mrdct

On a netbook (I use a Dell Latitude 2100 with a 1024x600 screen size running Windows 7) in the flash version I can't create a teams match because I can't move the dialog box high enough to click OK. The dialog box needs to be a bit more landscape to better suit the netbook screen layout (which last time I checked represented the majority of laptop sales in most parts of the world).

I wonder what his legal basis is for scoring it as "Not Played". The players may well have gone through the motions of bidding and pushing cards around the tables, but the card game they were playing was not bridge pursuant to the Laws, in relation to which you don't really need to go beyond Law 1: The board wasn't played so "not played" seems the appropriate way to score it. I'm not an expert on ACBL Conditions of Contest for the scoring of club duplicates, but I assume the officially promulgated scoring program scores an unplayed board in accordance with such Conditions of Contest.

Mike Fladder's response looks pretty good to me. It's a fouled board and isn't in a state where any real bridge result could be achieved so it just needs to be thrown out as he said. I would, however, add a few things: 1. It would be prudent to run all of the cards in that set through a dealing machine or get the club members to flush the boards at the end of session as it's more than likely that there is a board with 14♦ and 12♠ in the same set (probably an adjacent board). 2. Some detective will need to be done to work out which of the other results need to be thrown out. Probably best to get a few of the more competent players in the field to have a look at the hand record and confirm whether or not it coincides with what they held at the table. 3. Unless it's a very low standard game, it seems unusual that nobody else noticed the defective deck until it reached your table so I strongly suspect it was fouled at the table that had the board immediately before you. Accordingly, I'll start my enquiries with those players. You most definately should have called the director the moment your partner lead the ♠6.

If the cards for west from board 17 were swapped with the cards for west from board 18, surely somebody would've noticed something odd when dummy went down. Was this some sort of restricted event?

If the extent of his claim statement was limited to "the rest are mine" that would imply a belief that he has seven top tricks so he either believes the ♥8 is coming good or that the ♣4 is coming good. I'm going to ignore the ♣4 possibility as a bit far-fetched. The ♥8 coming good could be based on a assumption that the remaining two ♥s are breaking 1-1 due to his perceived count on the hand or could be based on a miscounting of ♥ played thus far. In the former case the layout will become evident when the ♥A is cashed and he will make his contract, but in the latter case he will attempt to cash the ♥8 and if he does so before cashing everything else he will go one down. Law 70E: Declarer could argue that his unstated line of play could only have been predicated on finding ♥ 1-1 and the subsequent failure of east to follow suit when the ♥A is cashed will clarify the ♥ layout after which it would be irrational to attempt to cash the ♥8. As a director some attempt needs to be made to ascertain what was one declarer's mind at the time of the claim and discounting, if necessary, any self-serving statements once declarer has had a chance to work out what's going on. The rest of the hand and some info as to the general skill level of declarer could also be relevant here. Has west made an inspired falsecard winning the previous trick with the K rather than the 9 to make declarer think the 8 is good? Did east follow to the trick won by the ♥K and, if so, was it with an honour? If in the course of my enquiries I get some unsolicited indication from declarer that he was aware that there were two outstanding ♥ and east had not already shown-out, I'm going to let him make his contract, but otherwise it will become a Law 70A situation of resolving doubtful points against the claimer and he goes one down.

East clearly ought to have known that his tank could deceive NS and appears to have achieved precisely that end. I'm adjusting this to NS 4♥+1.

I'd have thought the purpose of the free robot games was to give players a taste of how fun they are to encourage them to play in the paid games.

In the dark ages when swiss teams events didn't have pre-dealt boards, it made a lot of sense to keep tables of the same match separated and even in the "Australian" swiss movement (a term with which until this thread I was unfamiliar) the normal practice when two adjacent tables were drawn to play each other would be to switch a table number or two to maintain separation. With pre-dealt boards now ubiquitous (I haven't played in any event or club that uses hand-dealt cards since 1993) you obviously have the same boards being played at every table around you so there is always a risk of picking up a stray comment like, "you could've made that by dropping the stiff ♠K offside". There are reasonably adequate laws to deal with this assuming that the players in receipt of the UI are ethical. It remains good practice to keep head-to-head matches separated as, subcontiously at least, one is probably more likely to tune-in to obiter dicta emanating from your own match and you might also minimise UI that could arise from director calls and rulings at your other table.

