McBruce

You still have Unit finals where you are? I thought by now most Districts qualified directly to the District Final.

Not quite. He began by doubling 2♥, then was forced to pass when his partner made an insufficient bid that was not accepted. After the hand was played and it was clear from the play which of the players was responsible for the deck appearing to contain about 50 'Miltons' instead of the usual 40, he asked for a ruling on the basis that he or partner might well have chosen some other action, knowing that the free bid could be a six count.

It's not what they concealed from me, it is what they concealed from the opponents by not alerting 2♥. If you hold a 15 count with stoppers in three suits, partner has overcalled the fourth suit, and RHO has made a non-forcing or weak free bid, don't you think you would at least consider 3NT? The 2♥ call was either a psyche, a mistaken bid, or a reasonable bid by N-S standards. At the table I formed the impression, mostly from the comments by N-S, that it was a normal bid for them. Since this requires an alert, there has been misinformation. Even when N-S later claim that they misspoke or I misunderstood or whatever and South simply made a mistake, we have to consider Law 75C: a Director assumes misinformation unless there is other evidence to indicate mistaken bid. Perhaps I am a bit harsh in not immediately accepting what is on the system card or a claim that 'we have no agreement,' but the auction is at least a bit strange and that too is evidence. I don't think the intent of Law 75C is for the TD to blindly accept self-serving statements from the side that has gained from a mistake: I think the TD needs to be fairly confident that there is no implicit agreement to meet the standard set in Law 75C. Here I was not confident at all.

Interesting comments so far. Let me elaborate further on some of the subjects raised: I don't think East sought any advantage by making the insufficient bid and then barring partner with the 2♠ call. Away from the table East told me that it had simply not registered that South had bid at the 2-level and a bid at the 3-level was necessary to show the club suit. South was made aware before declining to accept the insufficient call that the replacement call would bar partner. At the table I got the impression that East was going to reluctantly bid 3♣ until informed that any other legal call would bar partner. So if the insufficient bid was deliberate to get partner barred, it was an Oscar-worthy acting job, and rather foolish, especially if partner is doubling for penalties without a spade fit. I didn't specifically ask North about selling out to 2♠, but the other comments North made seemed to imply that "extra length without strength" was a possibility for partner's call. North claimed that the auction had uncovered a misfit, and bidding on was dangerous. To me this seemed to indicate that North expected significantly less than what South showed, thus there was some implicit idea that 2♥ could have a wide range--even if they played it as 'forcing'. E-W are entitled to this information and without it could have been damaged. I realize that if an agreement is implicit a player may not realize it at the time, making disclosure difficult. But the normal approach-- do you play this? is it on your system card? why did you do this then? --seems to me to allow players to conceal conventions by claiming there is no agreement, which many have learned to do quite skilfully. A good player who knows North well told me the solution was for North to better communicate that there is no agreement. That's part of it, but another part of it is making calls that show you believe partner more than the opponents. North continued to discuss/argue the point after I had left the table to look at the hand record and decide what to do, so much so that I had to return more than once to tell them to quiet down and get on with the other boards. West does have a history of being a needler (although mostly to East!) but in this case North was responsible for the continued discussion (while the same preduplicated boards were in play throughout the room). They called once more to ask for a ruling and although I had decided by then I told them I would not give them the ruling until they finished the match, since this would cause even more bickering. Predictably, North was incensed at the decision, South argued that the auction had gone 'the same way at the other table with no alert' (untrue: it began 1♦ - DOUBLE - 2♥, believe it or not!). In a post-game discussion, I accepted North's assurance that their free bids would never be so weak again but left the 3 IMP/1 VP swing that resulted from the ruling in: call it a fine instead of an adjustment!

