mink

The dummy did not play, and therefore nothing is retracted. Even if the declarer had instructed the dummy to play, there would have been no change of this play. Karl

I have no clue what this is supposed to mean. Obviously this does not apply to the dummy, because it would be a contradiction with Law 45D. I have no clue what this is supposed to mean. Karl

It appears to me that there are some misconceptions about the Laws that are revealed in this thread. 1. People think that it is possible to accept a card played out of rotation. But this is only true for cards led - see Law 53. A Law that says something like this for cards played out of rotoation subsequently to a trick does not exist. A card played out of rotation to a trick after the lead cannot be accepted by an opponent, and if the LHO of a player who played out of rotation plays a card, this one is out of rotation, too, no matter if the dummy suggested a play or a card was really played out of rotation. 2. People think that Law 45D is applicable in our case. This is not true. When Law 45D refers to a card "played" by the dummy, it is assumed that it is the dummy's turn to lead or play a subsequent card. Only then a defender can reasonably assume that the card was played, because he just overheard what the declarer said or did not see the gesture by which the declarer instructed the dummy to play. If something happens with the dummy when it is not his turn, then usually defenders are aware that this is not a legal action. There is no Law that enables them to do something illegal themselves after that. If some defender accidentally plays out of rotation after an out-of-rotation action by the dummy, this defender is protected by Law 57C, but not by Law 45D. (It would also be very inconsistent if both Laws applied.) Please note that there is no real penalty for an out-of-rotation subsequent play by the dummy or the declarer himself, therefore this is an irregularity but not an infraction. The same is true for a defender who plays out of rotation after his partner has played to the trick. But an action that invokes Law 57 is always an infraction. The fact that the provisions of Law 45D do not apply if the declarer leads from his hand and then really plays the dummy before any opponent does something also indicates that only Law 57C is applicable. Declarer playing from both hands is only mentioned there and nowhere else. 3. People think that Law 57C disables any rectification for which a connection to play out of turn by a defender can be found. This is not true. Rather, only a rectification that aims at the act of playing before his partner is prohibited. That means, in our case, that if East had played the ♣2 prematurely, really no rectification at all would have been necessary. But playing the ♦Q is evil. It gives UI to partner, and East could have known that his side will benefit. If this has been done deliberately, which seems likely for me, it is unethically. Karl

Maybe best practice is to just say "director!" if you want to call the director and delay all other communication until the director arrives. However, like barmar said, you did nothing wrong and deserve a correct ruling. LHO deserves a procedural penalty for doings something before the director arrives. Karl

Bridge is played clockwise. This is so basic that the Laws fail to state it explicitly for the play of the cards. If some Law might declare that some play out of rotation is considered to be a legal play under certain circumstances, I would expect the Law to state this explicitly, maybe like "The card played out of rotation becomes a legally played card, and the play out of rotation is a legal action and not an irregularity." In contrast to that, if a law says "A defender is not subject to rectification for playing before his partner ..." (btw. Pran, there is no "any"), the play out of rotation is still an infraction and not legal. If a Law says "The penalty for driving across a junction while traffic light was red is not executed if the traffic light was red for less than a second in the moment the car passed it.", this does not mean that it is legal or advisable to do so. Consequently, if an accident occurs, the driver who ignored the red light is considered guilty. Karl

In Germany, in case of translation problems the original English version of the laws applies. What the dummy did was an irregularity, because there is normally no rectification for a suggested play that did not really solve a problem for the declarer and would have no consequences at all if East did not play out of turn. OTOH, East's play out of turn was an infraction. Relative to this infraction, N/S are the non-offending side. Karl

