[frank0]

Let's say you're playing a big event(well, big compare to your past experience) with semi-regular partner at about flight B/C level(opinion for people at higher level is welcome). It's still quite a few month before the events. You and your partner, besides work or school, have some but not much common free time.

What do you think it's the best use of the time? Main issue is, do you prefer spending more time on actually playing some hands? Or do you like to spend big fraction of time on working detail agreement(e.g. discuss/practice in bidding room)?

If your answer is former, what type of opp do you like to practice(e.g. your friends/teammates, random people, strong opp if you can find)? If your answer is later, what type of partnership agreement do you want to focus on(constructive bidding, defensive bidding, delicate defensive carding agreement)?
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I have some non-perfect(though not terrible either) experience on working with different partners before. I've played with a system fan, where I learned a pretty long and theoretical near-perfect constructive bidding system where we got the agreement on the situation that happens about once each 2 years, and we played together on reasonable frequency, but in real events, bidding misunderstanding in common competitive auction charged us. I've also worked with a partner where we spends lots of time on agreement discussion(or, more accurately, I asked my p to agree what I said ), pretty much cover everything we need, include how to defend some artificial bid, but actually played less than 50 hands(in about 3 month) before the actual event start. Maybe due to this we, or at least I did not play the best game, making lots of error in play/defense below my level. Right now I'm working with a partner who shows few interest in having too many agreements beyond ACBL convention card, and prefer spending 95% time actually playing, even with low quality opponents like random players on BBO.

Maybe I'm a little bit too die-hard on this issue and not treating partner properly. I'm the kind of person if you say you want to play leb. after X opp's weak 2, I ask you what's the meaning of leb. 2N first then bid 3♠(opp open 2♥). Or if you want to play XYZ, I ask you what's the difference bet. direct 3N and 3N via 2♣/2♦. If you ask me to play crash against precision 1C, I ask you what's pass and XX after opp double our overcall and what's the minimum hand you overcall with. Sometime I even bother partner with the meaning of (1♥)-p-(p)-3S*. I like to list a long 2 pages rules about when we play takeout/penalty double or when we play attitude/count suit-preference signal.
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If you skip the line in between, basically I'm asking what should be a regular partner in bridge spend time on? If the focus is to improve the result at the event you play given limited time. Do you think getting a long system note/complicated carding agreement is unnecessary or critical, given the level of events I play? Do you think playing many hands with partner is critical to improve card-play, especially defense, as a pair?

[mgoetze]

Personally I enjoy system discussion, but I don't believe this is the optimal use of my time for getting good results. As you've already noticed, competitive auctions are much more likely to cause misunderstandings than constructive auctions. So my personal recommendation - both partners should work through Partnership Bidding at Bridge by Robson/Segal and discuss after every chapter.

Another low-hanging fruit compared to optimising your constructive auctions is probably carding - finding out when partner is giving attitude, when count, and when suit preference. For this I like to play with opps who are understanding when you feel the need to discuss. Look at every card, think about what it means, and if it turns out that's not what your partner had, ask him about it.

[kayin801]

I've found that reviewing what system you have is always a good idea so that you don't have bidding misunderstandings, but trying to add or fix too much prior to the event is a bad idea. My partner and I are two of those system fans you mention, and we play something fairly intricate, so before we go to play at a tournament we print out/review our system notes and just randomly quiz each other or bring up obscure situations, not because we're looking for fixes or changes or holes, but so that we can remember and get ourselves into the right frame of mind (and this is what I believe to be the biggest thing, just being on the same wavelength). In fact, even if something is sort of bad, we will sometimes leave it just because we don't want to change it at that juncture. This has helped us avoid much by way of bidding misunderstandings except in really weird situations.

If this is an established partnership then I'd hope that carding agreements are set at this point, but definitely play a bunch of hands leading up to your event just so, again, you can get in the right frame of mind. Playing with different partners requires a different touch so you need to be able to decide what plays will let you best communicate with this particular partner.

[mikl_plkcc]

Discuss the bidding system to ensure that no misunderstanding happens in IMP events.

Focus on playing in MP events.

[helene_t]

some misunderstandings that frequently have caused me lost MPs or IMPs in not-so-well-oiled partnerships are:

- opening leads. We just agreed to play "rusinow" or "strong tens" but it appeared we had different ideas about what that exactly means
- overcall style
- follow ups to overcalls. In particular: Do we raise on junk, and cuebid with anything resembling a constructive raise? Or does a simple raise show some kind of values?
- More generally: how aggressively do we raise in various competitive auctions?
- preempt style
- follow-ups to natural notrump overcalls
- what do do when they double. Is system on over 1NT-(x)? Is 1banana-(x)-2apples forcing? What is (1NT)-2♣*-(dbl)-rdbl? (*whatever 2♣ means in your system)
- RKC 1430 or 0314?
- when do splinters apply?

[paulg]

I recommend that you just play most of the time. I know the robots generally get a bad shout, but they can be ideal for practice as they play quickly at a fair standard, bid a lot so you get competitive sequences, and don't mind if you stop to discuss something.

I also like to spend an hour in the bidding room with a 27+ points setting to practice our slam zone bidding, again with robots as opponents. It is the confidence that this builds that is more important than the slam zone tools, assuming it builds confidence

good luck!