[hv=pc=n&s=sj85hkqt765d2c984&w=s972haj94dkq4ckq3&n=sk6h32daj9753ca62&e=saqt43h8dt86cjt75&d=n&v=b&b=13&a=1d1s2hdp2sppp]399|300[/hv] This deal occurred in an ACBL Grand National Teams club game. East's second bid was actually an insufficient 2♣, not accepted by South and corrected to 2♠, preventing West from bidding further. No calls were alerted. At the end of the play, I was called back to the table. A result of +170 to E-W had been agreed, but West claimed that the South hand had failed to alert a negative free bid. A non-forcing 2♥ is alertable in the ACBL. North and South refused to admit at the table that this call was unusual for their partnership and argued that the extra length in hearts made the call OK, albeit lighter than expected. Away from the opponents later they claimed 2♥ was a mistaken bid and that what they were trying to say was that the South player had the right to make a non-system bid. Had West not doubled, North would be forced to make a call, they now claimed. In the meantime I had ruled that they had an implicit agreement that 2♥ might be weak, evidenced by the hand, their comments at the time, and the rest of the auction, in which North chose to sell out to 2♠ with an opening hand opposite a free bid. I ruled it likely that West would choose 3NT with this knowledge and make it for +600, and found this to be also the most unfavorable result that was at all probable for N-S had the implicit agreement been known. Since N-S at the other table was +500 in 4♠ doubled, this turned a +12 into a +15 in IMPs, making the ruling itself responsible for a single VP. 1) Is there enough evidence here to make the ruling that N-S have the implicit agreement that free bids can be quite weak? 2) How much evidence does a TD need to assume an implicit agreement? 3) If I had decided that the 2♥ call was a mistaken bid and let the score stand, what should happen to the pair the next time this (or something similar) happens? 4) What can a TD do when a player makes a non-system action that works, such as an underbid or a strange choice of lead, and the opponents claim that the player or the partnership does this sort of thing quite often?

In our Unit Championship games I ran arrow switches in pair games from the time I was appointed TD, three years ago. Realizing that ACBL players are unfamiliar with them (except those who had played in club games I ran), I made sure to fill out the arrow switch round pickup slips in advance, and explained the procedure as best I could so that everyone became familiar with it and it became fairly commonplace after a short time. Sadly, the local Unit Board decided to conduct a simple poll on the use of the arrow switch, and the players voted it down. The players that were most vociferous against it tended to make some inaccurate and disparaging comment to me as they passed the scoring area on their way out (because they were not interested in hearing a response). Here is an example of the abuse I would get: --"we got deprived of our two slams in the last round by your stupid arrow switch" --"the arrow switch cost us a N-S section top when we were suddenly compared against the E-W pairs." (This pair scored 22% on three boards in the last round with the arrow switch and of course feels that they would have crushed their opponents with the other cards. The masterpoints they got for third overall was more than first in a section half the size of the field would have paid.) --"you know it's not fair and you're doing it anyway" --"nobody anywhere in the world does this, you're the only one" --"it always gives out fewer masterpoints" or "fewer pairs win masterpoints" --"people will not come back if you continue to impose this silliness on us" At the same time, every novice pair who asked me questions about it were happy to hear what the benefits were. Those that did complain virtually always had had a sub-par game. The same players had very little to say when they were having a good game. The game slowly increased attendance, gaining about a table per game each year. I have replied to the Unit President asking what the Board will do when the players demand polls on travelers vs pickups, skipping a table to avoid seeing boards twice, and giving no matchpoints for a score that loses by only 10. The Unit President was less than amused.

Most of you have it: the 7♣ looks like the 7♠ to our poor declarer. :)

Heard this one at a recent tournament and I understand it comes from an Andrew Robson column: You hold a singleton 7 of spades and a 30-count. With clues like these, you need not be Ellery Queen to deduce your other 12 cards, but you will need to be Ellery Queen to work out what to do in a few minutes. RHO opens 7♠ as dealer. Perhaps you double, perhaps not, but when you lead the A♦, it is ruffed and eleven more trumps follow from RHO. What do you keep? Hint: Ellery would not only know what to keep, but exactly what declarer's 13th card is.

And until we are given more information about the situation, what we have here is a post complaining about something that clearly is UI but OP appears to be seeking a way out. Was there an adjustment? Did the TD make a questionable ruling? Who knows? Let's hear more. The alert procedure and the rules about asking questions are not perfect, this has long been known. But if you are put in a difficult situation, surely it is better to get the information you need even if it passes some UI, then continue as best you can. I'm speculating that this was a factor, but allowing the TDs correct ruling, that asking a question can pass UI, to distract you from getting your best possible result cannot be a winning strategy. If you are adjusted against and you have a case, you can appeal.

Not quite. All the TD has to do is to open the Law book to the right page and read from it. In this case, the Law in question is usually needed during the play, a card is led or exposed in dummy, and somebody notices a duplicate card in their own hand. Law 17, however, is the first Law in the section of the Law book titled "The Auction." Not only that, the subheading is "Part I -- Correct Procedure"! It might be better to append 17D to Law 7, or at least put something pointing to Law 17D in Law 7.

A quick look in the ACBL Handbook's club section seems to say nothing on this subject, so I shall take your advice.

True, but it is fairly simple to use a proper Swiss Pairs scoring program and enter the raw results. I run a Swiss Pairs once every two months (at a different club).

