iviehoff

Yes, the explicit verbal apology calls attention. Not the action of putting a card back into your hand. As to "the manner of doing something", well I suppose that is possible - you can talk in other ways than with your mouth, but we don't have any information on that in the present case. But in view of the restrictions on his rights, I think dummy should carefully avoid calling the director until something clear and undeniable draws attention - the apology is enough, mannerisms may be harder to justify.

I don't believe it does. Rather it is committing another irregularity which has not been drawn attention to. The second irregularity was not necessarily consequent upon a prior irregularity, (the card withdrawn could have been played legally) so I don't think you can say it was an action that could be considered as drawing attention to an irregularity.

I don't think a bit "less than 30%" makes something "extremely unlikely to succeed". It can even be profitable on balance to bid 30% contracts. Often the possession of some UI makes you know that the ethical action is very likely to be bad score, so even a 5% action might be net profitable in that context, if the best action is now known to be off limits. This is just another case-study pointing out that the law about not taking advantage of UI, and the law about not choosing a demonstrably suggested LA, aren't consistent. We know that. The problem is we haven't been told what to do. Clearly the lawmakers haven't explicitly thought through what the ruling should be in the case of hands like the present one and told us what to do. An interesting issue for the lawmakers is whether the director should be made to calculate, for the purpose of his ruling, whether an action such as the 4S call here is one that is on average profitable to the player given the UI restriction he suffers, a calculation one might make to distinguish things that are and aren't suggested by the UI. My personal view is that directors have enough difficult calculations to make without having to make that one too. It should be an offence to make any call that appears to take advantage of the UI. In the present case, the player saw from the UI that there was a chance he might be missing a game, he didn't really know what the odds were, took the chance and got lucky. That ought to be good enough to find him guilty.

I was once playing with an occasional partner who did. I learnt it the hard way.

Aguahombre is right that there is only UI when there is a break in expected tempo, but a very slow double can be a break in tempo even in this auction. Barry is also right that it looks like you can see the reason for your partner's uncertainty right in front of you, and claim that it is authorised information. But it can also be the case that a hand with weak trumps has an evident penalty double, so you can still be in possession of UI that your partner was uncertain about the double. There is a generic argument in this situation which runs: "A slow double suggests uncertainty about the double. Therefore it suggests that pulling it is likely to be more profitable than on average on this occasion. Therefore if passing is a Logical Alternative, it is the only legal call." You can in principle try to argue that you have no UI in a particular case, but if there is a clear break in tempo and pass looks like a LA, then I wouldn't fancy my chances trying to fly it.

Quite so, that's the point I'm making: that suffices to make it illegal. The reason it is non-obvious to some is that it need not suggested over 4H, the action you would have chosen without the uI. Plainly you already understood this, but it was not obvious from the way the previous person described it.

I was setting that out as a definition of the situation I was examining.

I think the true restriction is something like "you are allowed to choose an off-beat action so long as it doesn't have appear to have any advantage over a normal ethical action, given the situation you are in." Nearly always that will be the same thing as "you are allowed to choose an offbeat action as long as it is unsuccessful". The canonical case is 1H - pass - 3H (BiT) - pass - ? where the clearly ethical action is pass. If 6H looks to have scoring advantages over pass, then that will be disallowed. In practice, that is very close to saying it will be disallowed if you make it.

There is something wrong with a form of bridge where you are allowed to use information from your opponents' reaction to your claim. Further, having apparently set out deliberately to take advantage of that illicit information, then to bawl out the opps for calling your bluff is plain hypocritical. As correctly said, in Over The Table bridge this claim will be adjudicated going off.

It should have been no surprise. What you had there was self-announcement of bid meaning, and that is obviously liable to abuse in at-the-table bridge without screens. Announcement "weak" by the bidder's partner would have been a securer way to achieve the same objective.

No, it was the director's fault not East's fault. E would have been prevented from calling 3H if a correct ruling had been made in relation to W's call, because that would have made EW an offending side and the withdrawn 2D call would have been UI. Given the ruling actually made that EW was a NOS, then the withdrawn 2D was AI and E's call was perfectly within his rights.

