The Fall of The Junior

Summer's coming to a close and the contest for the Ortiz-Patino trophy is less than 50 days away. This fall will be my last as a junior playing for the USA. It's been four years the the United States has won a Junior Championship. What else can I say? I want to win.

Jason and I finished putting together our WBF Convention Card last night. For anyone who's interested in seeing what a WBF CC looks like, you can find ours here. There are many features about the WBF card that are far superior to the ACBL convention card, in my opinion. These include:

1) A section for bids the opponents absolutely must know about.
2) A note about psychic tendencies (gasp!)
3) An extensive section on defensive carding, an area that is very poor on the ACBL card
4) Stress on defensive and competitive bidding.
5) Easy chart for common, uncontested sequences
6) The encouragement of including supplementary notes.

Items 3 and 4, especially, are key, in my opinion. These are the calls that opponents actually need to know during an auction in which they intend on bidding. Half of the ACBL card, it seems, is essentially a template for players to brag about how many conventions they play. These are bids that can easily be explained at the conclusion of the auction.

You'll notice that nearly the entire WBF card is devoid of an area in which you can tell everyone you play the latest Bergen gadget, or how many artificial ways you have to raise partner. It's not about conventions, it's about bridge.