PeterAlan

This won't be accepted - it is (at the moment) no more than a controversial proposal, opposed by many states other than the UK, it is covered by one of the UK's opt-outs, and in the current UK climate it has no chance.

I think that the answer to this specific question is straightforward (though it can never be given at the time): "We have agreed to play Widget, but I think it means B whilst partner thinks it means A". Expand "it means" to "we have agreed that it means" if it leaves you feeling more comfortable. I don't agree with the notion that there is no effective agreement; there is an agreement, albeit one involving a misunderstanding, and this is the full explanation ("disclosure" if you prefer) of the agreement that has been reached.

I expect everyone's said all that there is to say about the general approach to be taken, and is no longer interested in discussing more and more contrived examples.

To elaborate a bit on this (the case where neither pair has played the board already, so their score stands - Law 15A1), let's suppose that the pairs who misplayed the board were A (N/S) & B (E/W), and that if the movement had gone correctly, they would later on have been playing the board against pairs X (E/W) and Y (N/S) respectively. For simplicity, I'll assume a Mitchell movement: you'll need to make the obvious adjustments if, under a Howell movement, say, either A or B was due to play the board against X/Y under a different orientation. It's typically too difficult, using Bridgemates and scoring software such as Scorebridge, to score wholly at the table a board such as this where the scoring software doesn't expect it to be played by the two pairs in question (here A&B). What you have to do is to record manually the score when they play it, forget about trying to put it into the Bridgemate at the time, and move on. Their Bridgemate isn't expecting a score for that board, and you need to play (or cancel/defer) their correct boards as well. In due course, one of the pairs (let's say A), get to the table/point where they were due to play the board (in this case, against X). They can't play the board (except for fun), since A has played it already, but now you enter the result (score) that applied when A played it against B. Later, B will get to the point where they are due to play the board against Y. Again, it can't be played in the competition; this time enter an adjusted score of Ave+/Ave+. At the end of the session, your scoring software will have: Board X: A vs X [Actual score for A vs B] Y vs B Ave+ / Ave+ Your last step is to change (in the scoring software) the pair numbers to get to the result you want: you change the pair number X in the first line to B, and the pair number B in the second line to X. This results in the table score for A&B, and Ave+ for both X & Y, which generally is where you want to end up.

Your use of "should" is ambiguous: do you mean the definition that ought (in, say, your view) to be used for applying Law 25A, but isn't currently; or the definition that is applied when the correct (according to the Law and related guidance) current approach is followed?

You misunderstand - or are misrepresenting - this particular point: it's solely about determining the action by which, and the moment at which, a call is deemed to have been made. It means, for example, that a call is not made by knocking the bidding box over and dislodging a bidding card. It has nothing to do with whether the call was "intended" or "unintended" for the purposes of Law 25A.

What you're saying is that the Law / the guidance should be changed. Fine. But until it is we have to work with what we've got.

Not really. The point is that a provision had been made for calls based on mental lapses, and that provision had been removed. If the intention had been that changes of calls based on momentary mental lapses, inattention etc were to be permitted entirely (instead of being permitted but scoring a maximum of 30%) the relevant law would have been changed, not deleted in its entirety. All experienced TDs know of the former 25B2(b)(2) but it wouldn't really matter if they didn't. No. We have the 2007 Law 25A (which is identical to the corresponding 1997 Law in its relevant part, namely its first sentence) up-to-date guidance from our regulatory authority on the application and interpretation of Law25A. We don't need to bring anything else to the table - and shouldn't do so, because that leads to inconsistency of ruling from one TD to another. If there's anything from the history of the development of Law 25 that we need to take into account, we should rely on it being reflected in the current guidance, and should not be bringing further personal interpretation (prejudice?) into the picture. If I may mix my metaphors, you seem to me to be heaping Pelion on Ossa in your attempts to justify what I think is ultimately an unsupportable position, and it's time to take Occam's razor to it all.

I for one would take some convincing that SB had originally intended to Pass, and I would not expect to be over-ruled by an Appeal Committee if I decided that he didn't.

Thank you for your apology, lamford - no real offence taken. This has probably gone as far as it sensibly can - I don't see that any further elaboration of our respective positions is going to provide any further illumination! I would say, though, that I'm just giving my understanding of what the current Law 25A and the guidance on it actually says and means, and not expressing a view on whether that is what we would have in a better world. Whilst the WBFLC minute remains in force, and our attention is drawn to it by L&EC in the White Book, I don't regard myself as able to ignore it, but the overall result is certainly generous to those who regard themselves as having made unintended calls. PS: On a detail of your hypothetical SB case, one clarification I would look for is whether North had announced SB's call as "12-14" before West's double and, if so, what and when SB's reaction to the announcement had been.