Dummy has suggested a play. It is not relevant that there is no decision involved in this play. So Law 57C applies, and East is not subject to a rectification. Nevertheless, East has committed an infraction by playing out of turn - Law 57C does not allow him to to that. So the ♦Q was illegally played and therefore is UI to West. It suggests to discard ♦K. Therefore by Law 16B West is required to discard ♣K. Failure to do so should result in a rectification. This is not prohibited by Law 57C, because the partner of the player who played out of turn is subject to the Law 16B rectification. This is not forbidden by Law 57C, which explicitly refers to one player ("A defender") and not to the side who played out of turn. Furthermore, the Law 16B rectification is not a rectification for the act of playing out of turn, but for using UI. If the intention of Law 57C was to forbid such a rectification, something like "the play out of turn is considered a legal action now" or "Law 16 does not apply in this trick" should have been included in the text (as in Law 27B1a). There is another possible approach to handle this: East could have known that playing out of turn may cause an advantage for his side. So TD could apply Law 23 and rectify. This Law starts with the word "Whenever". In order to override Law 23, Law 57C should have stated this explicitly. And again, a Law 23 rectification would be for the possible intention to get an advantage and not for the play out of turn itself. And something else: The Laws assume that irregularities and infractions happen accidentally. Law 72B1 explicitly disallows intentional infractions ("must not"). But my first impression about East's play out of turn is that it was a deliberate action. Evidence for this is that he discarded the ♦Q and not the ♣2. If East was really not paying attention and thought it was his turn to play, I rather would expect him to discard the ♣2. Therefore, if I was called to his table, I would first ask East what he had been thinking when playing the ♦Q. If he answered: "I did not see declarer's lead and thought dummy had led the ♦10, very sorry.", there is no case. But if he tells me that he is entitled to play now because of Law 57C, I have gotten him, and he would receive a severe disciplinary penalty, no matter if he pretends he has misunderstood the Law. Karl

When you receive such an invitation, you can accept or reject it. But there is a third possibility: Click on enemy! This also rejects the invitation, and ensures that you do not get another invitation by the same player. Maybe this helps a little. Of course, some auto-reject-all-inviations option would be more convenient. Karl

I was not aware that currently the player's flag is never used. Rather I thought that when somebody registers for a tourney with country filter, the flag set by the player is checked. Using the IP here seems smarter at the first sight. But for our tourneys, this means that a German player with a German flag who is spending his vacation on a Caribbean island cannot play in a BBO-Germany tourney unless he knows how to set the language to German, or he asks us to be included in the friends list. And one of our directors is living in a German area where he has no cable or ADSL access to the internet, and is therefore forced to use a satellite connection. His IP address is Italian. On the other hand, any BBOer who is currently in Germany can play, though maybe he cannot speak German at all. Maybe the best solution would be that a player only passes the country filter if both flag and IP match the tourney's country setting. Karl

I am one of several directors for BBO-Germany tourneys. We share the account DBV_01 when directing or creating tourneys. We are running 5 tourneys per week. Access to the tourney is restricted by Filters. We are using "Friends", "no Enemies", "Country" and "Language". Yesterday I received several complains by Austrians (using the German language, too) who are normally playing the tourney, but were rejected by the filters this time. Setting them to "Friend" solved the problem for each of them. However, many others maybe just accepted the rejection and are now angry for being rejected though they did nothing wrong. On the other hand, a lot of players had successfully registered who would normally have been rejected by the filters. It was quite obvious that the language filter was malfunctioning, but yesterday I did not figure out why. Now I think I have found the solution: In the past, I have noticed that whenever a new version of the BBO web client is automatically invoked, my language setting is English. The next time when I start BBO, it is German again. This was never a problem for me, so I did not report it. But obviously it has happened to the director who created the tourney, as he normally uses the windows version, so he got a new web-client-version when he started BBO in order to direct the Sunday tourney and create the tourneys for the next week. (I had suggested to give the web client a try.) When I asked him he remembered that in fact his language setting had been English. So all the tourneys he created inherited an English language filter, which explains the problem I encountered. Therefore I suggest the following software changes: Make sure that the language setting does not change when a new version of the BBO web client software is launched for the first time In the dialog for the filters of a tourney, please mention explicitly which language and which country will be used Maybe enable the creator of the tourney to explicitly change the country and language settings for the tourney Use the flag set in the profile of the player for the country filter rather than his IP address. Reason for the last suggestion is, that in the past I have heard that a tourney host who creates a tourney in a foreign country inherits the country that is derived from his IP address. Again, he does not realize this, and the result is a mess. Karl

Die übliche Empfehlung in solchen Fällen ist, den Cache des Browsers zu leeren. Ob das hilft, weiß ich natürlich nicht. Eine konkrete Erklärung wäre, dass das Internet nicht funktioniert, oder das eine Instanz auf deinem Rechner oder ein möglicher Proxy den Zugriff auf BBO blockiert. Letzteres gibt es aber bei einem Privatanschluss normalerweise nicht. Die blockierende Instanz auf dem Rechner könnte der Firewall oder die Antivirensoftware sein. Karl

I see no reason why a declarer who forgets about the ♥Q should be allowed to remember that he can set up a ♣ trick. So 3 tricks for him. Karl

