[blml] Alerting Rules

[Eric Landau]

On Sep 11, 2007, at 9:02 PM, Gampas at aol.com wrote:

> The L & E decided,  in its wisdom, that we were "likely to expect"  
> 1NT - 3H
> to be pre-emptive. I  think this is cloud-cuckoo-land. The clear  
> intent of the
> phrase was (it has been  removed now) was that the methods in  
> question would
> be normal, and the majority  choice. How else could we be likely to  
> expect
> them?

I would quibble with Paul's choice of words, which suggest that  
"normal" is somehow equivalent to "the majority choice".

We must recognize that there are numerous situations in which more  
than one treatment of a particular call is sufficiently well known  
and played by a substantial percentage of  players to be considered  
"normal".  Indeed, in many of these situations there may be no  
"majority choice".  Experience has proven repeatedly that attempting  
to build an alert procedure around the notion that any given call can  
have only (or at most) one non-alertable meaning leads to confusion  
and chaos.


Eric Landau
1107 Dale Drive
Silver Spring MD 20910
ehaa at starpower.net