watching a TD in action.

[matmat]

I was watching a tournament just a few minutes ago.

 

North was playing three no trump. At one point played low from Ax in hand, and east covered x to win the trick. a couple of seconds later North asked for an undo.

 

director was called by north. the tournament allows undos. fine, should an undo be allowed after a few seconds? is there some sort of grace period?

 

when the director got to the table, west had mentioned that 3 seconds or so elapsed between the trick being lost and the request for the undo.

 

anyhow. director told the players to continue and contract was defeated by one trick.

 

director was at the table reviewing the board when north made the following comments:

 

NORTH: any way we are here to play good bridge and not to insult each other is ok WEST??????/

 

then asked about the nature of the insult:

 

NORTH: when you don't tell the truth just to have a top that an insult lol

 

isn't that an accusation of cheating? should the director who is at the table do something about that?

 

had declarer risen with the ace can cash out for = (there may be some squeeze chances) or can take a finesse for +2 if the finesse were to lose, he would be down.

 

adjusted score 3NT+2

 

 

thoughts?

[blackshoe]

My thoughts, on the evidence presented, are that if I were the TD I would not have adjusted the score, and I would have awarded North with a nice shiny procedural penalty for violation of the proprieties (if you want a specific law, I will look it up). If BBO software doesn't allow me to issue PPs, then I would bar him from my games.

[jtfanclub]

Undos are always optional by the opponents, as far as I am concerned. Too many people cheat with them.

 

director was at the table reviewing the board when north made the following comments:

 

NORTH: any way we are here to play good bridge and not to insult each other is ok WEST??????/

 

then asked about the nature of the insult:

 

NORTH: when you don't tell the truth just to have a top that an insult lol

 

isn't that an accusation of cheating? should the director who is at the table do something about that?

 

Blah. Water ---> duck's back. I would have said something like "No, when they don't tell the truth just to have a top, that is a compliment". It would take a lot more than that to piss me off. If the opponents were pissed off, then I'd do something about it, but only then.

[jillybean]

Enabling undo’s is just too problematic – unscrupulous players expect undo’s that simply are not allowed within the laws, or perhaps the players typically grant undo’s, have been told they must allow undo’s so believe it is their right.

However, undo’s in bidding are a different matter and covered under different laws so to get around this I ask players to stop the auction and I enable undo’s. Not ideal but imo better than making someone play in 6♥X when they should be in 6♠. I dont go as far as allowing players to change their mind about a bid, but perhaps need to rethink this as it is allowed within the laws. (25B)

 

Ideally, the undo button would stop the auction and send a message to the TD, undo’s in play should perhaps be unavailable period.

 

I would not have adjusted the board here.

[Rossoneri]

Ideally, the undo button would stop the auction and send a message to the TD,

I second this idea.

[helene_t]

Agree with Kathryn. Undo during play is maybe acceptable in a friendly game in the main room (not that I personally care for it) but I really don't like it in tourneys.

 

I have once been thrown out of a tourney because I rejected an undo. Once the TD told me to accept an absurd undo request from one of their friends or I would be kicked out.

 

As for the actual case, I suppose 3 secs is just within the range of the acceptable, but EW have the undisputable right to reject an undo. Rejecting an obviously prudent undo request may be bad sportmanship but it is not an infraction. Much less if it was unclear to EW if the request was prudent. Even if the tourney rules state that you must accept prudent requests, the TD should refuse to deal with it since they cannot know exactly how many seconds elapsed.

 

Sounds as if N deserves to be blacklisted, although we may not have all relevant information here.

[blackshoe]

Sheesh. Are we going to have to play bridge with chess clocks now?

 

A f2f TD runs into "I don't know exactly how many seconds it was" all the time. Doesn't stop him from ruling. Shouldn't stop an online TD either.

 

A TD who uses his position to favor his friends ought to be shot.

 

The established online bridge custom wrt "undo" flaunts the laws of the game. I agree with Jilly - undo requests should summon the TD - it's his job to deal with it.

[jillybean]

I agree with Jilly - undo requests should summon the TD - it's his job to deal with it.

Her :)

 

And too late, Ive already been shot.

[hrothgar]

The established online bridge custom wrt "undo" flaunts the laws of the game. I agree with Jilly - undo requests should summon the TD - it's his job to deal with it.

I don't think that things are nearly this cut and dry. Not all tournaments are created equal. It's ridiculous to expect that a pick up event applies the same set of standards as a nationally rated event. The type of absolutism that you are suggesting doesn't exist in face to face (we all know the appalling standards of local club games and sectionals). Expecting this type of conformity in online events just makes you look silly...

