iviehoff

You are correct, I had overlooked that the definition you mention at point 2 does not describe the situation applying to the card missing from dummy's trick in this case. So the conclusion I had already come to, that Law 67 does not apply, is even more certain on this occasion. Good. I hadn't overlooked point 1, I just didn't want to go there at all. Unfortunately this particular bit of the law is full of holes too. Law 67 tells us to transfer a trick for a deemed revoke, seemingly without the exception for dummy provided for in the case of an actual revoke. Many credible people argue that the exception for dummy nevertheless applies, but the law is just inconsistent here. This is not the only problem with that bit of wording.

I believe what I said was entirely was not inconsistent with that view of matters, at least in relation to the trick where defender played the misappropriated card. I believe I also recently argued in another thread that it is more than just you who do argue for this interpretation, despite the absurd conclusions it sometimes leads one to. If you do take that view of matters, and if the played cards had been more carefully examined at the end of the hand, dicovering a card missing from a trick where dummy originally played a trump, then it is that trick with the missing card which is defective. And since dummy's card is the one that is missing from the played cards for that trick, rectification under Law 67 would including deeming dummy to have revoked on that trick. I do hope that no one would argue for such a ridiculous ruling in this case. I also hope that the laws are fixed so that one would not even contemplate such a ruling if the reason that a trick is defective when the played cards are examined is because the played card has been removed or lost from it.

Of course... This hand is attracting brainfarts.

The player has in fact played a card to the trick. Whilst you are correct that the player took a card from dummy and put it among his played cards, it is intermediate steps between those two actions that makes it a card played to that trick. If you look at the laws on what makes a card a played card, you will see that he did everything to make it a played card: in brief paraphrase he took it from his hand and faced it in the played position. If we had a law that said a played card is not actually a played card if it should not have been in a player's hand in the first place, or if we had a law that said a misplaced played card should be put back into the correct position among the played cards for the trick it was first played to, then we would be secure in applying Law 67. But we don't have any such laws.

I'm having greater difficulty working out your reason for bidding 2♠.

I think this is another case where we can use Law 23 to adjust. One curiosity of this hand is that, afterwards, we find 14 cards in the defender's hand, yet apparently he managed to play through the hand without finding himself with a spare card. If he has appropriated one of dummy's cards and played it, as looks very likely, then he also has managed to disembarrass himself of a spare card if the hand was played to the end. But perhaps the last few tricks were conceded or played quickly enough for it not to come to notice. This is another incident where it would be nice if that non-existent law about putting played cards back where they ought to be, actually existed. Because then we could rule that the trick where the defender played (what we conclude must be) the misappropriated card was a defective trick, because the card he played must be put back where it belongs, ie, in dummy's played cards, so now it is the second trick that is defective. The defective trick would then be deemed to be a revoke trick. But as the law stands, there was no apparently no revoke, rather the defender (as the evidence strongly points) committed the different offence of misappropriating a card and then legally playing it. Since the offence of misappropriating a trump in mid hand is one that always could well damage the opposition, we can always use Law 23 to adjust for it. So I think that is the law under which we should adjust the score. Touching or handling the cards of another player is an offence for which a procedural penalty is justified (L90B5). Given the mess that can arise, I think it is justified on the present occasion. Provided everyone agrees that dummy put down 13 cards originally, the evidence strongly points to the player having committed it.

Some people try to have it both ways, in the sense that they are really trying to claim while trying to avoid strict compliance with their own duties. So I wouldn't always take the statement "I'm not claiming" at face value. If it does turn out there are still choices to be made, and you might gather information from the opponents' reaction to your behaviour, I'll be looking carefully out for any damage to the opponents.

My recollection is that Bluejak has said that a defective trick may be defined by what cards are found in the played cards of that trick, and is not always defined by what cards anyone remembers being played to it at the time, even if there is unanimity on that. Suppose a card is played, is misplaced and then is played again. Certainly in that situation I believe Bluejak has argued that the first trick it was apparently played to is defective, even if everyone agrees that the card was played to that trick. If that is so, then the criterion that everyone recalls 4 cards being properly played to a trick, and which ones, does not suffice to avoid it being defective. I don't like this argument, but I give it time of day because it has been argued by rather more than one person out on a limb.

But this is a SEWOG case is it not? That is why he is considering the "normal result after the infraction", in order to assess what the damage of the "utterly undisciplined" 3S call is, as opposed to the damage from the infraction.

The definition of damage seems to be the same for MI cases as for UI cases and other cases. Are you arguing that in practice it is implemented differently for MI?

The main point of interest in the law is that we would have a better idea what to do if it was rewritten to make it a bit more workable. The only applicable law that potentially has a specific rectification for damage here is Law 67 on defective trick. Those people who have spotted that Law 67 is a foetid pile, and thus try to avoid treading in it, and believe that they have a respectable argument for doing so, will have to head for Law 23 instead.

What was the 2C opener, looks a bit thin for a normal Acol 2C, isn't this really what you opened 2D for last time? Do you have any agreements on what 2C-3S and 2C-4S mean? Or 2C-2D-something-jump in spades?

