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Wow. You get the easy ones, don't you? I don't think there's anything in the Laws that talks about playing your opponents' card (and thank you, I now have another hand for my crazy bridge game!) I think I would just throw up my hands and tell the opponents "everybody did something wrong here, even if it was just not noticing that West took South's card and then played it, I'm just going to assign a score assuming everybody is partly at fault." And no, that doesn't mean Average/Average, unless it's not obvious how it's going to go. I think the natural play on the auction and lead is run the clubs and endplay East. I'm willing to give South that line unless they really are weak, and depending on how strong South is, give East/West some percentage of -1. Now, on the topic of "Can the TD use DD or other results information". Everybody who has said something is right (IMHO). Anything is AI to the director, and they can use that information should they desire. Use of "other results" is discouraged, and should never be the only factor. It should only be used knowing its strengths and flaws. Use of DD to assign results has the same problem as analyzing results against DD. It is to be assumed that TDs know this and will not just look at the Par score. I also say that you "should not" look at those things unless it's a "final decider" and you already have a good idea where your ruling will land. This is a pretty safe case for "there's a line that works, it seems obvious to me, how much of it is 'seeing 52 cards' and how much is 'I'm flight A' and how much is 'it really is an obvious line'? Let's see how many others made it." Pretty much everybody in 4♥ is going to get there after a 3♠ overcall, and anybody who doesn't lead the diamond honour-of-agreement is looking at something other than their cards. Even the ruffing club finesse before pulling trump is pretty auto (but note, some of the -1s, and basically all of the -mores, are going to be "didn't think at trick 1, and led the ♥J"). But - and this is the key - even here you don't know that. And you might be assigning a score based on misplays that South or West successfully navigated at this table. But: At table 4, they're playing EHAA or Fox-Lambert 2s and South's hand is a 2♥ opener. They probably get to play it, and East doesn't bid spades. Oh, they don't find the endplay and only make 9 tricks. Valid comparison? At table 6, Crazyman West overcalls 2NT at the right colours, finds their club fit, and ends up in 4♥. Now maybe North doubled, but maybe West thinks that "let's get him with his AQTx" and leads a club anyway. Valid comparison? The key is - how do you know? Change the hand, even slightly, and suddenly the comparisons are as ephemeral as the results from the 299er game.[hv=pc=n&s=sj97hakqt2d75432c&w=s5h954dkqjtc87652&n=sa8hj87da98ckqj43&e=skqt6432h63d6cat9&d=s&v=n&b=15&a=1hp2c(GF)3spp4hppp]399|300|How many Wests led a diamond, and how many a spade? And does the "no endplay" matter?[/hv] [hv=pc=n&s=sj972hakqt2d7543c2&w=sQh954dkqjt2c87652&n=sa8hj87da98ckqj43&e=skt6543h63d6cat9&d=s&v=n&b=15&a=1hp2c(GF)3spp4hppp]399|300|How many Easts come win with this suit? (maybe at the 2 level?)[/hv] [hv=pc=n&s=sj972hakqt2d7543c2&w=s3h954dkqjt2c87652&n=sa8hj87da98ckqj43&e=skqt6543h63d6cat9&d=s&v=n&b=15&a=1hp2c(GF)3spp4hppp]399|300|Or this one?[/hv] And most hands will have many more decision points than this - even the tweaked hands I created. Plus "Yeah, but we open this 1NT, so." "We're playing Kontrast, our 1♥ opener is 8-14, and we mean 8. For us, this is an acceptance." "They're playing transfer responses to 1♣, the other tables didn't get to double 1♦ to show the suit." "Yeah, but most people wouldn't have seen the squeeze possibility at trick 1 and just pulled trump first"... Like all information, it is available to the TD if useful. Like much information, its relevance and strength has to be carefully judged by the TD. Unlike say self-serving statements by the offenders, it is not obvious to the new TD (or the journeyman TD that hasn't been tripped up by it enough) how seductive this information is, and how it can lead you badly astray. So "don't look at 'other results' to assign a score" is a good first lesson. Like all lessons in bridge, as you gain experience, "unless it's right" or "in these cases (only!)" or "as a decider of weight between 50-50 and 75-25" may be determined to be the operative phrase on this hand. But usually not.