 

For what it's worth, I don't disagree that some online tournaments should be run using a much more formal approach to the rules. Moreover, I would go so far as to say that ACBL Sectionally and Regionally rated online events should (essentially) use the same process and procedures as F2F events. (I'd suggest that the main exceptions should be related to physical infractions like revokes that are blocked at the GUI level and disclosure systems)

[blackshoe]

Somebody - it may have been you, Hrothgar - made the point on another forum that the time is not yet for "online laws" because no one who actually plays on line gives a damn about the rules. That's fair enough, but I wish if that's the case that people would quit asking what the rules say about some situation or other. In fact, I think my standard reply in future to such question is going to be "nothing. There are no rules, save the ones the Tournament Organizer, whoever he or she is, decides, probably without prior warning, to impose". :) :)

[hrothgar]

Somebody - it may have been you, Hrothgar - made the point on another forum that the time is not yet for "online laws" because no one who actually plays on line gives a damn about the rules. That's fair enough, but I wish if that's the case that people would quit asking what the rules say about some situation or other. In fact, I think my standard reply in future to such question is going to be "nothing. There are no rules, save the ones the Tournament Organizer, whoever he or she is, decides, probably without prior warning, to impose". :) :)

For convenience, Ill repost my comment from the Bridgetalk forum

 

The 2001 Online Laws failed because they were a solution looking for a problem. No one playing or organizing online games gave a damn about the Laws / Proprieties. Having a group of random individuals sitting off in the middle of nowhere creating regulations that no one actually cared about was an exercise in futility.

 

If a useful version of the Online Laws does come to fruition, it first requires that a number of these silly little issues work themselves out. For example: consider the discussion surrounding "Regulatory Authorities"... Theoretic discussions about what constitutes an RA are worthless. If an obvious RA doesn't already exist, the time isn't ripe to bother drafting Online Laws.

 

Conversely, come the day when some RA does give a damn about online competitions, we'll probably seem some real interest in drafting Online Laws. Moreover, said laws might even have a chance of being used.

 

In response to your current post:

 

I don't believe that the time is ripe to be drafting Laws for Online bridge. I genuinely believe that the players and administrators don't have enough experience with the Online environment to justify the time and effort to formalize a rules set.

 

This doesn't mean that discussion surrounding these issues is worthless. If we are ever going to arrive at a reasonable set of rules, it will first be necessary to achieve broad consensus about what works and what doesn't.

 

The best analogy that I can make is to point out how successful standards organizations work. (I'm going to base these comments on my experiences with the Internet Engineering Task Force).

 

Successful standards aren't generated by ivory tower academics sitting around theorizing how a perfect system should work and then hoping that the world at large will suddenly recognize the blinding genius inherent in their proposal.

 

Successful standards document a set of practices that have evolved over time. You start with a lot of experiments and discuss what works and what doesn't. After a while, you start trying to achieve rough consensus. The last thing that you do is write things down.

[helene_t]

Successful standards document a set of practices that have evolved over time. You start with a lot of experiments and discuss what works and what doesn't. After a while, you start trying to achieve rough consensus. The last thing that you do is write things down.

Right. And that is the purpose served by this forum.

[blackshoe]

Maybe I'm just having a bad day.

 

It does seem to me, though, that the laws of duplicate bridge have evolved over time. Okay, now we have a new environment of sorts. But what happened (again, it seems to me) is that the people who designed the original software by which one might play bridge online did so in ignorance of the existing laws. This is a very simple, very common, and very stupid software design error. Then, when it was pointed out to them that the software conflicted with those laws, their answer was "I don't care enough to fix it". It's not a case of "it can't be changed now", it's a case of "I don't want to change it", with perhaps a bit of "and besides, the players don't care". That's based, btw, on personal experience, so I'm not just dreaming it up.

 

Do the players care? Well, apparently some do, or they wouldn't ask whether such-and-such ruling was "right". Nonetheless, we have those who argue not only that the time is not right for "online laws", but that the existing offline laws can't, or at least shouldn't, be applied online. So where does that leave us? "Sorry, there is no "right" answer to your question"?

[hrothgar]

Your quite right that the original online bridge application weren't designed to be compliant with the Laws of Bridge. I would argue that this was a good thing.

 

Historically, duplicate bridge was an insignificant backwater in the world of bridge. When people wax nostalgic about the "glory days" of bridge when everyone and their brother played they aren't talking about duplicate tournaments. They're talking about four playing bridge around the kitchen table. The only "Laws" that people knew about was the tiny pamphlet that was shipped with the playing cards explaining the rules and the scoring. There was no director and no appeals committees. In short, it looked a hell of a lot like the rough and tumble world of BBO.

