iviehoff

I presume the first incidence of Spades should read Clubs, consistent with the details on the auction diagram. If the double really was agreed to be for takeout of Spades, which is consistent with N's hand, then such a double should have been alerted - this is not the unalertable meaning of double of a transfer bid.* So we will know a lot more about what is really going on if we know whether the double was alerted. My money is on N/S having a misunderstanding and/or not knowing what they are doing. *What the Blue Book says is sufficient to know that much. It says: (d) (doubles of} Suit bids that do not show the suit bid Alert, unless the double shows the suit bid.

I'm not convinced by EW's claim that E wouldn't double for takeout, it doesn't look much different in its attraction with the correct explanation. I suspect E wants to choose not to make a takeout double on the basis that NS are having a misunderstanding, but he wouldn't know that at any point at which he can be given correct information. As a technical point, was W allowed to change his final pass? He should have been so allowed to. Had he been allowed to, I wonder if he would have bid 3H? If that went off, as I expect it will, he'd probably then be claiming an adjustment on the grounds that 2S would have gone off...

Would any of these players who think they would bid 3H not have bid it on the previous round? What have you learned that makes it more attractive to bid now?

When has anyone ever enjoyed having the quality of their work assessed? But those of us who suffer from the risk of incompetence know it makes sense.

It has long been the case that successfully navigating the round robin can be more about getting lots of imps out of the weaker teams, which appears to be a different skill from beating the stronger teams. It is quite normal that if you cross VP the top half of the field, you get a very different ordering. In fact if we cross VP the top 11 in the BB we get Italy, USA1, England, Monaco, China, Indonesia, Poland, Netherlands as the leading 8 in that order, which is quite different as an order from the actual result, but includes 7 of the actual qualifiers (who included Canada rather than Indonesia). In the Venice Cup, the top order isn't disrupted quite as much, it becomes Netherlands, USA1, France, China, USA2, Poland, Japan, Turkey again with 7 of the actual qualifiers, though the one to drop out of the top 8 is England (instead of Japan), which perhaps is surprising given their recent level of success : though they are currently a long way ahead of USA1 after 2 rounds of their head to head - but a long way to go yet.

But deciding that a player has infracted deliberately to take advantage of the consequences is usually somewhere that directors don't like to go without incredibly strong evidence. That's the advantage of Law 23, which is entirely adequate in the present situation.

Which I suppose is precisely the reason that 27D doesn't apply to 27B2 cases, which I required to be reminded of by Gordon. We apply Law 23 in that subset of cases where one "could well have known": this is a "could well have known" case, but many shots in the dark after an IB are not. The reason we have Law 27D in 27B1 cases is, I think, precisely because Law 16D has been disapplied and thus you can get somewhere you couldn't have got without the IB.

To my mind the "proper disclosure" referred to in the regulation means explicitly saying "including hands where the 8pt are all or mainly in one long running suit". Unless it is made clear to opponents in this manner, opponents cannot realise that they might be facing this kind of hand.

There was a player in my club who was so terrible no one wanted to play with her. She was impervious to reason and persisted with her own curious and ineffective methods of bidding. She also claimed to play a complicated method of signalling that even she didn't understand and was unfair to impose on random partners. It was an act of charity to play with her, and I was willing to take my turn to play with her once in a while. Once I had worked them out, I scrupulously advised the opponents of any curiousity in her methods that merited alerting, etc. I suggest you treat playing with this player an act of charity along similar lines. I strongly believe in never blaming partner for anything, so long as they keep the agreement (which I make clear to them in words spoken out loud) never to blame me for anything. This is much better for partnership morale than recriminations. Of course, once someone says "what went wrong on that hand" or starts blaming me, then I will politely draw attention to what I consider to be unsuccessful actions by partner. In this case, if the player in question cannot see for himself that his actions were to blame for the bad scores received, then pointing it out to him isn't going to help. Either he realises, or he will never realise.

This argument is a misunderstanding by the director of the word "unintended" as used in the law. A good question to ask is "At the time you held the pass card in your hand, did you know it was the pass card"? If the truthful answer to this is "yes", then the bid was not unintended within the meaning of the law.

But he might well answer that he had a brainfart that made him think that 3N was sufficient, and could well be telling the truth. In which case the correction to 4N (silencing partner) is entirely legal in the immediate situation. However if 4S is making 11 tricks or fewer, it should be adjusted to 4S under the insufficient bid law, no need for reference to Law 23.

Taking the players away from the table is at the director's discretion, not the opponent's request. It should never happen if a player is confident in the explanation of a bid he is due to give, even if it is inconsistent with an explanation of another bid confidently provided by his partner. Misbids happen; misexplanations happen; UI happens; partnership misunderstandings happen; failure to make clear agreements happen; none of these things makes a board unplayable. What happened here is a common case of a partnership where one player confidently thinks its one thing and the other partner something else: - you play the hand out and adjust if necessary for UI and/or MI.

