I have been through this very unpleasant experience many times, when my side has a big result to come (e.g. making slam when vulnerable), my opponent deliberately disconnect himself and the hand goes to settlement. from the losing side, this is definitely sensible strategy, since a weak player probably would not done any better than GIB when playing/defending the hand. not to mention the odds extremely favor the losing side (-1430 vesus +100), can anyone guarantee a 90% success rate in their slams, even playing with their regular partners? That's why this unethical behavior has been rampant in online money bridge. IMHO, Current settlement rule is too lenient to these people. In f2f bridge, penalty to this kind of behavior is much more severe, even we just consider the adjustment of the score only, and nothing else. I think assess some penalty to disconnected players, who cannot or will not come back to the session in a give period of time, is not unreasonable. for example, the deal is still settled as before by robots, but a penalty trick is automatically assessed against the offensive side. Then the losing side would know he/she is very unlikely to gain by just leaving when opponents playing game or slam. yeah, this may be unfair to someone occasionally have a connection problem. But that's your luck, just as many other things in this game. To be honest, the odds of a disconnection is real, is conceivably less than 0.1%.