[blml] SAYC

[Eric Landau]

At 05:19 AM 11/2/06, Jeff wrote:

>What is SAYC? I don't find it on the abbreviation list.  Perhaps
>Standard American Yellow Card?

Correct.

>But what, if correct, does that mean?

SAYC was the product of an attempt by the ACBL to hold events in which 
everyone would play the same methods.  A committee was appointed to 
come up with those methods.  They were supposed to devise an 
essentially natural system based on standard American practice, 
incorporating only the most widely known and used conventions.  But 
instead they incorporated a whole bunch of their individual favorites, 
some of which were rather unusual, even odd.  The result was an 
unplayable system with some obvious holes (e.g., IIRC, the auction 
1NT-P-2S-P- demands a 3C rebid, with 2NT left undefined and therefore 
an illegal bid in an SAYC event).

Although SAYC events proved unpopular and are no longer held, SAYC 
remains the "official standard" system of the ACBL.  Because it's 
there, it has been adopted as the common default system for ad hoc 
partnerships playing on line.  But even ad hoc partnerships know 
unplayability and holes in the system when they see them, and have 
their own ideas about how to cope with the flaws in SAYC so as to 
render it "common-sensical".  So these days it is no longer generally 
regarded as a fixed system to be played exactly as written, but rather 
as a framework within which the details are left to the partnership, 
essentially the new "Standard American", albeit rather more tightly 
defined than than SA, which has come to encompass such a wide range of 
methodological choices (covering, for example, both four-card major and 
five-card major systems) as to be virtually meaningless.


Eric Landau                     ehaa at starpower.net
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