Forgotten transfer, no alerts

[el mister]

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Club game, occasional partnership - I open the S hand, and suffer a lapse in concentration by taking 3♦ as natural and bidding a hasty 4♦. I realised my error too late, but anyway - pard corrects to 4♥. I thought here that I can't pass this bid - I have to take it as if we had agreed a diamond fit so 4♥ would prob be a control-showing bid. So I bid 4♠, which gets passed out, and makes for a cold top - rest of the field in 3N which fails on the lie of the cards.

 

Can someone clarify the following:

Is my partner allowed to bid 4♥ here from the POV of 'pard missed the transfer so I'm putting things right'

Was I right that I can't pass 4♥?

Are the opps due an adjustment for getting fixed like this?

[pran]

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Club game, occasional partnership - I open the S hand, and suffer a lapse in concentration by taking 3♦ as natural and bidding a hasty 4♦. I realised my error too late, but anyway - pard corrects to 4♥. I thought here that I can't pass this bid - I have to take it as if we had agreed a diamond fit so 4♥ would prob be a control-showing bid. So I bid 4♠, which gets passed out, and makes for a cold top - rest of the field in 3N which fails on the lie of the cards.

 

Can someone clarify the following:

Is my partner allowed to bid 4♥ here from the POV of 'pard missed the transfer so I'm putting things right'

Was I right that I can't pass 4♥?

Are the opps due an adjustment for getting fixed like this?

The important question is: What would partner have "known" if you had alerted the 3♦ bid before bidding 4♦ ?

 

The answers to your questions depend on this, much also depends on your partner's hand.

 

If the 4♦ bid is impossible (according to your partnership understandings) then I would rule:

Yes - your partner is allowed to bid 4♥, you would have been allowed to pass 4♥ and the table result from the panic 4♠ bid stands. (rub of the green)

[wank]

you have no unauthorised information (i'm assuming there was no visible reaction from your partner to the lack of alert and 4D bid) so you can do what you like, including pass 4H.

 

your partner does from the lack of an alert. so he must assume you knew 3d was a transfer and bid 4d. what would that mean in your methods? it's a bad bid whatever it shows, but i'm guessing it should show a diamond control and a heart fit. your partner must therefore cuebid or bid blackwood or whatever if he has extra values. if he's minimum he can bid 4h. after you bid 4s he should still labour on under the assumption you knew 3d was a transfer. 4s is presumably another cuebid, though again a ridiculous bid considering you've limited your hand with 2nt (if 2NT is unlimited a la kokish, the bidding makes perfect sense and he should assume you have 30 hcp and a heart fit or some such), so he should bid on.

 

as for 4D being an impossible bid according to pran, people make bad bids all the time (more often than they forget transfers over NT bids). it's far from impossible.

[el mister]

Thks for the replies - I think 4♦ would have been impossible given our basic agreements. Showing 22/23 balanced then breaking a transfer to bid 4♦ wouldn't make sense for us.

[pran]

as for 4D being an impossible bid according to pran, people make bad bids all the time (more often than they forget transfers over NT bids). it's far from impossible.

I explicitly wrote: according to your partnership understandings

 

People certainly make the most peculiar calls at times, but the point is that when a call is "impossible" according to agreements (aka partnership understandings) then the fact that the caller quite likely has forgotten an agreement is AI, not UI to his partner.

 

After the clarification by el mister this means that North here is not obliged to understand 4♦ as cue or control but may simply understand it as forgotten transfer.

[RMB1]

... I realised my error too late, ...

 

Whenever you realise, you should (call the director and) correct your failure to alert.

There might be some opportunity for the opponents to change their last call.

This will give partner more unauthorised information but partner will have to continue to bid as if you knew 3♦ was a transfer when you bid 4♦.

[timjand]

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Can someone clarify the following:

 

Is my partner allowed to bid 4♥ here from the POV of 'pard missed the transfer so I'm putting things right'

 

Not from that POV, no. Well, maybe if 4D is an impossible bid, but if it is an occasional partnership and you play transfers I would think your partner should assume the natural meaning of a good heart fit and a diamond control. But with a weak hand he can bid 4H.

 

Was I right that I can't pass 4♥?

 

No. You don't have any unauthorised information so you can make any call. Including, I guess, 4S.

 

Are the opps due an adjustment for getting fixed like this?

 

This is something I'm not clear about. If they were not informed about the missing alert before the play, and therefore missed a good lead, or defended wrongly, then definitely. Otherwise ... the bit that troubles me is passing 4S. If you've shown a heart fit, 4S cannot be to play. But there does come a point when bids can only be explained by a misunderstanding in which case the pass is OK, but I'm not clear exactly what that point is.

 

Tim

[barmar]

Somewhat OT, I'm surprised the rest of the field is in 3NT. While it's sometimes right to avoid the 5-3 heart fit and play 3NT for a better matchpoint score when both take the same number of tricks, I'd still expect a significant number of pairs to play in hearts (and probably the majority in a typical club field).