[pran]

gnasher, on 2012-October-15, 04:19, said:

Sven, I think you missed my point. What I am saying is that the current rules are like a random number generator. The current rules for insufficient bids are already like LOTTO; I would like them to be more like bridge.

If I were rewriting the rules, Law 27 would read:

"If a player makes an insufficient bid, the insufficient bid is cancelled, and may be replaced with any legal call. The information that the player intended to make an insufficient bid is unauthorised to the offender's partner, and authorised to the opponents."

I honestly disagree (after my experience from more than thirty years of directing - at all levels).

When a player makes an insufficient bid his LHO has the choice of accepting the bid as legal and continue his own auction from there, or refusing to accept the insufficient bid and have the offender replace his bid as specified in the laws.

If he accepts the IB he will have more bidding space available at the cost of no further rectifications against the offending side.

If he does not accept the IB he will have no extra bid space and may even have his space reduced further, but then the offending side will be subject to rectifications that can possibly be very damaging for them.

The final result depends (according to the laws on duplicate contract bridge) entirely on the choice made by the offender's LHO together with the further auction and play.

To argue that the possibility for offender's LHO to accept the IB creates some (undesired) randomess is just as valid as arguing that for instance the possibility for a player to make a sacrifice bid creates randomness from whether the sacrifice was fortunate or not.

We play bridge according to rules, and judging probabilities when we have legal choices (like choice of call and choice of play) is part of the game.

[aguahombre]

I see Andy has run into the same argument: "The rules are part of the game." Grattan and his crew should have been told that, so they wouldn't waste the years ahead.

[Vampyr]

gnasher, on 2012-October-15, 04:19, said:

If I were rewriting the rules, Law 27 would read:

"If a player makes an insufficient bid, the insufficient bid is cancelled, and may be replaced with any legal call. The information that the player intended to make an insufficient bid is unauthorised to the offender's partner, and authorised to the opponents."

The Law 27 I suggested in post 106 might be a fair exchange for not being allowed to accept insufficient bids. Can you live with that?

(Of course, accepting them would still have to be allowed if the NOS did it by accident, but mind reading has become a vital component of applying the laws, so that is not a big problem.)

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They haven't gone anything like far enough, in my view. I would like to see all the rules relating relating to insufficient bids, bids out of turn, leads of out turn, revokes, etc thrown out and replaced by rules that restore equity, instead of randomly handing out non-bridge results of arbitrary value.

Do you think that restoring equity (in the face of UI, to boot) is a reasonable thing to expect the average volunteer playing director to manage? I would prefer more mechanical adjustments -- these would be easy to apply, and the lack of subjectivity would make the application completely fair.

If restoring equity really were a viable and reliable proposition, I would not strongly object to a system in which the NOS got an equitable result and only the OS were penalised. They could receive an automatic adjustment, or 40%/their table score, whichever is lower, etc. There should never be the possibility of gaining, and there should really be some deterrent effect. But the Laws are difficult enough to apply as it is.

Anyway, the other evening my regular partner and I had three insufficient bids made against us; this probably doubles out total for the last five years. I don't think that it is a big enough problem for people to worry this much about.

[bluejak]

gnasher, on 2012-October-15, 03:24, said:

What's wrong is that the effects are abritrary and nothing to do with bridge. It's roughly equivalent to a rule that says:

"After a player makes an insufficient bid, the director shall
(a) Determine what score would have occurred without the infraction
(b) Generate a random number between that score and 100% of the available matchpoints on the board
(c) Assign the result of (b) as the score for both pairs."

That's completely wrong. They are not "arbitrary". They are defined by the Laws we have. What you are comparing with is arbitrary.

The effects of these are similar to people mucking up bridge in other ways at other tables, by such things as forgetting their system, not counting opponent's points, lack of judgement, using Blackwood on unsuitable hands, and so forth. Do you want equity restored whenever these happen?

I like the approach to mechanical infractions such as revokes, calls and plays out of turn, penalty cards and so forth. Of course there are windfall effects for opponents, but since that is completely normal at this game, suggestions that it is not bridge are just wrong.

Of course, I don't like law 27, as is well known. But it seems perfectly obvious to me that insufficient bids should be accepted and that opponents should have the right to any agreements they like over accepted insufficient bids. I think it a pity the ACBL has decreed otherwise, and think they should reconsider.

Vampyr, on 2012-October-15, 08:32, said:

Do you think that restoring equity (in the face of UI, to boot) is a reasonable thing to expect the average volunteer playing director to manage? I would prefer more mechanical adjustments -- these would be easy to apply, and the lack of subjectivity would make the application completely fair.

That seems a reasonable approach.

