[barmar]

 EricK, on 2012-August-09, 12:47, said:

How often at the end of a hand do you hear declarer ask partner how many points dummy had etc?

I've done that myself, and I think I'm a pretty decent player. But it really depends on the hand. For instance, some of dummy's honors may be irrelevant to the play (e.g. Qx when I hold AK or a singleton), so they don't stick in my mind. Even most experts don't have eidetic memories, they remember what's important about a hand.

[FrancesHinden]

I've seen this a few times in league matches (where you play at someone's house, so the boards might well not be used between one match and the next one). This means that only one of the teams has a chance to remember the hand. A couple of times the hand has been recognised during the auction at one table or the other and redealt. There have been two occasions when the board was completed at both tables, both quite amusing:

At an away match, someone had a 30-count(!). Our team gained a large swing on the board. The opposing pair who had to bid the hand remembered later the in match that it was a prepared hand from a beginner's lesson one of them had been teaching the previous week (the lesson was just on cashing winners without blocking a suit) but they'd forgotten about it. This rather ruined the fun of thinking that a 30-count had been genuinely hand-dealt.

At a home match, the first time we played the board I went one off in 4S with trumps 5-0. The second time we played the board I was dummy (we were sitting the other way round) and my partner went two off. He didn't seem to find this as amusing as I did.

[Quantumcat]

 blackshoe, on 2012-August-06, 18:22, said:

In (US, anyway) Navy speak, a "scuttlebutt" is a water fountain. Around which people gossip, so…

That's quite funny - in Australia we have a slang word "furphy", which means a rumour or lie as well. In WWI water carts for soldiers were used from the company "J Furphy and Son" which I think is where the word came from. Sounds like a case of convergent evolution, except for words instead of animals.