The table ruling looks spot on to me. If you think the ♦KJ are high, it is a perfectly reasonable line to use those to pitch your losing ♠s.

You'd better post a photo of the offending board so we can properly judge how dodgy it looks.

With or without the alerts, non-alerts and non-systemic 3NT bid, south is looking a one-count with an 8-card suit opposite a weak 1NT. I couldn't possibly imagine any vaguely sensible player taking any action other than pass. Yes, I have UI here that partner has probably forgotten that 2NT is a transfer and is treating it as invitational, but so what? If he'd alerted 2NT and described it as a transfer to ♦ and then pulled out a non-systemic 3NT bid it would still need to be some sort of super-accept of ♦ in which case we could very easily have 8 ♦ tricks and just need a 9th trick to come out in the wash. In any case what could be bad about playing 3NT undoubled when the opponents have 25-27hcp on a hand where 8-card suits are floating around?

Prior to the introduction of bridgemates, at all of the major national teams events in Australia the swiss qualifying phase was run such that the top two teams played at table 1 (of which there was a red table 1 and an blue table 1), the next two at table 2, etc. The tables were arranged in clusters of 6 tables such that each cluster of 6 would have 3 matches all sharing the same set of boards. This worked reasonably well, although in events with shorter matches there tended to be a lot of caddy calls. When bridgemates were introduced, the organisers reverted to the "each team has its own table" method as this seemed to work a lot better with the scoring units (exectly why I'm not sure).

If nobody analyses why things have gone wrong, history will surely repeat itself. I guess air crash investigations must be a complete waste of time and money also!

I'm trying to get my hands on both the datums and the hand records in .dup or .dlm format for the aforementioned event; failing which datums and hand data files from any reasonably sensible and/or large-field imp-scored event unlikely to have been widely reported on in the press or broadcast on BBO. My local bridge club wants to add some imp-scored events into the monthly programme, but the preference is to score-up against a pre-determined datum rather than an internally-generated datum due to the likely small field size and significant variation in skill levels that would make an internally-generated datum somewhat random. Can anyone help me?

I'd love to see the root cause analysis of how this situation arose in the first place. Every board that I've ever seen was either pre-marked by the manufacturer or has the board number, correct vulnerability and dealer all on one sticker so it's impossible to stuff it up. I wonder how many other sessions and events this incorrectly marked board had been used in previously without being detected.

In that case Lauria (declarer) physically picked up the ♠9 from dummy (as Versace had left the room at this point leaving Lauria to mind dummy for himself) and then tried to put it back and play something different when his LHO revealled a higher ♠ than he'd expected (♠Q if memory serves). So a pretty strong precedent was established there that if you play a card from dummy before LHO plays to the trick you do so at your own peril.

The mis-marked board is a fouled board at the three tables where it was played and any result obtained using that fouled board is thrown-out and is of no relevance. Indeed, the fact that an apparently excellent result was obtained on the fouled board should not form any part of a Director's or Appeals Committee's deliberations. As the players had scored-up before detecting the irregularity, it is not possible to insert a substitute board. Law 86C: As Law 86D appears to require that the TD award an adjusted score, so we turn our attention to Law 12B: In this case there is no offending or nonoffending side as the fouled board was solely due to the negligence of the tournament organisers, not any of the players, so we have two "nonoffending" or "innocent" sides. Have a look at Law 12C2(a)&(b): It seems appropriate to me to give average plus (3 imps) to both sides. So in this case it seems the match result excluding the fouled board was an 8-0 win to bluejak's team, so after awarding both of the non-offenders 3 imps for the fouled board, the result will be an 11-0 win for bluejak's team and a 3-8 loss for the Welsh champions.

