The Origin of TresBoof or the Boofa System
as described by the Developer

Email Address has been deleted owing to privacy.

 

Alan Jaffray jaffray@
Thu, 10 Feb 2000 00:24:59 -0800 (PST)

On Thu, 10 Feb 2000, (xxx) wrote:

I have read a note about Tres Boof system.
Where to find the newest version of it?

Heh.

TresBoof was a relay forcing pass system that Bill Chen and I devised and played on OKbridge back in 1991-92. Neither of us had used either a relay system or an FP system before, and being American, we'd never even seen such systems except for brief references in the world bridge press.

It was designed more for simplicity than anything else. Pass=14+, 1C=H, 1D=S, 1H 0-7 fert, 1S=bal, 1N=D, 2C=C, other 2-bids natural and wild, symmetric relay followups, highly natural bidding when not relaying.

I wouldn't recommend it. There are better systems out there, and our system notes were very sketchy. However, if you really want to read the notes, you can.

There's a mention at the beginning that the system isn't too difficult to play "especially when you can keep a printout for notes... back then the general consensus on OKbridge was that consulting your own system notes was okay. I didn't do so, but I think Bill did occasionally.

And who can tell me what its name stand for?

I met Bill through his college roommate, Marc Wallace. One of Marc's many pet words was "boofa". It had many meanings, depending on tone of voice.

It could be a synonym for "person" or "thing", it could be an exclamation meaning nothing (such as "foo"), it could be a variable name, it could have connotations of "stupid" or "unusual but good" or "weird" depending on tone, etc.

Marc was still at the "bidding one means you have points, two means you have more points, three means you have even more points" stage of learning. But he'd independently thought of the concept of preemption, and had thus decided that a 1NT opening should show 3-6 points. This was dubbed the "Boofa System" by the rest of us. I eventually taught him weak 2's and 3's, but he wanted to keep the 1NT opening. So I suggested that we make it 0-7 and have pass promise some values. He liked that idea.

When Bill and I met, we used the Boofa system, but (since Bill and I were far better players than Marc was) we developed it into a more sophisticated system. We decided that this was a very boofa system indeed, so it became "TresBoof".

There, that was more than you needed to know. :)

Alan

 

 

 

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