I agree with this. However, it does not appear to be consistent with your earlier: the statement with which I took issue. I've no wish to over-complicate any of this: it seems to me that the guidance boils down to answering the two questions: "What did you intend to call?" and "What did you actually call?" I have given no view whatsoever on your SB example above, and would not quarrel with your last sentence as it stands: It would be a matter of determining whether or not SB "intended" to withdraw the 1NT bid from the box, notwithstanding his subsequent statement that this was not the call he wished to make (there's no problem if it was); as I said in the other thread, the TD's decision in such needs to be more nuanced than the simplistic 'if the brain tells the hand to select a bidding card, that is not "unintended", regardless of the original intent.' Your first statement above suggests to me that you think so too. However, that is based on your premise that 'SB [may have] "intended" to withdraw the 1NT bid from the bidding box, whether or not that was the call he wished to make.' If I've understood you correctly, both you and Vampyr are attempting to distinguish between "call" in the sense of which "bid, double, redouble or pass" the player decides upon, and the manifestation of that decision by (here) the withdrawal of a bidding card from the box, and are emphasising the possibility that the player may have decided to make one call, but nevertheless "intended" his or her withdrawal of a different card from the box. Whilst I'm quite prepared to admit that this may be possible, it seems to me to be an unnecessary over-complication in most cases in practice. Finally, my comment that "your remarks ... are going too far" was partly driven by your dismissive characterisation of me as Trinidad's "henchman".

I think that the interpretation of the Law has to be based on what it says now, not on a part of a previous version that was repealed 8 years ago and that many current TDs are unaware of. What is the evidence for this assertion?

It's your remarks that are going too far, lamford. To date, essentially all I have done is to quote the current guidance to EBU TDs as set out in the White Book - guidance to which you appeared to me to have paid insufficient attention before you made some of your earlier assertions. I have made no suggestion about going any further than that guidance.

Well, you could do, although of course you would be wrong. I'm with Rik in believing that you are both mistaken; I refer the honourable lady and gentleman to the reasons I gave more fully here, and more briefly (and with my emphasis and editorial addition) repeat: To conclude, in the absence of such mechanical reasons as stuck bidding cards, that the bidder necessarily and always 'intended' to make the call (s)he did because that was the call taken from the box is clearly contrary to the scope of application of the WBFLC minute. The TD's decision must be more nuanced than that simplistic approach. To give a simpler example, I've had the following auction: 1NT (Pass) 2♥ [announced by me as "Spades"] (Pass) Pass - inadvertent / unintended, because I had no intention of playing in ♥s rather than ♠s, but resulting from a brief "turning away of the mind" following RHO's Pass - the suggestion that there would be a conscious "change of mind" in my saying that my intention was to bid 2♠ rather than Pass is hard to sustain. (Before you ask, this particular instance did not give rise to a ruling - I played it in 2♥ - but it's nevertheless an example of what can easily happen.)

The EBU guidance to TDs is pretty clear: It also cites the following WBFLC Minute:

The problem with that view is that the laws also describe dummy's action of moving the card as playing it: Law 42A3 says that dummy "plays the cards of the dummy as declarer's agent". I think the problem there is that the word "play" is being used in two different ways: there's whatever action makes a card officially part of the trick, and there's the action that physically moves it into the played position. For declarer and defenders, these are basically equivalent, but dummy is different because there are two separate steps. I think 42A3 is just describing the physical movement, the same as the "after which" clause in 45B. It's no more than the issue of distinguishing between when "play" is being used as a term of art and when it isn't. Essentially, throughout Law 45 it is. In its second use (the noun) in Law 42A3 it is as well. But that doesn't mean that its first use there (the verb) is so, and there's no reason to take this as either determinative or particularly indicative of the construction to be placed on Law 45B, which is a clear enough statement in itself. None of this is to say that Law 45B couldn't be made clearer, and I agree with Vampyr on this (and about the earlier proposed alternative).

At risk of adding to what may seem to be pinhead-dancing, may I (seriously) point to the significance of the comma in this sentence. It clearly divides the first part of the sentence from the second, and supports blackshoe's contention that the "play" of a card from dummy by declarer is complete once it is (validly) named, and this completion does not depend on dummy's subsequent actions of picking up the card and facing it on the table. The first part of the sentence defines and determines when the card is played; the second, as aguahombre said, is a protocol.

