I'm Alan Williams, and I started developing the White Club system in 1997 with partner Michael Booker. We were curious as to how small a complete tournament system could be? We were also spurred on by offstage cries of "It can't be done".
For several years it was far from complete, and didn't look much like today's Chilli. The cycle of development was innovation from me, then critical editing from Michael. And it was working – we started to win things at a level commensurate with our general bridge skills.
The whole project received a big mid-project boost when the lovely Rob Covill pronounced that it was 'deeply flawed'. Bless him, that was enough to push us onto completion, and by the time Michael left for China to teach, we had 90% of the system in place.
I had just started playing with university friend Geoff Lacey, and I took the chance to ask him to switch from Acol. He was apprehensive at first, but soon became the system's biggest fan, and took over the critical role from Michael. It was about this time that I changed the name of the system to Chilli.
More recently, I started a partnership with Mike Wenble, a talented junior player who was returning to bridge after a very long absence. Mike also took to Chilli, and he also provided strong critical input. But his priority was to produce an optimal tournament system, and this inevitably clashed with my primary objective of simplicity. So Mike and I now play a different system which has inherited many of the good points from Chilli, but is (Mike's view) better and (my view) horribly complicated.
For such a small system, the rate of change over the years has been great, which I think reflects my own artisan approach to problems: try something plausible, and then keep working away at it, adding here, cutting there and polishing it all in the light of use. Right first time didn't figure.
Chilli Two is a huge change. I'm pretty sure it was the right thing to do, and I love playing it, but it is too early to tell how successful it will be.