Mankato Duplicate Bridge Club

From Club Director Raj comes this article about ASTRO,  This month I am listing a variety of ways to interfere with a 1 NT opener. See more at Bridge Bum ( Astro Bridge Convention - Bidding and Responses ) . A brief explanation of ASTRO follows. We intend to feature new Bridge items each week. As they used to say in the olden days of television, 'Stay Tuned!'...   A defense to 1NT in which a double is for penalty, and 2/ overcalls are artificial. Brozel A defense to 1NT in which a double shows a one-suited overcall, and all 2-level bids show specific 2-suited hands.  Cappelletti (Hamilton) A defense to 1NT in which double is for penalty, and 2-level overcalls are conventional. DONT A defense to 1NT in which double shows a one-suited hand, and 2-level overcalls show the bid suit + a higher suit. Gates Double An artificial double of 1NT by a passed hand. Landy A (very old) defense to 1NT in which a 2 overcall shows both majors. Multi-Landy (Woolsey) A very scientific defens...

  This is from club member Dr. Tim Scott.   The next time you thoroughly shuffle a deck of cards, you’ll almost certainly have landed on a combination that’s never been created before — and may never be created again. This may sound unlikely or even impossible, given that each deck contains just 52 cards, but there are more ways to shuffle a deck of cards than there are atoms on Earth. The exact number of possible card combinations is 8 x 10 to the 67th power, which is an 8 followed by 67 zeroes — an almost unfathomably large number. If you were to go back in time to the beginning of the universe and rearrange a deck of cards into a new permutation every second, the universe itself would come to an end before you were a billionth of a way to one of those arrangements repeating itself. As for how many atoms there are on the planet, most estimates put the number at 1.3 x 10 to the 50th power or 130,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. This is obviousl...