Roman Club

Roman Club (Italian: Fiori Romano) is an artificial bridge bidding system devised in the 1950s by Giorgio Belladonna and Walter Avarelli of Italy's Blue Team. They used it to win twelve WBF World Teams Championships, three Olympiads and numerous European and National titles. A variant, Little Roman or Arno, was played by their Blue Team-mates Massimo D'Alelio and Camillo Pabis Ticci.

Once radical, Roman has long been superseded by more advanced relay systems, but it was remarkable for the ideas it introduced or fostered in the bridge world. So was teammate Eugenio Chiaradia's Neapolitan Club and its offspring, Forquet–Garozzo's Blue Club.

The convention got banned at the time for play in tournament

Roman Club can be classified as a "small club" system, where 1♣ opening bid has a wide range of meanings. In Roman, it includes weak balanced hands, stronger hands with secondary club suit, and very strong hands. Other 1-bids are made in strict accordance with canapé principle (shorter suit first).

Roman is notable for its emphasis on distinguishing opening hands into groups by distribution and responding hands by strength. The general opening bid structure is:

The general responding structure divides hands into:

Like opener, responder may make their first bid in a 3cs to prepare a canapé.

The strong emphasis on distribution of openings simplified the bidding structure in many respects but did not overcome the classical weakness of canapé, where it is very difficult to distinguish strength range as easily as in a long-suit-first system. Opening three-card suits was also an obvious exposure in competition.

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