gordontd

It's a Bowman. If you have a spare set of boards and Bridgemates they work fine with a full number of tables too. I use them for 10 tables with 24 boards or 11 tables with 27 boards.

I've asked various players about this hand this week. They all thought it was close, but all but one of them finessed. The other one finessed the other way, but admitted he had no reason for playing that way. So, you think it's about 25% while I would think it's well over 50%.

What did West say he would have bid with the East hand? Was he surprised at East's choice of bid? East said he didn't want to bid 2NT as it was non-forcing. Wasn't 3♥ non-forcing?

What do you bid with 1534 with ♦xxx? Or 2524 with ♠xx?

The further detail that has come to me (by way of a phone conversation with one of the players at the table) is that they were in 5♠, not 4♠, so they had already gone off at the moment of the claim and no-one realised that there was more to the hand. The match was close enough until the final two boards that an extra undertrick could have been significant.

This seems to me to just be nonsense, since all we are determining is whether something is likely or not. In that context likely as >50% seems eminently reasonable. I can make up a sentence like "There is only one likely outcome". Does this mean that likely = 100%? Of course not.

Except that you're not showing any extra shape - wouldn't you have to rebid 2♥ with some 5-4s?

Why did I rebid 2♥ and not 3♣?

If we accept that pass is not a logical alternative, the question then is what may South bid. 5H certainly seems suggested over 5D or 4NT, and either of the latter two might well bring further bidding.

Not all but most, certainly. That's why the search for examples has mainly focussed on revokes and failures to cover honours (and you've already pointed out that not all instances of those are errors). One might also include playing unnecessarily high honours - eg K from KJ when the Q in dummy has not been played. And yes Paul, before you go and create another hypothetical example when it's right to play the K rather than the J, I know they exist. Examples of errors are just that - it doesn't mean that no such instance of the play can ever be right.

I think that if they had alerted as required he would be much less likely to have ducked the trick, yes. So it's not "unrelated to the infraction".

In this case it certainly is: If they had alerted as required, or notified the failure to alert, as required, West wouldn't have ducked.

What we should really be asking is if any of this would have occurred had NS not infracted by failing to alert, and then again by failing to advise EW of the failure to alert. If the situation wouldn't have arisen had NS not infracted, then it's not "unrelated to the infraction".

Indeed so, but you asked your question of my post which talked about Share-and-Relay Mitchells.

In what way would the duck, if it were to be considered a Serious Error, have been unrelated to the infraction?

Yes, that was the question, and the answer is L69B Now we just need to decide what "likely" means, and then determine what was likely to happen had play continued.

In the given situation, declarer need not know who objected since it happened much later, while scoring up. In any case declarer isn't going to decide on the line - the director is.

One further thought occurs to me: if a line is, for example, 56%, that doesn't mean that the expectation that the line will be adopted is 56%. I think a far greater percentage of players who think that is the expectation for the line to work, will adopt it.

I don't think it's right to look at it as two decisions: when you think the opponents are looking to promote a trump trick, you look at the whole before ruffing. Everyone seems happy with the assumption that South will continue hearts. Given that South has four hearts and North two, I would have thought (but am happy to be corrected), that the percentage line (by a fair margin - 9:8[edited]?) is to ruff high and finesse the second round of trumps. It just happens not to work here. Isn't that what is "likely" to happen if it gets played out? The fact that South has overcalled a four-card suit would, if anything, incline me towards the expectation that he has a singleton (spade).

L69

Unfortunately it's not, though it might be if/when the EBL update their website at http://eurobridge.org/departments/directing/courses.html and display the course information as they have in previous years. I wrote to them about it a couple of times after the course (which was more than a year ago now) but then gave up. Perhaps someone else would like to ask. I've found the information from previous years to be very useful. In particular there's a very interesting paper (on another topic) given by Bill Pencharz.

Where do you think author reputation comes from?

When we discussed Serious Errors at some length at the EBL TD's course in San Remo a year ago, with the benefit of advice from a world-class Dutch player, the conclusion was that the standard for considering an error to be serious was sufficiently high that the majority of examples we were given from real appeals should not have been considered serious errors. The classic example we were given of when an error is bad enough to be considered a "Serious Error", is failing to cover a card in dummy when we have the card surrounded. I think Lamford's suggestion that the case in question might be considered a serious error is a long way from the mark.

The title of the original post gives a clue.