From where and who the ideas, on which M.A.F. is built, were stolen.

In 1991 I read by chance about a bridge system called "Dutch Doubleton" (you may read the complete description of this system in dutch in the bridge magazine IMP 1991- 4,5,6,7,8; Jaap van der Neut: Dutch Doubleton). I did not read regularly about bridge and certainly not much. So this system was completely new to me, and probably to many others too. Anyway it appealed to me, and I told my partner about it. We soon decided to start playing a simple infusion of this system (DD).
In the course of 7 years our DD evolved to a system which now is called MAF by us since 1994. When reading the five original and inspiring papers again, I still see several important common properties:

  1. both systems are natural bidding systems
  2. both systems are five card major, which was rather rare in those days in dutch club bridge
  3. in both systems the 1§ opening bids are multi, promise at least 2 clubs and are forcing. In other words the openings are nearly equal. The source MAF is unmistakable.
  4. the style of bidding in MAF is roughly similar to style of bidding in Dutch Doubleton
Without copying especially the idea of the typical third property, MAF would never have become what it is today.
I am therefore very grateful to mr Jaap van der Neut.
My system was newly baptized as M.A.F. because:

Apart from these papers, I read all the books on "five card major bidding", that I could find (precision books excluded), Unfortunately I found only two:

I was convinced already that "five card major - systems" were superior to any other system. In these books you may read why. The latter book pleased me most. From Harold Feldheim I learned the "forcing 1NT answer" as an answer to an opening in a major suit. In MAF this convention was extended to the minor suit openings. The whole complex was baptized by me as "SOHL-answers".
The complete family of, if you count everything, 17, conventions is called in MAF: the collection of "SOHL-responses". They don't comply all exactly with the sohl definition, because there are a FAKE-Sohl, a Half Sohl five lohSrorriMMirrorSohls and three Simple Soul Sohls between them.

I also got inspiration from three exceptional dealings and the way some players handled the bidding. Reports of the relevant games were also published in IMP (1991-5-p17, 1991-6-p23 en 1993-1-p8 ). In all three dealings one of the players holds 11 or more cards in two suits. In the second paper Enri Leufkens, as the reporter, tells about the "alternative proposition of 11", which says, thanks to Maurits van der Vlugt and Huub van der Wouden, that if you have at least 5 cards in a major, you must open 4 in that major. This story, which was written very sarcastically, made me think. Reading the last mentioned paper I saw Bauke Muller applying the proposition successfully. This time I started thinking more thoroughly and one week later "MADAM" was born. MADAM is a convention that my partners and I apply ever since, whenever we have the opportunity, and until today always successfully. The convention is described elsewhere in this website.  
A few years ago, on holiday in France, we met Hein and Patty Prinsen from Vlijmen Holland. Apart from having a very nice time there in the Provence, we also learned about their powerful "Secret Weapon" (literal translation from: geheime wapen), as they called their defense against weak jumps in bridge. As far as I knew they really tried to keep their convention secret, but they did not manage to do it there. I hope this will come to end now, when the convention is being incorporated in MAF's defensive system, and will be published on the internet.
I also hope we are entitled to give it an appropriate, more or less new, name which does right to the inventors: "super Mysterious Armed Force" in other words "superMAF".

As you supposed probably already, I did not make the moving objects (like the dog, the house, the letter and envelope) myself. I pinched most of them as well as some other small building stones too, from cdroms and from various internet sites. They were probably put there by people who, just like me, are unable to build these things themselves. The way the applets were made was also pinched by me, but from a website where you can download the tools.

Finally I used a lot of software, written by other people, to write this site. Apart from several well known office suits, I used initially HomeSite: http://www./homesite.com and later on Aardvark: http://www.aardvark.com as website editors. For the pictures I used Paint Shop Pro, Graphic WorkShop (both in versions out of the pre-internet era), Lview: http://www.lview.com, "MapThis" and http://www.rtlsoft.com/animagic. Finally I used as told elsewhere JAnimation: http://www.janimation.net to build the applets and WinZip: http://www.winzip.com to zip/unzip files. Without this software the website could never have been build.

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