Disclaimer of Sorts

What is a convention?
One Webster's Collegiate gives "a general agreement about basic principles".
Many of the bridge conventions I've come to know are designed specifically to avoid what was once basic.
Inasmuch as that's an agreement about what are 'standards', that they're not good enough, or not complicated enough, or not effective enough, too facile, I will not dismiss this definition.
If I play a convention and my partner plays a convention, if we call it the same thing and yet we disagree as to what 'the' convention actually is, who is 'right'?
We could consult some third party, some published source, or some person in the business of making studies of conventions, or persons of 'greater' success/notoriety..
We will probably find, if we make much effort and have resources with which to search, that there are many different things that people do with 'the' convention.

Take "Drury" for example.I'd like "Drury" to be a limit raise by Responder of a 3rd or 4th seat one of a major opening.
I'd like it to be 2. Many will agree.
P P 1 P
2 (3+ card spade limit raise)
There's more to it than that.
Perhaps Opener's rebid, if a repeat of the suit, was originally forcing.
Perhaps a more fashionable treatment is that 2 is Opener's weakest rebid : "Reverse Drury".
Perhaps "the" inventor of Drury found that Reverse Drury was superior.
Perhaps the inventor was actually a Mr.Drury himself, eventually coming to that conclusion, only to find himself reversed... forever immortalized as having been reversed, perhaps self-correcting, but not clearly so....so close to "the" right idea...but just missed it.

So seldom do I play with a partner that DOESN'T plays "Reverse Drury" that with a new partner I might just agree to "Drury" and assume we're playing Reverse.
Perhaps an established partner and I will agree to vary from some third party's professings of "the one" publication on "the" convention.
Perhaps a third party has not seen a second publication on the convention.
Worse yet, perhaps that third party has seen more than one publication on the topic and found there to be no variance.

Controversy may result.
Appeals to this....appeals to that...failing...winning...failing...winning.
Perhaps it all gets published: a new publication is born.
Printers are paid, drivers gassed and oiled, librarians found to lift editions/versions/printings/abbreviations of it onto shelves.
We have a new book on the topic and it's now to be a new bridge player's bible.
A new bible of the game it might for that new bridge player be.

Perhaps from the newly 'bible' laden, the future will hear "...but that's not what Professor X told me!".
Perhaps that incites trips to a library to see if there's another version.
Perhaps there will be consultations with other players and teachers:
"Well??? Who is right?"

"The" Jacoby 2N convention has 7+ variations, or sub variations, or an assortment of variations/subvariations or combinations of those dichotomizings/categorizations that I've seen in just an hour researching 'possible other variations'.
Perhaps it's easier to just quote one source and start a course/book/instruction with a preamble or teacher's disclaimer that there may be much disagreement as to what a particular convention is, or isn't.
Maybe what results is one day a professor stating:
"My source is Amalya's great book for pedants. My assistants got it up the stairs for me. You can see why!" as it slides from the extended, now tilting shiny metal arms of a forklift onto the professor's desktop with a mighty thud.
Perhaps that professor at night off to sleep drifts muttering "My book's big-ger than your book. My book's big-ger than your book."

Perhaps a proper preamble or disclaimer at the start of a lesson/lecture/professing is:
"There are many" (nodding towards the last known resting place of Amalya's latest edition) "that would NOT ALLOW subversive soapbox-top pushers of single page multifold leaflets the right, in a civilization protecting supposedly inalienable rights, to suggest something shorter than there is in 'the book' that has appealed to so many professors" - a preamble whispered in no more than hushed tones under cover of the noise of passing trucks....subversion possibly to be crushed as perhaps a muffin...a muffin forgotten and later found below the hallowed publication....above the desktop's supporting structure...yet not in a drawer...to wit...crushed.

THIS PAGE is an in-print version of that preamble for all to be found in this folder of conventions.

It doesn't matter what you've studied if your partner doesn't play the same thing.
You may have a great number of partners.
Each one may play one of seven variations/subvariations of the conventions that you once 'knew'.
Some might agree that your version is 'right' or 'best' and some may not.
Some might appeal to "an" authority. Some might just memorize 'your' version...some dictate you memorize another.
Perhaps you memorize all of your partner's eccentricities, as you call them.
Perhaps the eccentricities are yours. Perhaps they're mine!

All that you'll find among these webpages is what I've at one time considered, often in fevers, to be what I'd like to play, or what I could remember, or what I thought the best way to treat some situation(s).
I might change my mind at any time and my old thoughts, 'published' as they are here, would be no help for us if we were to play together.
If they in any way converge with, or diverge from, the professing/publication of others, it is purely coincidental.
For many conventions, I have added/subtracted/omitted from what I've read/heard.
I might have surprised partner by varying without previous warning, thinking it in my/our best interest.
You might find that these conventions bear little or no resemblance to your understandings/readings/agreements.
Heresy it might be, or something to scoff at. You might forward links to certain pages and suggest "This is exactly how we DON'T play it."

If these convention renderings are in any way offensive, or shocking, I beg your pardon.
Perhaps you destine me for the muffindom above.
In any event, these are standards, possibly subversive, possibly antiquated, possibly nowhere else to be found.

If you choose NOT to use them, I'll understand fully.

May you use them, or use them not, in good health.

If you've a story to share and time to write it...maybe email.