Take the money.

With partner a non-passed hand the creative 3NT overcall is no longer in my considerations. Looks like fairly easy 3♥ overcall to me.

Whilst I don't have the old regulations at hand, I'm sure they would not have used the term "non-final pass". They would have said "/" = pass and "//" = final pass. If a player writes "/" in his square in any seat he has made the call of "pass" pursuant to the regulations and the laws. If it happens to be the third pass in succession, the auction is over. He may well have committed an irregularity under the regulations but it is clearly an irregularity capable of simple rectification of writing an additional parallel slash. Under your interpretation of the old regulations, how would you rule in the following situations: West North East South (1S): / : (/) : / 1. 15 or 20 seconds elapses after the third "pass" and north produces a face-up opening lead. Before east puts dummy down, south says "Hang-on! I haven't passed - all I've done is drawn a non-regulation slash in my square which I now want to substitute with a valid symbol under the ABF written bidding regulations". 2. Same as above except this time east puts his hand down on the table intending it to be dummy not realising that the auction was still alive and that north's attempted opening lead was actually an exposed card during the auction. The original intent of having a different symbol for the final pass in the regulations was presumedly to reduce the frequency of the awkward irregularity of players bidding-on after the third pass. It was surely not the intent of the regulation to open the door for players to freely change their mind in balancing position to undo an otherwise legitimate pass.

The Laws speak of three "passes" not two passes followed by a "final pass". The generic symbol for a pass is a slash so if three consecutive players draw a slash in their square, the auction is over. It is perhaps the absurdity of having a different symbol for the final pass that saw the Australian Bridge Federation come to its senses and amend the written bidding regulations to explicity allow the final pass to be either "/" or "//". Fortunately this is all moot now, but another illustration of the silliness of not treating "/" as a pass in the pass-out seat would be if a player writes "//" when they are not in the pass-out seat and then gets told his "//" doesn't mean anything and he substitute it with any legal call (subject to UI issues of course).

I'm in a bit of an information vacuum as I don't have a copy of the old Australian regulations, but whilst tournament organisers and sponsoring organisations have the power to specify the manner in which bidding is conducted pursuant to Law 18F, this would never override Law 22A2: Clearly, once three consecutive players have marked the bidding pad with the acceptable symbol for pass (/) the requirements of Law 22A2 have been met and the auction is over. The fact that final pass wasn't in the (then) preferred form of "//" is irrelevant. The same would've applied under the old Law 17E: If a person in the pass-out seat wrote the word "pass" in the square, they would be reminded of the correct procedure and possibly face a procedural penalty or warning, but they would not be able to undo their pass and substitute it with some other call.

Have you got the hand and traveller? Might I not get out for -2 in 4♥ undoubled as a profitable save against 3♠?

How about 3NT? With partner a passed hand it seems likely that the opps are cold for 4♠, but a normal competive auction (be that bidding 3♥ and partner raising or me bidding 4♥ immediately) will almost certainly see them bid 4♠ quite easily and it's always a hit and miss to compete to the 5-level at nil vul. By bidding 3NT, good things can happen: - it could get passed out undoubled and I only need to make one trick to beat their game and if I happen to go 9 down, I just need them to be able to make 11 or 12 tricks in ♠ to get an above average score; - if they double me, I might get to play in 4♥x which could well be a good save but will still beat the people who push-on to 5♥x; - the retreat to 4♥ after getting hit in 3NT should give partner the message that 3NT was based on a source in tricks in ♥ with little or nothing outside so that should stop him from doubling 4♠ based on presumed defensive tricks in my hand; - I could be talking my opponents out of a cold slam if they have all the values and one of them has a ♥ shortage.

I very much doubt that there would be a single rider in the Tour de France not taking some sort of performance enhancing substance. How else are they able to ride their bikes up and down mountains for six hours a day for three weeks? These are all carefully managed professional teams which know every trick in the book to avoid getting caught and push the limits of the banned substances rules and testing regimes.