I think the law protects against that. It may just happen that the disadvantage of the UI restriction to your partner which will arise from the blurting is worse than the disadvantage of the UI restriction you will suffer if you don't. But if it isn't, Law 23 should usually make sure you don't profit. The blurting is an irregularity - illegal communication - and often will be one which could well see will work to your advantage (by relieving you from that UI restriction), so I think the application of Law 23 is usually going to be straightforward. So in theory no profit from blurting. How often you'll have a TD able to see his way through such an arcane argument, I don't know. A fine to remind you of the laws on illegal communication would make things more certain.

Thank you for that, I had a really good laugh. I think the best way of describing the restriction of UI which wakes you up is that you are not allowed to recover from whatever misapprehension you are under. Misapprehensions usually relate to something you are ordinarily permitted to know, so it is irrelevant to say that the matter is AI. The player was never under the misapprehension that a 2N overcall is strong with transfer responses, so that cannot possibly be the thing he is required to continue thinking.

If he did, looks like you are going to have to pass.

It is just about possible opener has a 5cd suit and a weak responder, knowing the points were all somewhere else, looked at the vulnerability and decided to test you by making a pre-emptive raise with a doubleton. Though a misbid or misexplanation looks all too likely. Often in this kind of situation you need to be careful about whether partner has already bid the cards you have in your hand because he can work out you must have them. In the present situation it is hard to know, because you cannot estimate very accurately what the opponents actually hold. If the ops really do have diamonds your DA isn't full value because partner has a void, and your rounded suit holdings could well be a bit unhelpful. Too many possibilities, so pass, but they could well be talking us out of something.

It was probably in something like Reese & Dormer's "Acol System Today", whose first edition was in the early 60s I think. Bridge lore tends to change rather incrementally and if one is only intermittently exposed to the coal face it is easy to carry on in a time warp.

Only if you are sure this is not a UNT overcall. Certainly in old-fashioned versions of UNT you could leap in as high as you like and it is still UNT. For those who are less sure, double followed by 3NT is less likely to be misinterpreted. That's what I'd do.

He is actually explicitly permitted to prevent declarer leading from the wrong hand, and if he does it when he sees declarer is attempting to lead, declarer can deduce who won the previous trick from the "no you're on table" exclamation. "You're on table" delivered a little earlier contains no additional information to that permitted communication. We might be concerned about a dummy who only occasionally says "you're in hand", because it might be meaningful that declarer is being reminded on this occasion rather than on the occasions when he isn't reminded. That could indeed be participating in the play. A player who automatically reminds declarer at every trick is carefully avoiding even that level of potentially illegal communication. I can't see that declarer obtains anything from it other than avoidance of the irregularity that dummy is permitted to prevent. My grandfather suffered short-term memory loss in his latter years and needed to be told who was to lead at each trick because he routinely forgot things that happened 2 seconds ago, though he could usually remember the contract. Arguably in that case we might allow it on grounds of catering to a disability. But I can't really imagine anyone doing this unless they were catering to such a disability. It is correct that declarer's point of no return in playing a card may not have been reached with exposure to an opponent. I don't think "completeness" is a relevant property of irregularities, either we have reached a point where events are now irregular or we haven't reached that point, and in the case of declarer withdrawing a card from his hand, whether he is in hand or not, he can put it back without irregularity provided he hasn't reached that point of no return. Nevertheless, it is typically a very narrow window of time from starting to move the card to irrevocability, I expect often shorter than double a person's reaction time: I say double because to halt it dummy has to react to seeing what is happening and declarer has to react to dummy's warning before getting to the point of irrevocability, and thus to accomplish that one needs a window of at least two reaction time periods.

Let's discuss the real issue, not imagined things that are obviously illegal communication. The real issue is when Dummy says "You're in hand".

