sanst

SB is neither courteous with his shouting nor respectful with his telling te TD his job.

Sorry, I’ve absolutely no idea what “courteous and respectful” “a$$hole behaviour” is. To ask for a PP is not suggesting “a possible remedy” but trying to influence the TD by a world class player. That sounds more like an attempt to intimidate than to prevent the TD from “making an illegal table ruling”, which is anyway not the task of a player. If he doesn’t agree with the decision, he can always appeal. Law 81C is crystal clear: “The Director (not the players) has the responsibility for rectifying irregularities and redressing damage” (my emphasis).

That’s a complaint I’ve heard many decades ago, even in the first year at school. That was about my handwriting. But didn’t Cicero already complain about the standards being lowered some two thousand years back? :D

If this really happened the way you describe it, I think the PP should be given to Meckstroth. His behavior is a clear breach of Law 74A1and B5 and of Law 81C. You tell the TD what’s the matter, not what (s)he should or shouldn’t do. And a player of his class should be very careful not to be domineering to the lesser gods of the game. Besides, I would expect a regular pair at this level to have a defense available without consulting a printed version. Does the regulations prescribe a printed defense or just a defense?

Of course. Who wants Big Brother watching you? There’s already that “independent observer”, so it’s hard enough to scratch your bum unobserved. :D I’m afraid it’s a Dutchism, we sit behind the computer and in front of the tele. You probably know we keep our language as difficult and puzzling as possible.

For those who want to see how a serious match at top level is played online, next week you can. August 23 to 28 the European Championships (European Qualifier for the World Team Championships) are played online on RealBridge. Players sit in their homeland in a single room behind their computer. In this room there is a independent observer, proposed by the national unions and approved by the EBL. No one else is permitted to enter this room, not even the TD's. These direct the game also online. The matches, from 10 am to 7 pm CET, can be seen on RealBridge, with a half hour delay at the start. There are four categories: open, mixed, senior and ladies. What's missing in 2021 is of course a LHBTIQ+ category ;)

This is a situation where the automatic one trick adjustment might be insufficient. Only the TD can decide this and apply law 64C1 if necessary. BTW, it’s not a penalty, but an adjustment. Because it happens so often, the WBFLC decided decades ago that it’s too impractical to let the TD every time decide what would have happened had the revoke not occurred. Looking again at the post, I would say that you were lucky to get one trick automatic adjustment. If there hadn’t been a revoke, your RHO would have won the trick that your LHO actually won. The revoke didn’t result in a trick for the opponents that they wouldn’t have made without it. So the adjustment trick was a nice present. But only if we have the hands and the play, we can give a definite answer. To answer your question: the trick wasn’t won by the offending player, so it is one trick.

Maybe I misread Gilithin’s post, but is this a proposal to make the game purely digital where the players have to come to a club, but where the members of a pair are seated in different rooms? It would solve some problems, but I don’t see many people, who play for fun and social contacts, do that. The propsal to rebuild the laws from scratch is of the same order. You will probably end with the same rules in a different order. But I agree with the idea that online bridge is in need of a set of laws, adjusted to the way the game is played. The online bridge organizations should be involved in this, because they have to implement these laws into their software. That might prove to be an obstacle.

I've not seen anybody arguing that bridge can't be played by the rules because it would reduce membership. What has been writen by me is, that dealing out default penalties would send a lot of players to clubs where the TD's take circumstances, including the players' quality and experience into consideration. My experience with players that are not very good, to put it mildly, is that they break the rules almost constantly. Hesitating with a hand on the bidding cards, sighing, "I don't know" and all that is quite common and most of their opponents don't think there's anything untoward going on because they do the same. The list is almost endless and contains items you can't believe. The use of UI is standard and nobody cares. If a TD is called, usually by a somewhat better player, they think and sometimes say "We are not amused" or words with a similar meaning and have the feeling that they are accused of cheating. That's even the case if there's a revoke, which is quite often 'solved' by picking a card out of the hand and replace the revoke card with it, usually making a complete mess of the board. These people play purely for fun and don't want to be penalized or even strongly spoken to. The best you can do, if necessary, is explain what the rules are and why and keep your tone as friendly as possible. At he top level, wherever you draw the line, the situation is quite different. Here the players should know the rules. And even there, as most of us know, it can be pretty hard to decide that there was a possible use of UI. It's just that directing isn't easy and can't be done by applying algorithms. I don't know that there is a pandemic of cheating. There are quite a few cases of cheating online at top level. There are also some alleged cases at the Dutch online club, where members are banned for life on unclear statistical grounds, where information about validity, accuracy and reliability of the methods used (Hammond's) are not available and the methods are not published, let alone peer reviewed. If you want to ban cheating from online bridge, you have to resort to measures that most amateurs wouldn't accept like constant video monitoring. You keep claiming that the laws need to be revised rigorously, but don't tell what should be changed, why and what it should be. You don't seem to know that over the course of decades the laws have been adapted and fine tuned to cover the irregularities as good and equitable as possible. If you simplify them to the extent that seems desirable to you, we would end with a game in which all and every mistake is punished by the bridge equivalent of "off with their heads". The Queen of Hearts would reign supreme... :D

