All ACBL tournaments require partnerships to have a convention card (CC) available for opponents to look at on request. The Regina Bridge Club also has this requirement for its regular club games.
Partnerships which are new to duplicate Bridge, or are not interested in using and remembering lots of agreements, may choose to have a very minimum of agreements to indicate on a CC. In most cases of Bidding Agreements, it is perfectly appropriate for a partnership to have no agreement about a given topic, or have not discussed that topic in order to develop an agreement. As a result, a partnership may either leave many areas of the card unmarked, or include a required entry indicating such a lack of agreements. But any field or option on the CC where is a partnership agreement must be marked.
The ACBL rules require at least a basic agreement be made and indicated for some of the significant topics on the CC, such as for Carding Agreements, the HCP range for opening No Trump, or a set of option boxes may require at least one box to be checked such as the minimum length of a minor opening. The information of all agreements which the partnership does have is required to be indicated on the CC and available to their opponents by marking any field or option on the CC that reflects that agreement.
The ACBL allows use of either the ‘classic’ version or the ‘new’ version of the CC. The new Form has many fields and boxes which try to reflect the wide range and extensive number of agreements a partnership might have during both the auction and the play of the hand. “While it may seem like a lot of information — especially at first — it’s perfectly fine to only fill out the areas that apply to your partnership.” The ‘New’ version is very good for identifying things that are ‘alertable’ in red and those that are ‘announced’ in blue.
Note: The ‘classic’ forms the club has in stock are somewhat out of date in that some things like support doubles are in red whereas they are no longer alerted. They will be updated as stock runs out.
For convenience PDFs of the following are attached. Click blue CC below to open.
• A fillable version of the ‘New’ CC format (highly recommended)
• A fillable version of the ‘Classic’ format CC (updated and current)
• A compilation of the Bridge Bulletin articles on How to fill out the ‘New’ CC
• Larry Cohen’s article on filling out a Basic 2/1 CC
• A Classic fillable PDF of Cohen’s Basic 2/1 CC you can modify.
• A Yellow Card in the ‘New’ version CC
These fillable CC work best with the free Adobe Acrobat Reader. Save the form to your computer then rename it for each partnership.
If anyone has questions or would like help contact Don at donaldRN@gmail.com or ask any Director.