Perhaps I should clarify further: The game in question is a members-only club bridge game. Normally we play a Mitchell movement with 8 rounds of 3 boards for 8-12 tables. I have convinced the club to buy a new set of boards and cards so that while they play their game, I can preduplicate the next week's set, and look for hands upon which I might make some comments along with the hand records. (The club's best pairs play a year-end game against another members-only club, and they would like to improve their winning percentage. Somehow they feel that I may be able to help them here.) Anyhow, the overall idea is to reduce the number of boards in play, to a maximum of 27, by switching to two-board rounds with more than nine tables and a complete Mitchell, followed by 2 or 4 boards played throughout the room at the same time to get us to 24. This seems to me to make a better movement for 10 or 11 tables than a 3-board Mitchell, and means I have fewer boards to duplicate.

I run a game at a club where the attendance is usually 8-11 tables and there is time for 24 boards. With, say, 10 tables, is is reasonable to run 2-board rounds and, during this portion of the game, make enough copies of boards 21-24 to distribute throughout the room for a final round, where we match pairs top to bottom based on the scores at that point? Is it Laws legal? ACBL legal? Fair?

I have heard players discuss 3 or 4 different squeeze and endplay possibilities for a hand, discover one that works, and therefore decide that it is cold...

Done.

My idea as a club director on the subject of slow play has always been to take a positive attitude. Once you make it known to your players that you expect everyone to make an effort to catch up after a long round, but do not attach a reputation to those who are most often slow, the players will respond by being more aware. I find that standing at the table as they finish play helps quite a bit: when they are done I can ensure that the score is filled out quickly and the E-W pair moves as soon as possible. If the delay is more than 4 minutes I usually go to both affected tables and let them know that I expect all eight players to avoid delays so that they can catch up, over the next two rounds if necessary. (When those who waited give me the 'not my fault' line, I tell them I am not asking anyone to play fast, I am simply asking everyone to try to avoid delays.) Oh, and of course, nobody ever gets NP for an unplayed board when time runs out. My ACBL-printed Law book's version of 12C2a does not seem to admit the idea of NP and I wonder how the ACBL BoD came up with the interpretation. But we've been through this on this forum dozens of times.

My theory is that 1/4 of a top makes for a nice neat number to subtract from the score when the top is 12 or 8. Don't make things too difficult for the club owner, let the tournament TDs figure out what 1/4 of 38 or 26 is... :) If the TD feels that 1/4 of a top is too harsh he can simply give a warning. I've done that.

They were not. All players had 13 cards. Declarer deliberately muddled the replay in order to hide the fact that he had revoked, hoping apparently for some sort of artificial score which would be better than the big minus he was getting. By the time I began asking him about the three cards he had left, both defenders and dummy were wondering about the strange distribution of the spade suit, and in fact I had to ask him three times before he would show the cards. When he did, there was nothing on the order of "oh dear, that's a spade--I thought it was a club": he had clearly known for some time that he had revoked. It was the defenders who pointed the revoke out once they saw the spade. Sure, you're not required to disclose during the play that you have revoked, but when the play is reviewed at the beginning of what seems to be trick twelve and you know you have revoked, it's time to plead guilty, because even 007 isn't getting out of this one. :)

Our situation is that we've had the machine a month, so some of our club directors are just getting into their second dozen boards with it. I think my scenario is more likely. The other thing that gordontd mentions below reminds me of a specific problem with these types of machines, which read not barcodes but the actual corner of the card. When the machine encounters a trouble card, one that it cannot read, or thinks it has already seen in the current deck, it stops. Often you can reverse the position of the card in the hopper and it continues without trouble. But occasionally you get a card that for some reason the machine will not read in any orientation. The approved procedure here is to substitute another deck, or a similar card from another deck. But, not wanting to replace decks quite that often, what actually happens is that the operator will pull the card and continue dealing, while he looks at the onscreen hand record and places the problem card into the correct slot. The machine will then stop at 51 cards because (usually!) the next card is from the next deck and has already been read. Now you hit cancel, sort out the problem and go to the next deal. Trouble is, if you forget to go to the next deal it will assume you want to deal the previous deal again, the approved procedure. In some cases you can go four or five deals before you notice that the board the machine is dealing is not the one you have ready to accept cards. Now you have to backtrack and transfer cards from board to board. This is a possible source of error. (I try not to do this, it is almost as fast to redeal the deals as it is to transfer them. But our newcomers to the machine have not yet discovered this...) Anyhow there is really NO reason to abandon across the field scoring just because a board is fouled. Gimme the details, jb, I'll make sure it is correctly handled.