[P_Marlowe]

Hi,

the partnership bidding desk at BBO is a good way to test your agreement set.

Uncontested / Contested with the GIB.

That way you get to see lots of hands, in a very short amount of time.

If you plan to play, quality counts more than quantity, and you need to review
the play.

With kind regards
Marlowe

[aguahombre]

Even in a very long-time established partnership, where carding is well known and we have been using/changing the same system for years ---our misunderstandings (boo boos) occure when something hasn't come up for a while.

We don't realize it has been a long time since a particular sequence has been used until all of a sudden it is there to deal with.

Typical "oh-sh...'s" are:

--I could have used gadget x for this hand pattern, now she doesn't have a clue what this bid means.
--2NT by a passed hand in response to 1M is a 6-9 bid with both minors, but I forgot and things get silly.

So, we like to peruse the card for things which haven't happened lately. You have a month or so before the tourney. We do this while driving to the tourney. You even have time to peruse for things you don't like about your agreements; we don't think we should do that at the last minute.

[Phil]

I am 12 days away from the GNTs. My partner wanted some updated notes, so I am going through this exercise and not trying to throw too new stuff in.

There's been some discussions on here, but what you really need to focus on are your competitive auctions, which are about 75% of the auctions at the table. Spend a lot of time on your defensive carding as well, although I find that practicing with actual hands is best for this, assuming you spend a lot of time discussing what your signals mean after the session.

If you play a complicated system, then a lot of your resources are spent on auctions that come up seldom. This is unfortunate because you still need to have good agreements, if only to avoid messing up the easy hands.

[nigel_k]

I like to generate random hands and we both just write down how we think the bidding should go (using all four hands). Then we compare. Obviously there is some risk of resulting in the auction when you see all the cards, but the gain is that you can get through a lot of hands and do most of it by email whenever you have some spare time, rather than needing to allocate a large chunk of time when you are both available.

Don't forget leads and carding agreements, though I don't know a good way to practice those.

[nige1]

Larry Cohen's System Checkup is a good place to start with a new partner.

IMO, you should spend most time on carding and competitive bidding. Unfortunately, nowadays, you may also need to become secretary birds to adjust to the deepening mire of laws and regulations. This may help you to minimise the damage from opponents' rudeness, gamesmanship, and irregularities. For example, unless your regulating authority elects otherwise, you can agree different conventional treatments, depending on the options chosen after an infraction.

You can use the expert partnership bidding feature of a magazine for bidding practice:

• Designate yourself West (say), so that partner is East.
• Select all hands where West calls first and make your calls.
• Partner does the same with the East hands.
• Email your calls to each other and make the next calls.
• Repeat this exchange until all auctions are complete.
• Study the magazine auctions in case you can plagiarise an expert treatment.
• Discuss each board until you have an agreed auction.
• The idea is that, at the table, you won't puzzle "what does partner mean by that peculiar action?"
• It suffices to ask yourself "If I did that, what would I mean by it?"

[Cthulhu D]

Carding and leads comes up 50% and 25% of hands respectively, and I reckon they are a good use of time.

What ever you do it's much faster to practice on BBO with bots and VOIP so you can discuss in real time. Spend some time upfront to write some good dealer scripts to practice 'interesting' hands.

[gnasher]

nigel_k, on 2012-April-02, 13:56, said:

I like to generate random hands and we both just write down how we think the bidding should go (using all four hands). Then we compare. Obviously there is some risk of resulting in the auction when you see all the cards, but the gain is that you can get through a lot of hands and do most of it by email whenever you have some spare time, rather than needing to allocate a large chunk of time when you are both available.

I find this approach useful, because it tells you a lot about how your partner evaluates hands.

Quote

Don't forget leads and carding agreements, though I don't know a good way to practice those.

I've never done this, but after a session I think it would be worthwhile to go all the hands where you defended card-by-card, discussing the meaning of each card.

Nige1 said:

You can use the expert partnership bidding feature of a magazine for bidding practice:

I'm not so sure about this. If you do lots of "Challenge the Champs" type hands, you may start looking for traps on every deal. Most pairs would do better practising randomly dealt hands, with just sufficient constraints to make them interesting or relevant.

[Statto]

Play when you have common time. Discuss via email when you don't have common time. Online play has the advantage that bidding/play records are kept so you don't necessarily need a post-mortem right there, maybe make a note for discussion later. Ideally find a pair of opps who are in a similar boat, so there can be post-mortems where you and opps can be mutually beneficial to each other (like in teams practise where the team gets together to play).

Discussions should generally focus on whether there was a better play/lead/signal/bid/call in terms of improving partnership understanding (e.g. if I had ****, how would you have taken it? would you have expected me to **** with this hand?), less so on introducing any new gadgets, particularly nearer the event. Later reviewing all hands played is useful, you might spot something you missed at the time, maybe something worth discussing, but maybe just something that gives you a better understanding of partner's style.

[MartyD24]

1. take some sort of "checklist", e.g. "Partnership Understandings" from Mike Lawrence, which i know personaly, or some of the above mentioned, and make sure, that you and your partner are on the same wavelength regarding your parterership bidding system. As mentioned above, focus especially on: competitive bidding, balancing, when is "system on/off", etc.

2. do some regular "live" practice (on bbo, in your favorite club) and review/discuss the hands with your partner !! concentrate on misunderstandings and try to clear as many of them up.