[gnasher]

Vampyr, on 2012-October-15, 08:32, said:

The Law 27 I suggested in post 106 might be a fair exchange for not being allowed to accept insufficient bids. Can you live with that?

That sounds worse than the present laws, because we would have even more non-bridge results.

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Do you think that restoring equity (in the face of UI, to boot) is a reasonable thing to expect the average volunteer playing director to manage?

Yes, in most cases it's very easy. He tells the offender to replace his call with a legal call, the offender's partner (paraphrasing) not to use the UI, and the non-offenders to call him back if they think they were damaged. Then he goes back to his own table, and that's usually the last he hears of the problem. The players get to play bridge, and the result is a bridge result.

I don't see how this is any different from dealing with a slow double, a failure to stop, an incorrect alert, or any other source of UI.

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I would prefer more mechanical adjustments -- these would be easy to apply, and the lack of subjectivity would make the application completely fair.

And I would prefer a good game of bridge. This may require better directors, but in my view it's still a worthwhile objective.

One way to deal with the problem you envisage, if it is a problem, is to have options in the rules. A club could choose whether to use mechanical recifications as in the present laws, or equity-based recifications such as the ones I suggest.

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If restoring equity really were a viable and reliable proposition, I would not strongly object to a system in which the NOS got an equitable result and only the OS were penalised. They could receive an automatic adjustment, or 40%/their table score, whichever is lower, etc.

I don't object to penalising the offenders, but what you've suggested is also arbitrary, because the penalty may be anything from nothing to 60% of a top. The sensible way to deal with it is to let them get a bridge result by playing bridge, and separately impose a procedural penalty for the infraction.

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Anyway, the other evening my regular partner and I had three insufficient bids made against us; this probably doubles out total for the last five years. I don't think that it is a big enough problem for people to worry this much about.

I'm not sure what you mean by "this much". How much is "this much"?

There are numerous problems with the Laws, none particularly serious in isolation, but collectively they add up to something that many people think needs some attention. My preferred solution would replace all the current Laws about illegal calls, illegal plays, dropped cards, etc (with a bit extra for established revokes), so I would be solving about six problems in one go.

[gnasher]

bluejak, on 2012-October-15, 08:42, said:

That's completely wrong. They are not "arbitrary". They are defined by the Laws we have. What you are comparing with is arbitrary.

I said that the *results* of applying the current laws are arbitrary. They are arbitrary because sometimes there is no effect on either pair's score, and sometimes it has a very great affect on the scores, and the difference is independent of the seriousness of the offence.

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The effects of these are similar to people mucking up bridge in other ways at other tables, by such things as forgetting their system, not counting opponent's points, lack of judgement, using Blackwood on unsuitable hands, and so forth. Do you want equity restored whenever these happen?

Yes, there is luck in bridge, but so what? That's not a reason to have the luck factor unnecessarily increased by the laws. What makes bridge interesting is the skill, not the random good or bad luck.

[Vampyr]

gnasher, on 2012-October-15, 10:29, said:

That sounds worse than the present laws, because we would have even more non-bridge results.

For the hand in question, yes. In the long run, maybe the offender will remember more often to make sufficient bids only.

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And I would prefer a good game of bridge. This may require better directors, but in my view it's still a worthwhile objective.

One way to deal with the problem you envisage, if it is a problem, is to have options in the rules. A club could choose whether to use mechanical recifications as in the present laws, or equity-based recifications such as the ones I suggest.

I have long believed this to be the correct (even necessary) approach if things like even the current Law27 and the ones you suggest are to be included in the Laws. The decline of club bridge is the biggest factor in the decline of organised bridge in general. And if no one wishes to volunteer to direct, or people volunteer but are able to give only very poor-quality judgment rulings, well...

Remember that big organised clubs with professional direction and the possibility of consulting good players in the bar etc are not the norm, whatever we might be used to in London.

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I don't object to penalising the offenders, but what you've suggested is also arbitrary, because the penalty may be anything from nothing to 60% of a top. The sensible way to deal with it is to let them get a bridge result by playing bridge, and separately impose a procedural penalty for the infraction.

Yes, OK, probably better than my suggestion as it does not allow the offenders to "break even". I would be happy with this if applying it were trivial, which I believe is not the case, except for the reason below.

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I'm not sure what you mean by "this much". How much is "this much"?

You and Aquahombre seem very concerned and convinced that this is a big problem in the current Laws. I just don't think there is a high enough incidence to affect whether you get a "good game of bridge" or not.

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There are numerous problems with the Laws, none particularly serious in isolation, but collectively they add up to something that many people think needs some attention. My preferred solution would replace all the current Laws about illegal calls, illegal plays, dropped cards, etc (with a bit extra for established revokes), so I would be solving about six problems in one go.