Here is a new pair, that has just learned to play bridge and comes to your club for the first time. They, with some help, find out what’s expected of them and during the first round the TD arrives, find out they have no CC, and penalize them. Do you really believe these will become members or even continue to play bridge in an affiliated club? In general, if you penalize people who are playing for fun, they won’t come again. It’s far more sensible to explain the why of the rule they violated and if necessary, warn them not to do it again.

Neither of us is stupid or don’t know the laws, quite the contrary. But you don’t understand what the point is, namely that those supplementary regulations lead to the situation that everywhere the game is played by different rules. In what other sport can the powers that be add some regulations to the laws? Just one set of clear and good alerting rules should be sufficient for the whole world.

Your first point is probably correct. But that’s not the WBFLC’s fault, but of the NBO’s who claim the right to make their own rules. I got the impression that the ACBL for one, is an organization that won’t compromise easily. Besides, what’s usual in one country, is sometimes highly unusual in another. And there are NBO’s that differentiate between players based on level, others don’t. I think your second point is only half finished.

I never contested that. The decision had to do with the statistical evidence presented, which was insufficient according to the arbotrators. If you use such evidence, you should firstly decide what the reliability, accuracy and validity should be. AFAIK that was missing in this case.

Even so, it’s the Court of Arbitration for Sport. and the WBF, with the consent of the national organizations, has accepted it as the supreme judge in disputes. Besides, there are 367 arbitrators and there will be some that know bridge. The decision in the Fantoni/Nunes case was based ob the statistical evidence presented, which was considered insufficient, and had little to do with bridge. It was a legal decision on legal grounds and as happens quite often, the fact that ‘everybody knows that they were guilty’ has no standing in a decent court of law.

There are some basic problems with Hammond's methods, the most important being that the algorithms are not published. If he claims, after investigating, that you have been cheating, there's no way you or anybody else can check whether the method used is correct. As far as forensic statistics are concerned, you need an pretty big set of data, probably more than thousand boards, chosen randomly, with the complete hands, auction and play. And, as Hammond wrote on bridgewinners.com: "I don't do (much) club data. There are various reasons. It is possibly to accurately process some club data, but I'm not going to give the details. The problem with club data is the wide variance of skill level. The same problem exists at tournaments, but to a lesser extent. In the book, I show the difference between top players, then top players when they only play against top players. It is the latter where it is easier to detect cheating." Another problem is, that Hammond isn't a mathematician, let alone a forensic statistician. Add that to the unpublished status of the algorithms, and I for one wouldn't accept any 'proof' given by him. There certainly is cheating in bridge, but it is very hard to prove. Even in the Fantoni-Nunes case, when all their competitors 'knew' that the pair was less than honest, the CAS decided that the methods used were insufficient to convict them.

No one here can decide whether this is a psych or not without asking the pair some questions. You need to know what alternatives they had in their system or whether it was a mispull/missclick or misbid before reaching a decision. From your posts I get the impression that they have ruffled quite some feathers, including yours. The only sensible thing I can say is, if they often deviate from their agreements, they should forewarn their opponents. But with no director present, you should shrug your shoulders and move on to the next game.

And it will finish bridge as a social game. Brige, as many sports, can only exist because there are many playing it as a pastime and an opportunity to meet friends. Digital bridge doesn’t offer that opportunity and is far less popular than the physical game. The Dutch bridge union has done what it could to lure the members of the clubs to digital bridge, including free membership of the union’s online bridge club Stepbridge. But the majority of the members didn’t join that club and all are hoping that physical bridge will be possible again in September. Digital bridge might be the future at the top, although I know that the Dutch internationals see it more as a possibility to stay in shape and ‘meet’ their colleagues from other countries, and that they hope to play physical bridge ASAP, which most if not all prefer.