I don't have the exact hand for you; in any case it is not relevant. The incident took place at an ACBL Unit Championship game, which is a level between club games and local tournaments. North was declarer in 4♣ doubled (vulnerable). The opening lead was a spade and he ruffed it in hand, then played along cross-ruff lines for several tricks. Near the end of play declarer was found to have three cards remaining while everyone else had two and I was called to the table. It was immediately apparent that once the problem was discovered, the players had already examined two or three tricks back and discovered that the problem was earlier: the preceding two or three tricks all had one card from each player in them. This put us into Law 67B territory, and I told the players to slowly go through the play from trick one. This proved to be quite difficult. There were several disputes over what had taken place and all four players seemed to be on different speeds, too fast in some cases for me to follow; in fact, the only thing keeping me from losing track completely was that the declarer would also get one or two tricks behind and the defenders and dummy would ask him to catch up. Eventually, we somehow got back to the same position we were originally at: declarer with three left, defenders and dummy with two. Declarer was clutching these three cards to his chest and refusing to show them until I asked to see them. One of these cards was a spade, the suit he had ruffed in hand at trick one. I had a difficult time keeping my composure as I explained the gross impropriety of concealing a revoke. The board was scored as down three (with a revoke penalty) for 800 and a bottom, and I felt I had to consider an extra penalty on top of this. I was later told, when discussing it privately with other players (before deciding what extra penalty to give), that the dummy had asked declarer to confirm that he had no spades at trick one; declarer confirmed having no spades. It thus seemed almost certain that the player had discovered the spade in his hand after trick one was finished, but also that he had discovered this well before my arrival or before the problem with the number of cards remaining was noticed. I find it difficult to believe that he deliberately ruffed at trick one. I also find it difficult to believe that when he was asked to show his last three cards, he didn't realize that one of them was a spade: there was no surprise at that point, and there was also the evidence that he was 'dragging his feet' during the replay. I chose half of a top as a procedural penalty here, twice the normal PP. Too low? Too high? Just right?

As one of the directors at the club in question I can say that it is certainly not impossible. An operator can be distracted. More likely might be this type of scenario: one player at the table where the boards are initially placed does not hear the announcement that the boards are 'ready to play' and pulls out the West and South cards to shuffle before being stopped by someone who has heard the announcement. Back they go, in the wrong slots.

Sometimes you get to deliver a ruling that is so funny that even the players who wanted the ruling are too convulsed in laughter to grumble. Here on the Wet Coast (not a typo) of Canada, we have many Chinese-Canadian players in the local bridge scene, both young and old. It was two of the latter, Mr. Li and Mr. Tu, who produced the questionable result on this hand: [hv=pc=n&s=s852hq96dk83cat52&w=saqjt74hk3dqjt65c&n=s96hjt875da94ck96&e=sk3ha42d72cqj8743]399|300[/hv] Most pairs played in 4♠ making five. The E-W pair that played it after Mr. Li and Mr. Tu, however, saw (on the traveler) that their result was 3NT by E-W (I forget who, which is perhaps a good thing...) making six! They called me over and asked me to investigate, since making twelve tricks in notrump off the ace and king of clubs and diamonds seemed "physically impossible." I replied with the line from the original Pelham One Two Three: "you'd be surprised what's physically possible," and went off to have a look at the hand record. My experience with these is that if the score entered on the traveler is not inconsistent, it is right most of the time, no matter how improbable it seems given the cards. But this one stumped me, so I went to the table to investigate, and had a look at the scorecard of Mr. Li, who held the South cards. The players who had asked were playing the next deal when I returned. I told them to play it out and hoped they would do so quickly before I started giggling. Once they were done, I made this announcement: "Mr. Li's scorecard clearly reads 690, and also includes three angry-looking Chinese characters, followed by an "A" and a diamond symbol." :) Somehow, the ace and king of diamonds had both made their appearance at trick one, and North chose the wrong suit to continue.

We all want to adjust to 4♠ based on an infraction that occurred AFTER West passed 2♠? What makes you think that a side willing to pass in a partscore is going to compete all the way to 4♠ without the razzle-dazzle?

[hv=pc=n&s=s842hat932dcaqjt6&w=skqjthk764dk843c7&n=s97hqj5dat76c9853&e=sa653h8dqj952ck42&d=e&v=0&b=14&a=p1hd1s2spp3h4dppp]399|300[/hv] The 2♠ call was explained as 'natural, at least 4 spades' when North asked after it was passed around to him. North expressed considerable doubt that 2♠ was actually natural and asked several follow up questions as to whether it might in fact be a cue-bid, and what other options East had. When North turned out to have psyched the 1♠ call, E-W were not amused. 4♦ was not a success, while 4♠ would have been fine, had North not talked E-W into believing that perhaps they had a misunderstanding. How do you rule?