So the summer before my Senior Year I went to a math camp over the summer called MOP (Math Olympiad Program). Anyway I had a great time as you might expect. Anyway, I was looking over MOPper World which is just one participants website where he tries to present the cumulative memories in a semi-coherent way. Anyway, it was pretty nostalgic looking over the pictures and the quotes and such.

Which leads me to my point: they have on the website the funniest bridge bidding conventions I’ve seen. You have to understand that all the people there are total dorks. Well I mean look at me.. I went. When I was there we played bridge all the time (because it’s a good intellectual game and the people playing chess were crazy good (had world rankings)). Well, here’s one example of their “bidding conventions” from this past year:

The “I have 12 cards” convention: if North has a terrible hand, he pretends to count his cards, and says, “I have 12 cards”. If South also has a terrible hand, he says, “I have 14 cards — redeal,” and they proceed to throw their cards into the center of the table before East and West realize what’s going on. If South has a good hand, however, he says, “Hmm, I have 13 cards,” and while East and West are counting their cards, North suddenly “finds” the extra card and play continues as normal.