[blml] agreements

[Eric Landau]

At 08:28 AM 10/13/06, Alain wrote:

>At 11:33 12/10/2006 -0400, you wrote:
>
>>I have a hard time believing this.  Is "the standard Belgian expert
>>stuff" really consensually and uniformly defined to the point where it
>>can be called an agreement by virtue of merely being named?
>
>Perhaps. Perhaps not. Perhaps there exists a standard Brussels stuff. 
>Remember that Belgium is the size of New Jersey (and has less expert 
>players).
>
>>I can tell you this for sure:  There is not a single soul who could
>>tell you what constitutes "the standard American expert stuff".  Any
>>"agreement" to play *that* would be meaningless and would certainly not
>>constitute what we mean by "a partnership agreement" in this context.
>
>However, it has been said BWS2000 (or any year) is an agreement.

Point taken, although Alain would have done better to cite BWS87 (the 
version prior to the current one), or stick to the (I assume 
hypothetical) "Kalamazoo Club".

The current verions of BWS (actually BWS2001) is another kettle of 
fish.  The Bridge World itself has stated that due to the way their 
polls were conducted, BWS2001 contains internal inconsistencies which, 
notwithstanding its usefulness as a "framework" for system discussion, 
prevent it from being a coherent, playable system as formally 
defined.  Moreover, they introduced in BWS2001 the concept of "leaves" 
-- multiple possible meanings for various auctions subsumed by the 
overall system but subject to individual partnership agreement as to 
which "leaf" would be incorporated into the partnership's methods.  So 
while calling "we play BWS2001" an agreement is certainly better than 
calling "we play the standard American expert stuff" so (there is at 
least *some* "official" definition of the former), it's still rather dicey.


Eric Landau                     ehaa at starpower.net
1107 Dale Drive                 (301) 608-0347
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