another claim

[jdonn]

Well said dburn.

[iviehoff]

[This is intolerable. The success or failure of any claim should not be a matter of whether jdonn or I arrive at the table to resolve the claim (whether the contract is 7NT or 2♥). It should be a matter of following, step by step, a well-formulated procedure that requires nothing whatsoever in the way of subjective judgement, and arriving at a conclusion that though it may seem unpalatable is at least objectively justifiable.

That's an ideal to strive for, but you won't achieve it, at least not in an acceptable manner. There are rules that are objective and repeatable, but they aren't acceptable. For example, a claimer loses every trick in the case of a faulty claim is an objective rule that produces the same result every time, but it isn't acceptable.

 

Bluejak will tell us that faulty claims are so rare that it doesn't matter much, but I disagree. At the club, faulty claim rulings are much more common than UI rulings.

 

There are other parts of the laws where judgment rulings are applied, and they are inevitably subjective and don't produce the same result with different people applying them. I think inevitably any acceptable claim adjudication has to involve the application of judgment. What we require is, as is provided in the case of UI rulings, a bit more guidance from the lawmakers on how to apply our judgment.

[dburn]

[This is intolerable. The success or failure of any claim should not be a matter of whether jdonn or I arrive at the table to resolve the claim (whether the contract is 7NT or 2♥). It should be a matter of following, step by step, a well-formulated procedure that requires nothing whatsoever in the way of subjective judgement, and arriving at a conclusion that though it may seem unpalatable is at least objectively justifiable.

That's an ideal to strive for, but you won't achieve it, at least not in an acceptable manner. There are rules that are objective and repeatable, but they aren't acceptable. For example, a claimer loses every trick in the case of a faulty claim is an objective rule that produces the same result every time, but it isn't acceptable.

If I ruled the world, the law on claims would say this:

 

A player making a claim faces his cards. He states the number of tricks he proposes to take, and one or more orders in which play will progress so that he can take those tricks. If the claim is contested, the Director adjusts the score as if any play not explicitly covered by the claim statement had proceeded in the legal order least advantageous to the claimer.

 

Is this what is accepted? No, for people make bum claims all the time, being encouraged to do so by officials who say "yes, of course you'd have made four tricks from AKx facing Q10xx" when there is no "of course" about it at all.

 

Is this what is acceptable? I don't see why not - it takes no more than a few extra seconds for players to claim as I have indicated above instead of saying "the rest are mine". And if they go down twelve instead of down one by saying only "I have them all", perhaps they'll learn not to say that next time.

 

At any rate, it is considerably easier for officials to rule on what is or is not explicitly covered by a claim statement than to rule on what some buffoon might or might not have had in mind when he claimed x tricks despite possessing only x-1 winners. Players at all levels don't mind the rules being harsh. What they mind is the rules and the rulings being [a] inconsistent and incomprehensible.

 

If you've got fifteen golf clubs in your bag, you get penalized out of all proportion to the "offence" when the extra club was a plastic putter for your three-year-old kid. Golfers don't mind that. Why should bridge players?

[bluejak]

I do not know why bridge players should mind, but the fact is they do. They do not care whether the rules are complex or not because they aggressively do not understand them - take the simple doubles alerting rules, which are so simple that players say they are too complex when they assume they are more complex than they are.

 

But they do not think it fair that they should suffer for their mistakes. There was a strong effort a few years back to stop "impossible" results from revokes: players could not see how it was fair to let a grand through holding the ace of trumps. Me, I think they should learn to follow suit. Players call or play the wrong thing and assume they have an absolute right at all times to change it.

 

Incidentally, in answer to another point, of course there are more claim rulings than UI rulings in clubs, and I really dislike "bluejak would say ..." followed by something i neither said nor meant. What does not happen frequently are difficult claim rulings. In clubs, there are thousands and thousands of unchallenged claims, plus a number of completely obvious claim rulings ["Of course I knew there was a trump out"]. Very tricky claim rulings are very rare, especially compared to the number of unchallenged claim rulings, and that is why suggestions to reduce claims are flawed.

 

But the main thing about this forum is that we are trying to help people make rulings with the current rules. That is what the forum is for. If I had my way, there are quite a number of Laws I would change, but so what? If we want to discuss changes and perhaps put any consensuses to the WBFLC or our national bodies, we now have a forum for it - and this is not it.

 

So if we believe the claim Laws are wrong it does not help.