I'll bite with the boring line: As an aside, opening the South hand with 2♣ is not something I would expect from an expert.

I doubt that the question is susceptible to a meaningful answer, due to the various system philosophies out there As an example, I have played and am now playing (in a more limited context) systems in which one partner, invariably for us, responder, implements a relay sequence Back in the old days…late 1990s…we often had extremely long auctions….each call being alerted. I remember one where we alerted 13 times before placing the contract in a slam, declared by responder. On being asked, at the end of the auction, I could say (and I no longer remember the exact hand) that he’s shown 3=1=5=4, with 5 controls. He has either both the AK of spades or neither of the,. Same in clubs. He has one of the A or K of diamonds. He has both the club and diamond queens but not the queen of spades. He has neither the Ace nor king of hearts, but might have the queen…I couldn’t ask. He, in answering questions, could say: he has at least a decent 14 count, but other than that I know absolutely nothing about his hand other than that, opposite what I’ve told him, he thinks 6S is the correct contract. Ok…lots of leakage there, in terms of opener’s hand, but the ambiguity in location of controls reduces that a bit, and of course having zero idea of my shape doesn’t help. On the opening lead having been made, the appearance of dummy can help with some reverse engineering but the reality is that our extremely long auction almost surely resulted in less information leakage than anything but the purest, and random, bashing would create. So in relay, if the system is well designed such as to maximize the chances of the relayer being declarer, I don’t see much correlation between length of auction and information leakage. Similarly, when Meckwell were the top pair in the world, they often had long auctions, in theory giving lots of information yet for many years they were arguably the best bidders, in terms of consistently reaching good contracts, in the world. Finally (?), David’s point about skill level is pertinent. I think that at the expert level the defenders are so skilled, and their methods so refined (I’m not including the ‘great’ defenders who used illegal methods) that there are few pure bashers. Maybe once in a while, but generally most top pairs like to bid slowly on, especially, slam and grand slam decisions. Otoh, many top pairs rarely, if ever, use game tries. I think that if there’s one area of proper concern for cost-benefit analysis, it’s wrt to game tries. We, in my partnerships, do have various tries in our toolbox but rarely use them. The main exception is an auction such as 1D 1M 2M, where the raise might be on a weak hand with three trump…now the game try, asking min-max and trump length, seems worth the leakage. Against lesser defenders, bashing is more apt to work, in absolute terms. But so too is slow bidding…the weaker the defenders, the less use they’ll make of information leakage anyway, and the bash can lead to silly contracts on occasion. All in all, given the tremendous range of skills amongst players and partnerships, the huge variety of methods (especially at the expert level where long-standing partnerships will have many idiosyncratic treatments), I think there are too many variables to allow for significant findings to be made.

Most bridge players do not suffer from a lack of knowledge about the game. Most of us are not hindered by not knowing what to do; we are hindered by not being able to apply that knowledge while sitting at the bridge table with (real or virtual) cards in front of us. Bridge imposes a pretty significant cognitive load. I've certainly had the experience of thinking so hard about a hand that my brain simply overloads and I revoke. And, while revoking is rare, overloading and then doing something fairly dumb is common. Many of us look for ways to play just as well (or better) while doing less actual calculating at the table, but experience tells us there are no such shortcuts. Beyond the beginner level, it's almost all about keeping track of more information and considering more possibilities at the table. Calculation ability is important, and while you need much less at bridge than at chess, most of us still don't have enough. (On the other hand, you need more recall at bridge, since there is lots of information that isn't visually available to you.) Innate ability matters in bridge just as much as it does for football. Yes, everyone could work hard to become better at football than they actually are, but it takes hard work, and, for most people, no matter how hard you might have trained and how good coaching you might have gotten, you could never have made it to a Premier League team. On the rare occasions I have discussed a hand with real experts, I am always amazed at their ability to keep track of and figure out facts about the hand. They feel like they are from a different planet. It's the same in the other direction with experienced but not nearly as good players I know at the club - I sometime marvel that something that is obvious to me is something they have no ability to figure out at the table (though they can figure it out slowly when it is written out afterwards). Differences in bridge-playing ability are to some extent innate, and it can't all be overcome with study and practice. We can all get better with study and practice, but that doesn't mean we can all become experts, just as no amount of coaching and training could have turned me into a Premier League footballer.