I agree, it is better to use the word "disadvantage". Hesitating is not illegal, and it is not penalised. But knowledge of your partner's hesitation is UI, and possession of that UI can be disadvantageous to you. I am proposing that IBs and COOTs are handled in the same way as hesitations and other revealing mannerisms. They will be resolved without penalty, but knowledge of them is likely to be disadvantageous to your partner, through being UI to your side and AI to the other side. Law 23 may also apply.

The consequence of being ruled to be in possession of UI is that you may have to do something which was not what you wanted to do; it is on average likely to result in a worse score than doing what you would have done if you didn't have the information. Thus people who break the law in this way, are ruled to be in possession of UI, and comply with the laws on UI, will obtain worse scores than on average than if the original offence had never occurred. You can argue as to whether that is a punishment or not, but it is certainly not free from negative consequences, in a well-run game.

I was aware of it. You said it was excellent, and it was indeed excellent in its clarity and confidence. But for it to be fully excellent we need to check whether it is also correct. It may well be correct, but that was not fully evident to me, and I was drawing attention to a shortage of evidence for part of it. I think what Barmar said is relevant to this.

So it's sufficient, but is it necessary? Maybe you can exercise your right to prevent an irregularity merely on the grounds taht it might occur. And, after all, if declarer is allowed to be warned off an attempt to lead from the wrong hand, why wait to warn him?

I don't think very many COOTs are from people who can't be bothered to call in turn, I think they are mainly from people who have suffered a misapprehension that it is actually their turn to call, a misapprehension that they will suffer however draconian the penalty. I don't think a ruling that you are in possession of UI is "escaping punishment", at least in a good game where people take notice of UI. Frequently, possessing UI does require one to make the less promising action, quite clearly in some cases. It may not be effective in the kind of clubs where you can blatantly abuse UI, a significant proportion of players see nothing wrong about that, and no one does anything about it. But then you could hardly rely upon a COOT ruling being correctly read from the book in such a club, so what's the difference? I do agree that for revokes "a fixed penalty or equity + 1 trick if that isn't enough" is a more rational rule than "a fixed number of tricks or equity if that isn't enough". But I think that for reasons of avoiding a randomising effect, rather than for reasons of maximising deterrence. But if one is happy with fairly draconian penalties, one can devise alternative penalties for COOTs and IBs that are simpler to apply and more reliably draconian in their impact. At the moment there has been an ad hoc approach to reducing penalties for specific cases of these irregularities, which is rather inconsistent in its effect.

L68A says "A contestant also claims when he suggests that play be curtailed, or when he shows his cards (unless he demonstrably did not intend to claim – for example, if declarer faces his cards after an opening lead out of turn Law 54, not this Law, will apply)." It seems obvious to argue that prefacing your statement with "I'm not claiming but..." means that you demonstrably aren't claiming. But I'd disagree. What it often means is that a player is trying to duck out of the responsibilities of actually claiming properly, such as stating a line of play he'll be held to, while obtaining some of the advantages. So I'd be inclined to rule it was a claim despite the statement that it wasn't, and the asking the opps if they'd be willing. It's only a very little point, but another reason I'm wary of this is that there can be a coffeehouse - sometimes showing the opps your cards enables you to learn something from their reaction to seeing them. It's probably a very rare situation, but it's something to bear in mind. Claiming is part of the game and your opponents are going to have to get used to it. It's an education to them to have to cope with your claim. So today it's going to take as long as playing it out, but in future if you persist they'll get used to it. Clearly one doesn't claim against very weak players until it's really clear cut, but they really must learn to cope with simple claims. I probably shouldn't say this, and you can't make a habit of doing it this way, but I can imagine someone thinking the way around this is just to hold your cards a bit low so that the opponent can see them, but thinks you aren't doing it deliberately. Probably someone will be kind enough to tell you to lift your cards up, but even the most honest of "I don't take advantage" players finds it very hard to put out of their mind what they have seen: if what there is to see is that it just doesn't matter, they'll now be able to play quickly. Of course this would be just how to pull off the coffeehouse.