It's an arguable point that probably needs a poll and information on whether this pair opens 1N with a 6-cd minor sometimes. However if N is permitted to bid, then I think that avoiding use of the UI requires a call of 2S in preference to 2H. So N clearly needs to be reminded, perhaps painfully, of the need to avoid use of UI. W's claim that he wouldn't double 2D was based upon being told that 2D is a transfer: but is he basing this choice on also knowing that the player who failed to complete the transfer didn't know that? It's very easy to choose not to double when you know a player who didn't know it was a transfer didn't complete it. He isn't entitled to all that. He is allowed to deduce that a player didn't understand his partner's bid from a later correction by the player themself. But in relation to the moment at which MI was given, he is entitled only to correct information, not immeidate evidence of a mistunderstanding. Correct information would be that they don't have a clear agreement for this position/vulnerability. Now that information does make clear that the players don't know what they are doing, but it doesn't reveal unambiguously that the player who passed doesn't have a diamond suit. It is now perhaps less clear to pass it out.

I think it is reasonable to treat this as a misbid. Assuming no screens, N does have a UI problem, but I don't really see N passing 3D, and so 3S is probably not an infraction. So rub of the green, resulting from poor bidding by both E and W.

Is this behind screens? If not, I think it is best handled as a UI case. N likely has UI from S's non-alert and likely committed an infraction in taking out 2DX to 2H. I adjust to 2DX, even better than EW asked for. W's second double is nowhere near the required standard for being a serious error.

If all you know is that the previous card was the CA, that actually makes it easier for you to believe that there was a slip of the tongue, because "club" might have got stuck on the player's tongue. You need to know more than that to realise that to realise that cashing the CA before ruffing a diamond is mad, which I understand to have been your original argument and was the one that convinced me.

That's why that's the wrong question to ask. The correct question to ask is something like "when you said the word 'club', were you aware that 'club' was what you said?" Of course you can still lie in response to that question, but it will feel like a lie. Answering "diamond" to the question actually asked doesn't actually feel like a lie, of course you intended to play a diamond.

But he'd need to actually look at declarer's hand to realise that playing the CA followed by ruffing the diamond was nonsense, and directors are generally discouraged from looking at the cards during the play. Whereas E doesn't need to look at declarer's hand as he has a count.

I think someone has pointed to the fact that the ACBL regs on claimed slips of the tongue say that the balance of probabilities at which the director should be willing to agree to change on is "overwhelming". Plainly that is specific ACBL regs which do not run in Croatia. Nevertheless it offers a hint to us that being very sceptical about how often a claimed slip of the tongue is really a change of mind is the right idea. I agree with Pran that the line of up to that point makes this look very much like a change of mind. However would that information be available to the director making a ruling at the time? East surely knows exactly what is going on at that point, but would it be appropriate for East to draw details of this nature to the Director's attention while the hand is still being played? What information is generally going to be available in these cases? It seems to me, unless you actually look at things like the development of the play, pretty much all you are going to have most of the time is "he said clubs and an interval of time later said that was a slip of the tongue." How are you ever to make any kind of balance of probabilities from that?

In this case, with Andy's line, you will win the 5th spade even though there is no squeeze: Andy's line doesn't give up on the possibility that the spades just break. Phil's line doesn't work with those cards - he reckoned that E would not overcall on those cards but rather could be relied upon to hold the DK. Which line you choose depends upon your judgment of your opponents, as to whether they are the kind make that overcall a strong 1C on any old rubbish.

Indeed and I have never been in any doubt of it. But there was an additional condition in my original query you haven't addressed. In the present case there wasn't actually a misunderstanding. It seems to me to be taking things a step further to allow the NOS the (chance) benefit of a lead they would have made if they had falsely deduced that there had been a misunderstanding, a false deduction they might have fallen to from thinking that a corrected explanation implied a misunderstanding, whereas in fact it arose from incompetence.

It is an irregularity, just as detaching a card from your hand and putting it back, or failing to keep to an even tempo, or making extraneous remarks, is an irregularity. But if you believe that an infraction is an action that results in rectification, as I do, then it is not an infraction: these irregularities are things that you are allowed to do - but are discouraged from doing - and there is no direct rectification. But, as with all irregularities that fall short of being an infraction, (and some other things that aren't even irregularities), there can be a UI consequence.

Can we make an adjustment on the basis that W will receive a later correction, and thus be able to deduce a misunderstanding; rather than on the basis that he was correctly informed throughout and thus unable to deduce a misunderstanding, given that it looks like S never believed his own explanation and there wasn't in fact a misunderstanding?

If the explanation given was a garbled version of "I passed on the first round because I was still under the misapprehension my partner opened 2C", then that is one of the explanations I would believe.

Who leads trumps away from 10xxx when there is no evidence the opponents have a fit? The correct explanation reduces, rather than increases, the likelihood of a trump lead. No adjustment.