This approach is extremely difficult to evaluate if there is no suggestion about what is to be done when a non-offender follows, in all innocence, a play or call that seems, even briefly, to be legal? You equity-restorers really need to address this problem if you intend to have a workable (whether or not misguided) solution.

[gnasher]

Vampyr, on 2012-October-15, 10:54, said:

For the hand in question, yes. In the long run, maybe the offender will remember more often to make sufficient bids only.

We seem to be going around in circles. It is possible to discourage infractions without randomly varying the effect of the penalty., and without giving a nice present to whichever other pair happens to be at the table at the same time.

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You and Aquahombre seem very concerned and convinced that this is a big problem in the current Laws.

Then you are mistaken. I don't think there are any big problems in the current laws, just lots of small ones. And I'd prefer if you didn't attribute attitudes or opinions to me that I haven't expressed.

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This approach is extremely difficult to evaluate if there is no suggestion about what is to be done when a non-offender follows, in all innocence, a play or call that seems, even briefly, to be legal?

You restore the position to what it was before the irregularity occurred. A bid or play made innocently (and not carelessly) by the non-offenders is AI to the non-offenders, and UI to the offenders. If, as you say, an insufficient bid is a rare occurrence, presumably an insufficient bid followed by a further bid by the non-offenders would be rarer still, so this would be an uncommon problem.

[Vampyr]

gnasher, on 2012-October-15, 10:29, said:

I don't see how this is any different from dealing with a slow double, a failure to stop, an incorrect alert, or any other source of UI.

You probably don't play enough in small clubs with volunteer directors to know that these cases (for which I see no alternative to judgment rulings) are very difficult for the director (who is neither an expert player nor an expert director) to deal with.

[blackshoe]

Vampyr, on 2012-October-15, 17:06, said:

You probably don't play enough in small clubs with volunteer directors to know that these cases (for which I see no alternative to judgment rulings) are very difficult for the director (who is neither an expert player nor an expert director) to deal with.

I don't think it's so much a matter of "very difficult" as it is that some player, who is himself neither an expert player nor an expert director, may disagree — often vociferously — with the ruling TD's judgement.

[Vampyr]

blackshoe, on 2012-October-15, 18:56, said:

I don't think it's so much a matter of "very difficult" as it is that some player, who is himself neither an expert player nor an expert director, may disagree — often vociferously — with the ruling TD's judgement.

I have never seen this happen, but under gnasher's laws there would be a lot more judgment rulings, and the resulting inconsistency will cause grumbling (and lots of appeals, which my local once-a-week club is ill-equipped to handle).

[gnasher]

Vampyr, on 2012-October-15, 19:40, said:

I have never seen this happen, but under gnasher's laws there would be a lot more judgment rulings, and the resulting inconsistency will cause grumbling (and lots of appeals, which my local once-a-week club is ill-equipped to handle).

Earlier in the thread you implied that you encounter about one insufficient bid a year, and you said that this type of infraction is so rare that they aren't "a big enough problem for people to worry this much about". If that is true, how can we possibly end up with "a lot more judgement rulings" and "lots of appeals"?

But in any case, I've already suggested a solution to the problem of clubs that are ill-equipped to give judgement rulings, and you have already agreed that this would be a good solution. So why do you continue to suggest that this would be a problem?

[bluejak]

gnasher, on 2012-October-15, 10:37, said:

Yes, there is luck in bridge, but so what? That's not a reason to have the luck factor unnecessarily increased by the laws. What makes bridge interesting is the skill, not the random good or bad luck.

That's like blaming the police who fail to prevent a murder for the murder. The main cause of murder is the murderer.

So the main cause of what you call the luck factor is the failure of some people to follow the rules. Of course it is a luck factor that at some tables people follow rules, at others they don't.

[gnasher]

bluejak, on 2012-October-16, 07:39, said:

That's like blaming the police who fail to prevent a murder for the murder. The main cause of murder is the murderer.

No it's not. I'm not blaming the directors for anything. In fact, I'm not blaming anyone for anything. I'm suggesting that the current rules have undesirable consequences, and we should change them to rules that have more desirable consequences.

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So the main cause of what you call the luck factor is the failure of some people to follow the rules. Of course it is a luck factor that at some tables people follow rules, at others they don't.

Yes, and my point is that we can reduce this specific variety of luck at virtually no cost. Given that, why wouldn't we?

[bluejak]

I don't believe we can. To reduce it at no cost we have to stop people spoiling others' enjoyments by making them follow the rules, and that requires increased penalties. Your method of reduced penalties means more infractions, and far more guesses at restoring equity, which not only means an increased luck factor, but a less desirable playing environment.