Agreed, Ed! Peter

I know what Law 1 says, Ed. The first part of what you quote tells you what order the suits rank in, for when you need to rank suits (reflected later in the ranking of denominations in Law 18E, but I speculate also as an historical relic from rubber bridge antecedents - see the comment below about the cut). The second part tells you how you rank cards within a suit for when you need to do that (essentially to decide which card wins a trick). But I do not see any evidence that there was any intention to meld these separate rankings to determine a combined ranking to relate, say, the ♣7 and ♥3. In particular, I do not read that the first part, which refers to suits and not cards, says that all spade cards rank ahead of all heart cards when, for all other purposes of the game, their relative status is determined by other considerations (such as whether they are trumps, or not the suit led to a trick) and traditionally, when cutting for partners, seats etc at rubber bridge, the contrary is the norm (♣7 outranks ♥3). (*) Here, in Law 67B2a, we have the term "highest ranking". Laws 24, 41D, 46, 50 and 57C all refer to the "rank" of a card in the same sense of whether it is an A, K, ... or 2, and Law 41D specifically uses the term "lowest ranking" in the same sense. None of this supports your contention, and I continue to maintain that the use of the term "highest ranking" in Law 67 is either intended to refer primarily to the rank in the sense of Laws 24 etc, and when I would use suit order only to distinguish between cards of the same rank, as in cutting for partners, or, at worst, is insufficiently well-defined. Edit: (*) Since writing this, I looked for interest at the Laws of Contract [Rubber] Bridge 2014. Law 2 is essentially the same as Duplicate Law 1: "The suits rank downward in order - spades (♠), hearts (♥), diamonds (♦), clubs (♣). The cards of each suit rank in descending order: ace, king, queen, jack, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2." There follows Law 3, which deals with the draw cut, and specifies (in that context) "When cards of the same rank are drawn, the rank of suit determines which is higher." The law that corresponds to Duplicate Law 67B2A is 67(b)(ii), and is even vaguer: "... the offender ... withdraws all but one card, leaving the highest card he could legally have played to that trick". What's "highest" here? Is a trump higher than a plain card (a question that might also apply to the meaning of "highest-ranked" in the Duplicate Laws)?

There's ambiguity in the use of "rank" in the Laws - cf its specific use as a designator of 'A' to '2' in Law 46. Law 1 specifies the ordering of suits, and the ordering of cards within a suit. It's not at all obvious to me that it was intended that these should be combined to give the total order ♠A, ♠K, ..., ♣3, ♣2 for the purposes of Law 67B2a, as opposed to the order ♠A, ♥A, ♦A, ♣A, ♠K, ... , ♦2, ♣2 that would apply if "rank" in "highest ranking" is given the meaning that it has in Law 46 (with equality of such rank being split by suit order as in Law 1).

You're suggesting that the Laws of Duplicate Contract Bridge vary from country to country if those countries' "rules of statutory interpretation" differ?

The scoring program is a tool of the TD; its job is to score results that it's given, and to do that job well. If you try to turn it into some limited sort of bridge expert system, building in default judgments in situations where the TD is supposed to think before deciding on the score, you'll end up with a compromised mess.

I think it is important to maintain a clear distinction between the procedure of polling players in order to arrive at a decision on what is a "logical alternative" (the test in Law 16B1(b)) and any consultations the TD may undertake when deciding what "could demonstrably have been suggested" by the extraneous information (Law 16B1(a)). The EBU has specific guidance on the former: This does not extend to any sort of formal polling on the second question, and it seems to me a mistake if the distinction becomes in any way blurred or the two distinct processes conflated.

Another, more general, approach would be to invoke Law 72A: I would argue that the phrase "ethical standards set out in these laws" refers to norms of expected behaviour that are characterised by, but not restricted to, the particular ethical points that are specifically covered therein. It is clear that this particular form of reprehensible behaviour falls well outside such norms, and hence violates the requirement here to comply with them. If this is accepted, then this also gives a basis on which to deal with a whole range of other matters that are not specifically covered in the Laws.

Alvin Stardust, glam rocker. I see that he briefly (c1973) performed as "Elvin Starr". That's the name that Reese and Flint later gave to the central character of "Trick 13" - it seems too unusual a name to be a coincidence, but I can't imagine how they came to pick it.