Here we go again. Why don’t you come up with a proposal? The WBFLC will ask for these in a couple of years. But don’t claim that the players will be enthusiastic about it. The revoke laws were simplified some decades ago and even further in 2007, but more often than not players feel disadvantaged by them. “Why give them a trick for free that they couldn’t have made anyway?” or some remark about being not compensated enough. How would you simplify contested claims? By forbidding claims? If someone claims that there was UI, rule that there was UI? There seldom are “Secretary bird” rulings, the North London Club being an exemption. And is there really so much cheating going on? Or is it that these cases get a lot of exposure? Anyway, to stop cheating you have to change to full digital bridge with camera surveillance. I don’t think that there will be many players left. I would certainly look for entertainment elsewhere.

Your first sentence applies to your reasoning too. No director claims to be able to establish what a player was thinking when he did what he did. But back to the case in hand: the director should establish whether the player, ChCh, had a bridge reason to think as long as he did. Therefore he should ask the player why there was a pause. After that the TD decides whether or not the reason was a valid one. You don’t believe the player ‘on his blue eyes’ as we say in Dutch, but you can’t dismiss his answer out of hand. You seem to miss a basic concept of bridge, namely that it is a MIND game. That makes it essentially different from physical sports, where the director, referee, umpire and the like are supposed to see what happens. In bridge thinking is essential to game and should be taken into consideration if necessary. I don’t know about Australia, but here judges ask suspects what they were thinking when they are on trial. And they take that into consideration when establishing innocence or guilt - no juries overhere - and when sentencing. They don’t claim to be able to read the mind of the suspect either or to decide what he told was the truth.

That’s downright ridiculous. A TD should establish the facts before deciding. Amongst those facts is the reason why the player did what he did. Whether you’re convinced or not, is something totally different, but you certainly should use the information when deciding. You’re stance seems to be “I don’t care what they say, shoot them anyway”.

Believe me, there’s a lot more and even more important things you learn a newcomer. Some don’t even know the names of the suits :D Many players, and I’m one of them, figure out a line of play at trick one. But I don’t consider all possibilities at that point. It would take far to long. Yesterday I was in 4♥ holding five hearts and three in the dummy. I won trick one, played a high heart from the dummy and discovered that my RHO held the five missing ones. Before playing the next trick I took quite some time to work out a plan how to make the contract or, if failing to do so, how to limit the damage. But you seem to demand that I did this at trick one. I don’t know whether you know the name Bauke Muller, one of the Dutch top players who twice won the Bermuda Bowl. He is quite notorious for extremely long pauses for thought, twenty minutes is no exception, and reacting quite angrily when pushed for action. That can happen in the middle of the play. Are you seriously telling that the TD should spur him on?

So do ours and I don’t read anything in the Laws that permits you to do as you like after a bid out of turn. If you make a habit of it or have an agreement to do so, you should inform the opponents of this. An infraction doesn’t mean that the offenders loose their rights. Somehow I get the feeling that many are looking for loopholes in the Laws when that’s not illegal. I don’t like it. Bridge is a game of fairness, not a playground for legal niceties. I expect players to take the laws 72, 73 and 74 as the main guideline for their behavior and attitude at the table - or computer nowadays.

Your obligation? Call the TD. But you probably know that :lol:. Pran has given chapter and verse about the possibilities for the offenders, but also pointed to Law 72C. From your this description I get the very strong impression that your RHO was trying to put you on the wrong footing. If so, I wouldn’t hesitate to give that side a serious PP, not just a warning. It’s not as bad as cheating, but it certainly destroys the pleasure of the other players and makes serious bridge impossible. Sometimes such jokers fall in their own sword, but to often they can get away with it.

Barmar asked wether there was a convention card, but you didn’t answer. You keep insisting that N should have alerted the first double, because it was a stolen bid. Never heard of any player do that in this situation, but N said so. That doesn’t make the double alertable if their agreement was TO, as S stated. You’re entitled the agreements, not to the knowledge that N deliberately (?) deviated from that agreement.

I didn’t agree. The second double might be alertable under EBU regulations - it’s not in The Netherlands nor according to WBF alerting policy - but what else than penalties can this be. South has bid two suits, North’s second double should now show values and S has to decide. In this case S passes, N start is certainly a present for EW and 3♠x can be made. Why W assumes that S has a more balanced hand, is not clear to me.