europe and South America and Asia your experiences are different?

[1eyedjack]

In my locality there seems to develop a cluster of good quality players who play very similar methods within the cluster. This enables them to change partnerships and still maintain a fairly sophisticated set of partnership agreements.

[Fluffy]

I've been playing with same sponsor for 5 years, but neither of us really knows fully the system, does it count?.

Also I have been playing regularly with my father, does that count as another partnership?.

[luke warm]

i'd be going on 5 years with one partner except i'm an idiot

[Winstonm]

luke warm, on Aug 3 2005, 07:37 PM, said:

i'd be going on 5 years with one partner except i'm an idiot

Yeah, and I've been playing over 25 years with the same idiot partner.

[helene_t]

Last year some pairs from my local club (level ranging from D- to G-league in the seven-league Dutch A(highest)-G(lowest) for national and regional competition) did a workshop on "is this call forcing?".

Most of the pairs turned out to disagree on close to 50% of the sample auctions, meaning that you might as well play with some blindfolded monkey as with your regular p. (Well, as far as forcing or not is concerned. If the question had been "is this call natural?", hopefully the agreement would have been well above 50%).

I know partnerships who have played for years and still aren't sure if they play negative freebids or not. Or if Jacoby transfers apply after 1NT has been doubled. Or how to signal if you play Roman carding and you only have the wrong parity.

Last sunday I played for the first time with one of the better players from our club (E-league). I made a list of the most essential things you have to agree on. She was willing to answer my queries but obviously found it a little bit silly. She thought that most of the times, you will manage all right just defaulting to common sense.

And she's right of course. Only once on the 18 boards a situation occured in which one of our special agreements applies (it was inverted minors in competition). And even on that board, the decisive factor was not the bidding but me choosing the wrong opening lead.

It's just that if I'm not sure that partner will understand my bidding, I get stressed and I get the feeling that it will impair my judgement. So I keep insisting on comprehensive agreements. Obviously, most players are not interested in that aspect of the game.

[han]

Playing f2f I almost always play with regular partners, people I have played with regularly for more than 4 years now. I was lucky that my first serious partner in the US feels very strongly that a succesful partnership must have very clear agreements about many situations. I copied many of his prefered methods and used them in my other regular partnerships.

At the local level I have the same experiences at Mike. Even the regular partnerships have no agreements about some things that I consider absolutely necessary. But I'm not complaining, I prefer winning over losing.