The Strong Club System is a set of bidding conventions and agreements used in the game of contract bridge and is based upon an opening bid of 1♣ as being an artificial forcing bid promising a strong hand. Unlike Standard American which typically opens with 2♣ to show a strong hand of 21 (or 22) or more points, the strong 1♣ opening is assigned a lower minimum strength promising 16 or more high card points. All other bids would therefore be limited to a maximum of 15 high card points. There are several variants of the strong club system and all are classified as artificial because the bids are highly codified.
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Famous quotes containing the words strong, club and/or system:
“Between married persons, the cement of friendship is by the laws supposed so strong as to abolish all division of possessions: and has often, in reality, the force ascribed to it.
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—David Hume (1711–1776)
“The barriers of conventionality have been raised so high, and so strangely cemented by long existence, that the only hope of overthrowing them exists in the union of numbers linked together by common opinion and effort ... the united watchword of thousands would strike at the foundation of the false system and annihilate it.”
—Mme. Ellen Louise Demorest 1824–1898, U.S. women’s magazine editor and woman’s club movement pioneer. Demorest’s Illustrated Monthly and Mirror of Fashions, p. 203 (January 1870)
“Our system is the height of absurdity, since we treat the culprit both as a child, so as to have the right to punish him, and as an adult, in order to deny him consolation.”
—Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908)