OK, I understand what you meant now, and now I agree your case isn't SEWOG, it is like my case which you did not comment on. Now please look at this case again. I'll now re-present it in a slightly different way, so it looks like a normal every day case. -With MI, a heart lead is near certain. An objective person who bothered to make the complicated calcualtions would say the contract is 25% on a heart lead, though at a glance this is far from obvious. However owing to a complicated sequence of events, poor decisions by both sides, and the outrageous slings and arrows of fate, but nothing SEWOG, the contract makes. -Without MI, a spade lead is near certain. The contract is, on careful consideration, about 50% on a spade lead. We do not know the outcome, because this didn't happen. In this case, we routinely say there is damage. We discounted the outrageous slings and arrows, we discounted the poor decisions, we simply looked at the result. We justify this by saying these are slings and arrows and decision points that simply would not have occurred in the different situation without without MI. But essentially this case is no different from the ones that Jeffrey has constructed, he has simply made the location of the slings and arrows particularly transparent and particularly close to the moment where the MI makes a difference.

I'll start by blaming the system again. If you are going to play destructive weak 2s in 1st/2nd, and have no way for responder to show a great hand interested in something other than opener's suit, then this kind of thing is bound to happen. Maybe it doesn't happen very often, so you play such a system if it gains on balance. But should it have happened on this occasion? If 2S is constructive in response to a weak two, and the weak-2 holder actually has a 10 count with scattered values, and 2-card support, then what does "constructive" mean if it doesn't raise a response from this hand?

I think the worst call was agreeing to play 2D as showing 8 playing tricks in a single suited hand or 16-22 3 suited, especially the 3-suited bit. Essentially it amounts to opening 2N with a 16-22 3-suited, in the sense that very little information has been transacted until opener responds 2N. Now people who use 2N as a flat hand usually restrict it to a 3-point range, sometimes even just 2 points. The problem starting to exchange info at the 2N level is that there isn't much space, and you still have quite a lot of info to transact. That's why people use narrow ranges for the 2N call after 2D. So what happened? South, who still might have a 0-count, gets no opportunity below the 4-level to show preference to your suit, which might be just a 16-count and with a singleton rather than a void. As it happens, he's got a 7 count with a useful Ace and 4 card support, and a really nice fit. But is he really strong enough to do anything other than bid your suit, when you might be a 4441 16 count (or given that you considered 5530 as 3-suiter, maybe you use this with 5431 too)? I find no fault in South's call, he was forced into it by a system. North, with his 2 loser hand, apparently didn't find it worth encouraging above the 4-level, when for all he knows your parther, for systemic reasons, could have only 3-card support and probably about 0-12. I think, with a 2 loser hand, I might just have made one more try, because likely partner isn't a 0-count, there are 18 points out after all. If I had a normal Acol 2C bid available on this hand, I think I'd have bid it. Though bidding over 2C often doesn't go very well either, it is OK on this occasion.

The thing you hope to be true requires campboy to be wrong, I think. It is campboy who is advocating comparing the expected results immediately after the infraction with the expected result without the infraction. This is what results in the 50%/51% sensitivity. You avoid this by doing what the law says instead, ie, comparing the table result with the infraction to the expected result without the infraction.

Yes, it is true. All sorts of things can happen after an infraction to change the result. Some of these are random, some of them good or bad decisions. But in general we say that the table result which actually occurred is the table result "because" of the infraction, except when those happenings are SEWOG. We don't make changes for the numerous decisions and chance events that happened between the infraction and the actual table result. When have you ever seen a judgment ruling based upon the expected result immediately after the infraction, as opposed to the table result? Answer, never. This is because it is not a valid procedure. Every time, we use the table result, regardless of the occurrences in between, so long as they aren't SEWOG. In reality, you know this perfectly well. It is just you are now choking on it because you have been given an extreme case where it is straightforward to see the difference between objective damage and damage as made procedure in the laws. Now you have introduced something that is potentially SEWOG. If someone did mentally toss two coins and as a result deliberately chose a 25% line, we would call that "gambling", and treat that as SEWOG. That is the reason for the different approach in this case. I gave you an example at the end of my previous post, in which the 25% outcome occurred by chance, rather than deliberate gambling. Legally, there is damage, even though objectively there was not. If the 25% outcome occurred simply because the player played badly, that is not SEWOG. And the table result is indeed the table result "because" of the infraction, despite the various things on the way between the infraction and the table result that affected the result. I'm sure you know this really.

We adjust for Unauthorised Information, not for BITs. I would adjust even if there was clearly no BIT, because the question is UI. 5D is a poor bid which has been made safer by N's show of interest in the auction by asking a question. Nigel's assertion that there is no LA to 5D doesn't add up for me - how can there be no LA to a poor bid? 5D was not bid to make, it was bid as a sacrifice. As a sacrifice, it is terrible, because it is a phantom sacrifice. 5C is failing to make for reasons that S can see plain in his hand, terrible breaks. To make, 5D is a awful contract. It made in practice only because of good luck (not luck you could really count on) in the card locations and, arguably, a misdefence. But the misdefence is nowhere near bad enough to deny EW redress.

