Zia Mahmood's Bridge column for the Guardian newspaper today tells of two players with world titles to their names, Fulvio Fantoni and Claudio Nunes, who apparently have an intriguing bidding system:
They play a bidding system that is unique in top-level bridge: opening bids at the one level are forcing, while opening bids at the two level are not weak - they just show not enough points to open at the one level.
In the example deal, Fantoni and Nunes quickly jump to 3S with 11 points between them (!) as North and South, stymying poor old West who is holding 21 points, and ends up in an unmakeable 6H due to lack of bidding space (6C or 7C would have been much better). Score one for the rogue system!
What are the key features of this interesting system? According to a link kindly provided by Aryabhata, some people are wary of "Fantunes" because of its high amount of variance. It must be possible to get to the very top using it, but could this be more down to Fantoni and Nunes' playing skill than the strength of the system?
