[newroad]

Hi Straube.

Compliments of the season to you and yours!

I've never played anything that purported to be MOSCITO (though I did play what was in effect a strong club implementation of FPR when MOSCITO was still using one bid, 1D as I recall, to show both majors. In this, we played 1C = 14+ hcp, 1D = 4+H 9-13 hcp, 1H = 4+S, 1S = 4+/4+ minors etc. In some respects, this was slightly ahead of its time).

Further, though a few years ago I considered something similar to the Straw Man method, I didn't and don't play it so these musings are purely an academic consideration for me at present.

I think your point about relay versus non-relay auctions is valid - where we might disagree is on how prevalent these situations are likely to be and therefore how much design (and memory) effort to put into them. IMPrecision c2009 has a fairly hefty strong club (16+, 17+ if BAL) so my inclinations would be weighted to towards the relay side. As mentioned before, the proof is in the playing (and it may come down to personal philosophy as well - some people prefer to break relay more often than others).

In essence, I had to look at IMPrecision to properly consider your question, and when I did, at first blush, it appeared to have significant complexity compared to Symmetric and I couldn't at face value see enough rationale - hence I asked the question. To vary from Symmetric, one should really be able to justify what one's doing, both in a playability sense (which you judge IMPrecision does) and a memory sense (to do well in a long tournament against strong opposition, you can't afford either system lapses or declarer/defensive lapses deriving at least in part from effort expended on system recall).

Straw Man would be fairly easy to play (for someone already versed in Symmetric) as you can always go back to Mama to work things out if needed. The "bad" relay breaks have a sensible and convenient mechanism in most cases (via 2D) - it is possible that the "good" relay breaks to which you alluded (splinters, fit-showing etc) less so, but as previously mentioned, I'm perhaps more inclined to continue relaying with these than you. Straw Man does a couple of other things well in addition (e.g. the early separation of possible hearts versus spades versus hearts and spades) but it's all a bit moot, no-one plays Straw Man - this was really about considering the bang for buck of IMPrecision relative complexity.

Regards, Newroad

[straube]

Newroad,

Opener breaks relay when he can't force game.

Fair enough point about memory load. The relay breaks have more to remember because there is much more that opener can describe. IMPrecision seemed rather daunting to me when I first looked into it. Well worth it.

Thanks for the discussion. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year