Sticks and clubs

Abstract

We study combinatorial principles known as stick and club. Several variants of these principles and cardinal invariants connected to them are also considered. We introduce a new kind of side-by-side product of partial orders which we call pseudo-product. Using such products, we give several generic extensions where some of these principles hold together with not CH and Martin's Axiom for countable p.o.-sets. An iterative version of the pseudo-product is used under an inaccessible cardinal to show the consistency of the club principle for every stationary subset of limits of omega_1 together with not CH and Martin's Axiom for countable p.o.-sets.