About 'one club'

I've recently (the last 2.5 years or so) resumed playing contract bridge,
a game to which I was introduced at age 8 or so by my mother. I've played
now and then over the years, but had never tried duplicate bridge, the form
played in bridge clubs and in tournaments, until 2003.

As you may know, a hand of contract bridge begins with an auction in which
the 4 players compete to name a trump suit. There are only a very few legal
words that can be used for these bids. There are therefore many different systems
for assigning a particular meaning to a particular bid.

The bidding system most often taught to beginners in the U.S. and elsewhere and
thus the system known by most of the players one encounters in the U.S. is called
"Standard American", or SAYC, for Standard American Yellow Card.

This system is rather "intuitive" in that one is supposed generally to "bid what
one has" -- clubs if you have clubs, etc., with few artificial bids (for example,
a bid of 3 clubs meanning a good hand in spades to go with partner's spades).

The problem with SAYC is that it's less descriptive and has more "holes" (situations in which there's no good bid) in it than do more sophisticated systems. The most popular extension of SAYC is called 2/1.

2/1 can and does work for players who adopt it, but I prefer a different system
based on an artificial strong one club bid. Typically this system is known as Precision; the variant I've been playing with various partners around Seattle and suburbs is abstracted from a book called Precision Today by David Berkowitz and Bret Manley and is described here.

The Precision advantages:

(1) strong hands come up more often (16+ HCP) than
in 2/1 or SAYC, which typically use an artificial strong 2 clubs at 21 or 22+ HCP.
There's nothing like looking into your hand with 16 points and hearing partner open 1 club -- you know immediately you should very likely be in a small slam. This is much harder to figure out in those other systems.

(2) You can often arrive at a lower-level contract than you could with 2/1:

Opener: 1 club (16+)
Responder: 1 diamond (artificial negative, 0-7 pts.)
Opener: 1 heart (5+ hearts, natural)
Responder: pass


Often you have to get to the 2 level with this sort of hand in the other systems.

(3) Lower-level club players (199ers & below) sometimes find Precision intimidating,
and even higher-level players sometimes find it difficult to defend against.

(4) Finally, all "one-level bids" (1 diamond, 1 heart, 1 spade, 2 clubs) show
a limited range of 11-15 HCP. You don't have to do extra bidding to figure out
what partner has when she opens 1 heart.

I've bought probably 10 copies of the Precision Today book and have been greatly
enjoying playing it with various partners. If you're reading this and would be interested in a Precision class I would possibly be interested in putting one together to teach in Bellevue or Issaquah ... let me know!

A couple of hopeful energy technologies

I first read about EESTOR in MIT Technology Review several months ago under the headline "Too Good to Be True"? They claim to have an "ultracapacitor" technology that will make batteries obsolete.

A less exotic but still exciting battery breakthrough is from Firefly Energy.
They claim to have swapped out most of the lead in lead-acid batteries for
a carbon foam, which is of course much, much lighter.

It seems that either one of these could make electric cars practical, at last.

The Peak Oil Bibliography

Here's a selection of some books I've read on the Peak Oil hypothesis.
The common thread in these books is that soon if not already we will,
instead of pumping more and more oil, "peak" and start pumping less.
The predictions on the ramifications of this vary all over the map, from
moderate but annoying economic dislocation to the collapse of
industrial society.

My personal view is that it's going to be somewhere between these
extremes, but that we will be poorer as a society for the period between
the oil peak and whatever time the next energy breakthrough(s) come
online (fusion, ultracheap solar, or more likely some combination of various
technologies along with extreme efficiency improvements).

The books (and a couple of videsos):

The Empty Tank by Jeremy Leggett -- if you want to read only one book
on this issue, I'd suggest this one. All of these books tell similar stories on the
geology, but this one spins what looks to me to be the most likely economic
scenario: market panic. His suggestions on "What Can We Do About It?" run
toward the hopeful, also.

Other books and videos, from restrained to hysterical:

Out of Gas by David Goodstein

The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler -- Kunstler is a critic of suburbia and suggests that peak oil is going to make the suburbs "the new slums."

Robert Newman's History of Oil (A comedy routine with a real bite on YouTube)

Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World by Richard Heinberg -- Heinberg especially seems to be looking forward to the collapse of society, for some reason.

http://www.dieoff.org
If you're getting too cheerful, for some reason, try this one.

Since I keep emailing this stuff ...

I must have emailed my peak oil bibliography and bridge links 15 or 20 times, so I am posting them here now for quick reference and updating.

I have resisted blogging up until this point since I didn't get to doing this until it seems that everybody and his dog now have a blog. But one too many "here's the peak oil and bridge email again" has pushed me over the edge!

Just to clarify: I don't think we'll have 'zero oil', just that the energy markets are set to become
considerably more expensive and chaotic than they are now, and as I write oil sits at $81/barrel.

As for 'one club', that refers to my preferred bidding system in contract bridge, typically referred to as Precision.

I have other interests (computer science, literature, golf ...) that may also appear here as I
think of things.

I will update the content here not necessarily frequently, but as new news items on the subjects here come up.