Jeffrey's examples are carefully designed to expose what "damage" actually means. You have correctly assessed that there is no damage in an objective sense. But it is not the sense in the laws. 12B1: "Damage exists when, because of an infraction, an innocent side obtains a table result less favourable than would have been the expectation had the infraction not occurred". (This is the useful part of 12B1. The first sentence of 12B1 really ought to be deleted, because it doesn't actually do anything beyond express a pious hope, and is of no use to the practitioner except as a distraction.) So we see, quite clearly, damage is calculated by the comparison of the table result, and the expectation of a result had the infraction not occurred. You cannot say "it was a 50/50 shot either way, so no damage". You have to compare the table result with the 50/50 shot. Jeffrey's examples are carefully designed to demonstrate the difficulties with this definition of damage. Consider the following example, which illustrates the issue even more starkly. (1) With misinformation, a heart lead is near certain. Declarer has to make two 50/50 choices which are a toss up, and needs to get them both right to make his contract. The contract is 25% on a heart lead. By misfortune (from the defender's point of view), he gets them both right and it makes. (2) With correct information, a spade lead is near certain. This resolves one of declarer's two choices, so now declarer only has to make one choice. The contract is 50% on a spade lead. We do not know the outcome, because this didn't happen. Ex ante, ie, before the hand was played to a result, it is clear that the misinformation was no damage at all, it actually encouraged the defender to make a lead that was not in declarer's interest. However, ex post, there is damage. The defender had a 50/50 expectation with the correct information, and, in comparison to the table result, which is the calculation we are instructed to make, this is damage. Thus damage can exist in a legal sense even in a situation where objectively there was actually quite the reverse of damage. I am sure this definition of damage has been adopted in order to reduce the number of calculations the director has to make. he director can see the table result, and only has to calculate an expectation for the case with correct information. In an objective assessment of damage, he has to calculate expectations in two cases.

What a waste of time. The worst that they can do to you is award you none of the last 6 tricks, and you had assented to that. I've discovered in life that sometimes some people just won't listen when you are trying to give them all that they want. They have got it into their mind that they are going to have to argue about it. They assume that if you are saying anything at all it is to dispute it. So they just don't hear when you agree with them. I would imagine this is why they carried on discussing when there was nothing to discuss. Probably the best thing to do is sit silently until they stop talking and politely say "Yes of course you must have all the remaing tricks, we have never said anything different." I don't think there is anything you can do forcibly to close out an apparent ruling situation when they insist on discussing nonsense.

Law 67 appears to say that once both sides have played to the next trick, you can't fix a defective trick as easily as that. It would be nice to have clarity on the point.

The underlying problem is that the law has no provision for putting a played card into, or back into, its proper place among the played cards (excluding those properly withdrawn) if it is later found somewhere else. If we had such a provision in the law, a lot of these problems would go away. We could simply put the Q with the played cards where it belongs, and now there is no possibility of playing it again, the previous trick definitely isn't defective, and we can stop worrying about stupidities and get on with the game. We could probably also put in a few more words so that if a card is discovered to have been played a second time, it is put back into the trick where it was first played and it is the second trick that is defective. And that would stop a few more silly arguments. In the present case, probably the best approach for players who don't like winning by application of law, is for the sides to agree to quit the Q late. But if the defenders want to lawyer it, they can try arguing that the preceding trick is now defective and see if they get a revoke penalty out of it.

The most charitable explanation is that, disgusted by his partner's hitch, he decides to give declarer the contract, which he does by failing to take the trick which takes the contract down by force, and by giving declarer a wire on how to make it. (Though as RMB points out, simply taking the K would be above criticism.) The most uncharitable explanation is that he thinks declarer is daft enough to fall for the duck despite being given a wire as to what is happening, and daft enough to go for the overtrick even though he can now make it without any further finesse. If this is what he was thinking, he was in fact correct. The middle way is that he isn't quite bright enough to think through any of this properly, and certainly not quickly enough, and SNAFU-ed it, but was then rescued by declarer's own limitations. I think this the most likely explanation.

The authors of the EBU White Book, as OP correctly points out, do not read 73D1 like you do. At para 73.1 they write, as OP has read: "Players have argued that they were wondering whether to play high-low, but Law 73D1 makes clear that this is an infraction." I'm mistaken in thinking that there was a directive from WBFLC on this, it was this clear instruction in the White Book I was recalling.

Whether one gets adjustments for misleading breaks in tempo has nothing to do with whether anyone thinks anyone is coffeehousing, and both players and directors should scrupulously avoid any accusation without cast iron evidence. But East does need a lesson here. It suffices to break tempo in a situation where there is no good reason thing to think about anything to risk being adjusted against, there need be no accusation of the misleading being done deliberately. Now the uninformed player might think that they are allowed to break tempo to think about whether and how to signal, but there is a directive that they are not allowed to break tempo for that. If a break in tempo for such a purpose is misleading, they will be routinely adjusted against. So this is what East needs to be told, nicely.