Heron

Say you're near the end of a straightforward 4S contract. The board holds one small spade and a string of top clubs. Lead is from the dummy. Then, declarer calls for a "high spade". As declarer, I believe there's an uncontroversial right to say "er I meant club" if there's no pause, but what if declarer doesn't realize the use of the wrong word until dummy is reaching for it? As dummy: must one play the "high" spade with no comment, despite being a singleton 4? may one ask "there's only one, please confirm you mean the spade 4?" something else? (...kick partner? kick opponent for cover and play the club ace?) The obvious and expected (by everyone at the table) line of play was to run the top clubs, ruff a club in declarer's hand, and ruff a heart back in the dummy. This was also the plan of the declarer, but declarer looked at the top black card and just used the wrong word for it. On the one hand, law 46.B.1 is fairly unequivocal with "If declarer, in playing from dummy, calls ``high'', or words of like import, he is deemed to have called the highest card". On the other hand, 45.4.b provides some slack if a correction to a call is made "without pause for thought", but I don't really know how to interpret that here if declarer doesn't realize the mis-call until it's seen. On the gripping hand, declarer is already kind of in the wrong here against 46.A's "declarer should clearly state both the suit and the rank of the desired card", but is there anyone in the world who actually does do this aside from pedantic me? For what it's worth, I believe in the game in question declarer could have asked to correct and opponents would have been OK with it, but declarer took the conservative path (and a bottom). Thanks for any opinions and enlightenment!

Writing as one of the (as currently reported) 17% who have completely switched, here's another bit of perspective on this: A while ago I tried using the Windows client on Linux under WINE. It was a really terrible experience and only barely worked if I was careful to never click on the wrong thing, but within those limitations it was... workable enough, but sufficiently frustrating that I gave up on it and BBO. (I have lots of computers around, but none of them are Windows machines, and while I'm not as fervent a Microsoft-basher as many I'm also not about to start maintaining a Windows machine just for this, especially as my local f2f bridge scene is quite decent.) Now, not only do I not need a Windows machine (and additionally one that I have the privileges to install software onto), I can walk up to nearly any computer anywhere that's on the net and get going on BBO in a few moments. That is really, really, incredibly awesome. Thank you all. When looking for some old correspondence recently I found a saved 2002 rec.games.bridge posting from Fred talking about the infeasibility of non-Windows clients, and I'm enormously pleased both that the market has changed and that you've been (imho) smart enough to have recognized this. In 2002 I freely admit I was well out on the fringes of the market but times have indeed changed. ...so, thanks! (...and also for not nuking my account despite not having been used in a decade.) PS: the one thing I'd really like is chat records, but I don't think cut-and-paste really cuts it (har) and I certainly don't want flash apps scribbling randomly over my local filesystem. Any chance these could be saved server-side for a bit and made downloadable?