OP did not say anything about the defense, so I assume there was no serious error. The takeout double is less attractive if ♠ is not South's suit for sure. If East says he would not double with the correct information there is no evidence to mistrust him. If East passes, in case ♠ is not South's major, South has a problem and will maybe make the wrong decision: either pass while North has only 4 ♠ cards, or bid something while North has 6 ♠ cards. If the false explanation was true, however, South has no problem, and the takeout double is a good idea for sure. I would adjust to 2 ♠ made without double. Karl

It happened again to me. This request seems to have a low priority, and nobody has stated yet that a change has even been considered. I am aware that there must be a priority list for changes. But this automatic abandoning of a teamgame is by far the most annoying software feature I have ever encountered at BBO. It is especially annoying if I am the host and other players maybe blame me for the abortion. It is obvious that this could be changed fast and easily, at least if you simply increase the threshold of withdrawn players, even though this would not be the optimal solution. Karl

Today when I was dummy I wanted to see the explanation of a bid and unintentionally clicked on that bid. This resulted in a question to the opp. I think it should be quite easy to prevent this from happening. Karl

This link works for me.

I would really disregard the revoke by the defender and only handle declarer's revoke as demanded by Law 62. Apart from that this is the easiest and most elegant way to solve the problem, it really might be the case that the second revoke never would have happened if declarer followed suit in ♠, as the defender might have been playing ♣ because he saw declarer's ♣ card and thought that it was led. Karl

North did not do anything wrong. South thought that he was dummy when East made the opening lead and cannot be blamed that he spread the dummy. West did not really do something wrong, but failed to say "stop" or something else that could not be misunderstood in order to prevent something wrong from happening. But the real offender was East who lead a card though the auction was not yet finished. My ruling would be: There were 14 cards exposed before the auction ended. East was the offender. Therefore, according to Law 24C, West must pass once. This forced pass ends the auction, so the play can continue as if nothing had happened. Karl

In this hand, South replaced his original 4♣ bid by 3nt after an undo request. The 2nt and and 3♠ bids were alerted. The alerts are present in the lin code, but are not displayed by the movie (barmar please check). Do you think that 4♣ can possibly have been a misclick? Would you adjust, and if yes, to what? What would you do if this happened at a real table with bidding boxes in use? Karl Edit: it was of course South who requested the undo, not West as I originally wrote.

The stars are assigned by BBO following some criteria, I think international success is required to earn a star. The numbers range from 2 (lowest) to A (highest) and reflect the BBO-masterpoints won by that player. This has been explained in more detail on this help page.

Of course this is not likely to be a problem if I really find 7 players among my friends, but this is not easy, because there are so many opportunities to play (tourney, BBO tourney, main bridge club) or to watch (star players, friends, viewgraph). Most time, most of my friends are busy. On the other hand, pickup team games work very well most time, and the quality of the players there tends to be much better than at Main Bridge Club tables or in tourneys. Maybe make a survey how many team games are pickup at a given moment of time, and I would not be surprised if it is half of them. Karl

I just tried to play in a team match. Found one with a nice host, who chose me as partner. 12 boards. After 6 boards completed with no problems, at each table 1 player did withdraw, and this happened almost simultaneously, so that the host could not do anything to prevent the automatic close. Instead, he started a new team game. While playing board 2, at the other table 2 players did withdraw almost simultaneously, one of the reasons was that partner cannot play bride. Again, the host could not do anything to prevent this. I am really frustrated now, and have stopped to play for some time. Karl

Again I encountered the problem I described in posts #32 and #33 of this thread. Summary: If I set up a pickup team game and get request to play by chat from players using the old software, it happens that I get the message that a seat is occupied though it is free. This is really a bug and I would like to know if you can reproduce it and if it is scheduled to be fixed. Requests to sit issued by players using the web-client, where no chat is involved, always work. Karl

I invited a player for a tourney starting in 4 minutes, and he accepted. I thanked him by chat, but got no response. About 2 seconds before the start of the tourney, I got the system message that the registration was withdrawn, and I found that my partner was playing in some other tourney. The most likely explanation for this is that he got a sub request from that other tourney and accepted, not aware in this moment that he was already registered for another tourney. In order to avoid anything like that, I suggest to inhibit any sub request to a player who is registered for a tourney starting before the end of the tourney that makes the request. Maybe additionally, remove a player from any sub list when he registers for a tourney starting in less then 20 minutes. Karl

If the bidding goes[hv=d=w&v=n&b=12&a=1nppdpp2dp2hd]133|100[/hv] pass is not an LA for East, provided that they do not open nt with 5 card majors or with singletons. Nobody wants to play in a 4-2-fit if opps double for penalty, and it is likely that West can never reach the dummy. I am quite certain that a poll would support my view. Karl