[Zelandakh]

I actually think Andy's suggestion is a very good one and if someone was designing the game of bridge from a duplicate background for modern clubs/tournaments then I suspect this is how it would be done, essentially streamlining and simplifying the rules across the board. But I do have one question...Andy, your main argument for this change is to avoid arbitrary penalties; yet it is pretty clear that the results of strictly obeying the UI laws can be anything from nil to a huge penalty. Is this not also arbitrary? The measures make much more sense to me as a general concept of cleaning up the laws and making the idea and responsibilities of UI better understood by club players.

[gnasher]

bluejak, on 2012-October-16, 08:13, said:

I don't believe we can. To reduce it at no cost we have to stop people spoiling others' enjoyments by making them follow the rules, and that requires increased penalties. Your method of reduced penalties means more infractions, and far more guesses at restoring equity, which not only means an increased luck factor, but a less desirable playing environment.

I am not suggesting reduced penalties. If I have to say this again, I will write it in 28-point upper-case, with alternating yellow and purple letters, and followed by three rows of suit symbols.

I am suggesting that following an insufficient bid we would:
(1) Tell the offender to replace his illegal call with a legal call.
(2) Treat the illegal call as UI for the offender's partner but AI for the non-offenders.
(3) Penalise the offender as appropriate.

Item (3) could be 100% of a top, or 20 IMPs, or disqualification from the event, or castration (if permitted by the CoC).

[blackshoe]

gnasher, on 2012-October-16, 10:00, said:

If I have to say this again, I will write it in 28-point upper-case, with alternating yellow and purple letters, and followed by three rows of suit symbols.

I would suggest not doing that, if you want your message to remain visible.

[gnasher]

Zelandakh, on 2012-October-16, 08:21, said:

I actually think Andy's suggestion is a very good one and if someone was designing the game of bridge from a duplicate background for modern clubs/tournaments then I suspect this is how it would be done, essentially streamlining and simplifying the rules across the board. But I do have one question...Andy, your main argument for this change is to avoid arbitrary penalties; yet it is pretty clear that the results of strictly obeying the UI laws can be anything from nil to a huge penalty. Is this not also arbitrary? The measures make much more sense to me as a general concept of cleaning up the laws and making the idea and responsibilities of UI better understood by club players.

To me it seems far more reasonable for a result to be created by UI constraints than by someone being barred from the auction, or by the creation of an extra round of bidding. The result of obeying the UI rules will always be a bridge result, because it will always result from choosing logical alternatives. It will be a result that would have been obtained by some of your peers in an unpolluted auction, and might have been obtained by you. You may get a bad result, but it is one of the set of results that you might have got anyway.

In any case, under the existing rules you're already constrained by the UI rules. If your partner makes an insufficient bid and then replaces it with a pass, the insifficient bid is UI.

Maybe it's worth comparing the possible outcomes under the existing rules and under my proposed rules :

(1) Existing rules: The opponents get a benefit in the form of extra bidding space or alternative meanings for the same call.
Under my proposed rules this would be impossible.

(2) Existing rules: The insufficient bid is replaced with an equivalent (or more tightly defined) legal call, and the auction proceeds as normal.
My proposed rules: Same as under the existing rules.

(3) Existing rules: The insufficient bid is replaced with a pass, the auction proceeds with artificial restrictions on the offender's partner, and the offender's partner is also constrained by UI.
My proposed rules: The insufficient bid is replaced with a pass, the auction proceeds as normal, and the offender's partner is constrained by UI. This is closer to normal bridge, and more likely to produce a normal bridge result.

(4) My proposed rules: The insufficient bid is replaced with some other call, the auction proceeds as normal, and the offender's partner is constrained by UI.

I'm proposing to swap (1) for (4), and making (3) more likely to produce a sensible result.

[Vampyr]

gnasher, on 2012-October-16, 02:29, said:

Earlier in the thread you implied that you encounter about one insufficient bid a year, and you said that this type of infraction is so rare that they aren't "a big enough problem for people to worry this much about". If that is true, how can we possibly end up with "a lot more judgement rulings" and "lots of appeals"?

You are talking about using your laws for all regulations, so this would result in a lot more cases than just insufficient bids. (I am going to start counting insufficient bids and other irregularities, because to be honest the frequency I gave may have been accurate).

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But in any case, I've already suggested a solution to the problem of clubs that are ill-equipped to give judgement rulings, and you have already agreed that this would be a good solution. So why do you continue to suggest that this would be a problem?

Mainly because (as you know too) this is not going to happen. And I guess, in part, that though the solution you mention is good, a better one is to adopt my approach to handling irregularities. I believe it is, anyway.