 

"Laws" and Appeals Committees only matter in the formal tournament game. For what its worth, I think that its a vital necessity that highly structured competitions like a Duplicate Tournament have formal rules and systems for adjudication problems. However, its a terrible mistake to think that the overhead intensive processes that work well in formal settings are necessary or appropriate for a social game. I'd go so far as to argue that OKB and BBO would have never succeeded they way that they did if they had been designed how you envision.

 

Someday (three years from now, five years from know, whenever) we might very well see a new set of clients that are specifically designed to support formal tournaments. Come the day that the demand is there, such applications will be easy enough to program. Here, once again, I suspect that the impetuous will be some RA that decides to get serious about the online game.

 

In the mean time, we're going to have plenty of players who like to bitch. Frankly, I don't give a damn because the bridge players who bitch about these sorts of things are always going to be bitching about something.

[jikl]

Nice post.

 

Sean

[blackshoe]

I have no problem with "other than duplicate" bridge. I played a lot of rubber when I was young - and might play a lot now if my circle of friends included people who like to play it.

 

It would be entirely possible for BBO and similar sites to provide software that would support both forms of the game (not to mention Chicago and possibly other variants). Have they done that? No, they haven't. Why not? If it's because they didn't think folks would want to play duplicate, then why did they set things up so they can - sort of?

[hrothgar]

It would be entirely possible for BBO and similar sites to provide software that would support both forms of the game (not to mention Chicago and possibly other variants). Have they done that? No, they haven't. Why not? If it's because they didn't think folks would want to play duplicate, then why did they set things up so they can - sort of?

I suspect that Fred / Uday are the only ones who can provide a definitive answer, however, here's yet another guess:

 

Infrastructure doesn't matter jack ***** if you don't have qualified individuals to administer the system. In theory, BBO could design a client that was deliberately engineered to be compliant with the Laws.

 

No undo buttons

Choice of movements

Options for adjusting scores and issuing procedural penalties

yada, yada, yada

 

Some would argue (myself included) that putting these types of tool in the hands of the average BBO Tournament Director would be a disaster waiting to happen. Most of the TDs out there wouldn't have a clue how to make use of any of this functionality. (For what its worth, I don't confine these comments to BBO TDs. The average Club level tournament director doesn't know what they're doing either)

 

Worse yet, the highly structured, formal system that you envision introduces a lot of overhead. The existing undo system is far from perfect. However, it allows folks to work out problems for themselves without the need to drag a director to the table to deal with each an every misclick. (My impression is that misclicks happen a hell of a lot more often in the online environment then in F2F bridge. I don't think that requiring a director to sort out every single incident is desirable, especially when said director will probably get the ruling wrong 75% of the time).

 

Out of curiosity: Do even play online bridge? (I seem to recall you stating at one point in time that you didn't. Unfortunately, I read a lot of different lists and there are a lot of different conversations to try to remember).

[jillybean]

Some would argue (myself included) that putting these types of tool in the hands of the average BBO Tournament Director would be a disaster waiting to happen.  Most of the TDs out there wouldn't have a clue how to make use of any of this functionality.  (For what its worth, I don't confine these comments to BBO TDs.  The average Club level tournament director doesn't know what they're doing either)

I don't see how giving full functionality can make the situation any worse.

TD's have the ability to adjust scores and sub players now. Instead of issuing a PP some penalize with a 2 trick penalty for failure to alert, failure to announce your system. If you wont explain what you have in your hand, some TD's sub you.

 

Provide the functionality and let people run tournaments to the best of their ability.

[blackshoe]

Out of curiosity: Do even play online bridge? (I seem to recall you stating at one point in time that you didn't. Unfortunately, I read a lot of different lists and there are a lot of different conversations to try to remember).

I do not. I played on OKbridge briefly when it first got started, but didn't like the interface, such as it was (no Mac support back then). I have the bbo software on a Windows laptop (which I have because ACBLScore doesn't run on MacOS either), and had intended one of these days to try it out, but beyond wandering around the site I've not got around to it. After some of the horror stories I've seen here, I'm not sure I want to, either. :P

[helene_t]

BBO is a nice place, Blackshoe. Once in a blue moon, you'll be involved in one of these incidents. Happens less often here than at the club, IMHO. Of course if you direct tourneys, it's a different matter.

[blackshoe]

Well, maybe I''ll give it a try. Gettin' tired of World of Warcraft, anyway. :P