Talk:Blue Club

{{POV-check}}

I like (and used to play) Blue Club either, but it this kind of praises certainly does not belong to an encyclopedia. The article should be expanded and cleaned up. Duja 09:57, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

I believe that seeing some of the greatest bridge minds (Belladonna in particular) used this system to win numerous world championships and other major tournaments justifies a positive overview of the system. However I disagree that the Blue Club article praises the system. It is a fact the the system is especially good at finding slams and if Duja you have played it, you should appreciate this. I agree that the article could be expanded, however pointing people to the Reece book about the Blue Club should be enough until someone takes the time to undertake this task.

Belladona did not play Blue Club while they were winning all those championships, he played Roman. Roman is a small club or variable club system, not a big club system. The pair that did play a big club system played Neapolitan, which is the ancestor of blue club. Blue club is a system designed after the fact to capitalize on that run of championships, mostly achieved using systems quite different than blue club. 65.79.173.135 (talk) 18:30, 9 January 2009 (UTC) Will in New Haven 65.79.173.135 (talk) 18:30, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

It used to be excellent in finding slams at the time of Blue Team, compared with American methods. With today's systems, it's an equal deal.

The paragraph:

Other systems such as Standard American have become incredibly complicated to enable players to compete against systems such as Blue Club and Precision etc. Blue Club is especially deadly in finding safe slams, slams that other systems miss. It is thought to be complicated and artificial but in reality is straightforward and a pleasure to play.

certainly indicates an opinion rather than universal truth. I don't mind having something in that sense, but in less praising and more objective tone. I currently have a lot of job on other articles though, so I just marked it with POV-check. Duja 11:02, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

I also believe that the article should be called Blue Club rather than Blue Team Club as Blue Club is the actual name of the bidding system. Btw I am new to Wiki and I hope I haven't stepped on any toes through my contribution. Tiliqua 00:41, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

Possibly. It's not problem to move it. I think that it should be cased "Blue club" to be in line with Wikipedia naming conventions, but I'll have to recheck them out. Duja

Sounds good, I'd agree that I've expressed an opinion, however it's difficult to get a feel for bidding systems if only universal truths are expressed. To merely list the bids and responses contained in a system only tells part of the story - I think that an article about Blue Club should say where the system stands, in relation to other systems, particularly SAYC (which unfortunately seems to be the defacto world standard).

I truely believe that Blue Club is a system that is misunderstood and I was attempting to put things in context, ie that it is good at finding slams, that it is not particularly conventional and in essense is quite natural and straight forward. If you can put that in a way you believe to be more neutral I have no problems with that.

BTC in its modern form is played a lot over in Austria currently.

The tone of the piece is very opinion-oriented. The reason BTC was so popular was two concepts: 1) It unlike 2/1 treated each suit equally thusly allowing the users of BTC to arrive at very nondescriptive contracts. 3NT was often 1D-3NT, with no idea if the 3NT bidder had majors or not. 2) Their slam bidding was excellent - they introduced to the modern lexicon control bids, ace-asking bids other than Blackwood (such as Turbo), and detailed relay-style bids and responses.

These days with the reemergence of prepared/strong club system, BTC is starting to be seen as the forerunner to today's methods and concepts. -- End unsigned comment --

Here's another example of NPOV:

Canapé This is a powerful concept as with a 2 suited hand, your second bid is your strongest suit, whereas other more popular systems bid their weaker suit second - a potential recipe for disaster.

The "recipe for disaster" statement is unsubstantiated, and IMHO false. Normally responder can simply correct to the original suit at the same level. I consider canapé inferior, particularly in competitive auctions: 1H (1S) Dbl [negative] (3S) pass pass ???. Responder doesn't know if 1H was opener's best suit, or a fake suit preparing to rebid in diamonds. Unless opener was strong enough to bid at the four level, the Blue clubber is at a big disadvantage here. Matchups 01:13, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

It seems a simple thing to remove the most POV comments, and I have done this. Systems are a matter of preference in the end - all strong club systems are theoretically great in unopposed auctions, but potentially vulnerable to high-level interference by opponents. Hyperman 42 00:01, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Card Symbols

There seems to be a problem with the article atm. Every time 1C or 1H etc gets mentioned only a box instead of the suit appears. I'd edit it back to read 1C etc but I guess there is a better way of doing it except that it hasn't worked. Tiliqua 02:38, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

Please don't do that for the time being. It's maybe because you're using an outdated browser or OS. ♠ HTML code should evaluate to Unicode Spade symbol U2660 (hex), same as ♠ (giving ♠). The entire stuff should be probably redone using templates, e.g. making a {{Hsuit}}, which would ensure consistent appearance throughout. But then, someone would have to make a bot to replace all the existing stuff.Duja 11:02, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

I use the latest version of Opera as my Browser so that might exlain the formatting problem I mentioned. Goodluck with your work on the other bridge articles, it's good that someone competent is taking the time to do so. Tiliqua 12:24, 18 December 2005 (UTC)