campboy

Seems obvious to bid 4♠ now even taking into account the fact that the player didn't bid 4♠ on the previous round. Anyway, it's not clear to me that the UI suggests there has been a misunderstanding. If partner passed and then said "sorry, I should have alerted 3♣", that sounds to me as though he knew what it meant all along, but just forgot to alert at the right time.

I can't see why you would think that, when 4B1 clearly says that to be non-alertable this bid has to be natural and not have a potentially unexpected meaning. "Natural for the purposes of alerting" simply means that it passes the first of those criteria. The whole point of 4H2 is that it gives examples of things which fail the second criterion, so are alertable by 4B1. Almost all* of these are "natural for the purposes of alerting". It is not an exhaustive list, just some examples. As it says at the start of 4H, "the following are interpretations and examples of the above directives." * the exceptions are the two passes, which don't seem to meet the definition of natural either, but then for passes "natural" and "no unexpected meaning" are basically the same thing according to the BB.

It's certainly unambiguous, but that's not what it says. Both bids are definitely natural for the purpose of 4B1, but there is still the question of whether they have a potentially unexpected meaning.

The EBU alert regulations used to specifically mention this auction (1S - 2C possibly being 3433) as not requiring an alert. (They don't seem to mention it any more, but I think that was removed just to make the regulation shorter, and wasn't intended to change whether it was alertable.) There was never such a provision for 1D - 2C.

Yes. I think this is a legal route to a fair result. It would be simpler if the laws said I could force the player to stick with his original call, of course, but they don't. (I believe the player when he says he pulled the wrong card.) Anyway, you should attach more weight to Gordon's opinion than to mine!

IMO you can't disallow the change to 2♣ (because the conditions for law 25A are met), but what you can do in this sort of case is adjust the score afterwards if they do better as a result. Partner's remark is an irregularity which might well damage the other side, so you can use Law 23 to adjust to what you think would have happened if the remark had not been made.

I did not say redoubling was a serious error. I don't even think it was an error, because it sounds deliberate. I'm ruling it wild. While it is true that 24B only tells the TD to see law 23 when a pass damages the NOS, he can (and should) still apply law 23 whenever its conditions are met, even when not explicitly referred to it by another law. Law 23 talks about the irregularity damaging NOS, not specifically the enforced pass.

I'd be more inclined to view 4432 as three-suited than either 6430 or 5530, which fall within "within 1 card of 5440".

Logical alternatives are not relevant here. A silenced player does not have any alternatives, and if East had not been silenced he wouldn't have had UI either. The question is: if there had been no infraction and the auction continued rdbl pass pass, how likely would East be to pull? It seems plausible (taking account of his earlier huddle), but not certain, to me, so I would be inclined to give a weighted score on that basis. Redoubling in the hope that a silenced player will pull is crazy, of course, and so I'd deny N/S some portion of redress for that reason. South should just pass; he would still get redress on the basis that he would have redoubled were it not for the infraction.

There are normally about 1000 other pairs in the competition, so why do you think playing 12 of them would be "duplicate" if playing 8 wouldn't? Since it's a sims I would be inclined just to split into two sections and play two 12-round 3/4 Howells.

Sorry, I thought you were talking about the 3♣ bid being discussed in this thread, and saying it was a cue-bid by definition (rather than by meaning). I think it's not a cue-bid (again by definition, rather than meaning). If I misunderstood your post, I apologise.

There doesn't seem to be an official EBU definition of the term "cue-bid", but FWIW the ACBL have one which doesn't agree with what you wrote, and by which this is not a cue-bid (whatever it may mean). From the Alert Procedures:

In this thread, nowhere else. It's Blackshoe's suggestion for how to rewrite the regulation so that it is (a) clear and (b) means what (we believe) the ACBL intend the current regulation to mean.

If someone explains an opening bid as showing an opening hand, they presumably don't merely and unhelpfully mean a hand which would open the bidding in their own methods. They must be saying something about how the hand would be treated in standard methods. And clearly that is not an opening hand (at any level) in standard methods. Nothing about the one level required here.

Yes, if they hadn't added in the bit in brackets I would say 10-11/19-20 was allowed. Now the bit in brackets doesn't actually say anything meaningful, but I think the obvious interpretation of it is "when your range has a gap in the middle we want to count that bit as part of the range, but we don't actually know how to write a regulation that says so".

The range is the possible values it might be, not what the hand actually is. Otherwise you could say any 1NT opener is a 1-point range (it's just that nobody apart from opener knows which 1-point range it is yet).

Of course it does. You're not allowed to play conventions after "natural notrump opening bids [...] with a range of greater than 5 HCP". If you open 1NT, not vul, all that matters is the range of that particular opening bid, and 10-13 is fine. The fact that a different notrump opening bid might have a different range is irrelevant -- just as irrelevant as the fact that in standard a notrump opening could be 15-17 or 20-22 depending on what level it is at (the regulation doesn't say anything specifically about 1NT, after all).

This isn't even a double shot IMO. A double shot is when you go for a really good score, expecting you can fall back on an adjustment to a decent score if your action doesn't work out. But here East is surely expecting the adjusted score to be better than the penalty he can get in 6♥x. The double shot here would be to bid 6♠. If it makes, great; if not you can ask the TD to give you back your 5♠=.

Your opinion is wrong, then. You can find the definition of "rectification" in the front of the lawbook.

It's supposed to be wide-ranging. But the point is that when we come to rule on a hand we have a lot of information that offender couldn't have been aware of at the time of the infraction -- we can see the full layout. So the question is: if we only take into account the information available to offender at the time, is the infraction still reasonably likely to gain?

I agree with the other replies. It's perhaps worth mentioning that putting trumps on the left is a legal requirement, not just a custom (law 41D).

You do need an additional step, since neither of the laws you quote empower you to adjust the score. The normal law to use in this situation is 23 (not 27D since that only applies when the correction does not silence partner). And I think 23 does apply in this particular case: if they can't stop in 5NT any other way, then surely offender could have known that silencing partner could well be advantageous.

I think so. (If you were going to ask me which, probably both!)

Ridiculous. I see no reason to think 4♥ is going off. They may well have stumbled into their fit; if they haven't partner will double them anyway.

If East suspected (based on his knowledge of partner) that the intended meaning was artificial then perhaps he should have alerted. But he presumably didn't suspect that, nor have any reason to.