[Cyberyeti]

This turned up in the pairs at the club.

I'm sitting West.

N puts the board on the table.

My partner notices an exposed card on the floor, it's the Q♠.

He turns it over before anybody else sees it, and we establish that it belongs to South.

Do you just award Av+ or do you see if the board can be played ?

Spoiler

As it happens, the auction would have gone 1N from me P-obvious P-P so there would not have been a problem.

[gordontd]

Cyberyeti, on 2012-November-01, 15:54, said:

This turned up in the pairs at the club.

I'm sitting West.

N puts the board on the table.

My partner notices an exposed card on the floor, it's the Q♠.

He turns it over before anybody else sees it, and we establish that it belongs to South.

Do you just award Av+ or do you see if the board can be played ?

Best would be to arrow-switch the board so that your partner plays the South cards.

[blackshoe]

If 1NT-all pass is the obvious auction then arrow switching (Law 16C2{a}) doesn't seem equitable to me. What else could the TD do? Perhaps allowing the board to be played with the possibility of adjustment later (Law 16C2{C}) is better? The problem, of course, is that the TD is not likely to know that 1NT-all pass is the obvious auction unless he looks at all four hands, which he is generally trained not to do. Or should he do so in these cases?

[gnasher]

blackshoe, on 2012-November-01, 16:45, said:

If 1NT-all pass is the obvious auction then arrow switching (Law 16C2{a}) doesn't seem equitable to me.

What's inequitable about it? Each side's average matchpoint expectancy is the same as it was before the board arrived at the table.

[bluejak]

I would let his partner play the South hand without looking at any of the hands, and not expect anyone to have a problem with this - so long as the scorer can handle it. Law 16C2A supports this, and it is not our job to decide whether Laws are equitable, though in fact it seems perfectly equitable to me.

Even if the scoring program cannot handle it, it involves a trivially easy manual adjustment.

[blackshoe]

gnasher, on 2012-November-01, 17:00, said:

What's inequitable about it? Each side's average matchpoint expectancy is the same as it was before the board arrived at the table.

Is it? When you switch the only hand that will bid from EW to NS?

[Cyberyeti]

gordontd, on 2012-November-01, 16:03, said:

Best would be to arrow-switch the board so that your partner plays the South cards.

That didn't occur to either me or the director at the table, and is clearly best.

In the absence of that (or say it's only noticed after the players have seen their hands), do you allow the players to play the hand and scrap the board if there's an obvious difficulty, auctions where partner or the owner of the Q♠ are dummy and partner has no decisions where Q♠ even vaguely matters would seem to allow the board to be played.

[bluejak]

First, how do you know it is the only hand that will bid? I bid on hands others don't.

Second, a top can be obtained just as much by defending as by playing.

Third, since I don't look at the hand, how would I know?

Fourth, even so, why is my matchpoint expectancy affected by having an opening rather than not having an opening bid?

Fifth, why not just follow the Law?

I grant you it is an inequitable solution if you were playing rubber bridge, but at rubber we just redeal.

[blackshoe]

bluejak, on 2012-November-01, 17:22, said:

First, how do you know it is the only hand that will bid? I bid on hands others don't.

So does my partner. I don't know that it's the only hand that will bid. The statement is based on the OP statement that 1NT-all pass is "obvious".

bluejak, on 2012-November-01, 17:22, said:

Second, a top can be obtained just as much by defending as by playing.

In theory, yes. In practice, not always.

bluejak, on 2012-November-01, 17:22, said:

Third, since I don't look at the hand, how would I know?

I believe I mentioned that possibility. I even asked a question about it. Would you care to answer it?

bluejak, on 2012-November-01, 17:22, said:

Fourth, even so, why is my matchpoint expectancy affected by having an opening rather than not having an opening bid?

If at every table, the bidding is the same and the outcome is the same, then everyone gets the same score (50% of a top, at MPs). If anything is different, someone is going to get better than average, and someone worse. Perhaps this is just "rub of the green".

bluejak, on 2012-November-01, 17:22, said:

Fifth, why not just follow the Law?

The Law does not say "you must arrow switch". That is just one of several options given the TD. I asked if another option (let them play it out and adjust the score later if knowledge of the card made a difference) might not be better in this case. You haven't addressed that question.

bluejak, on 2012-November-01, 17:22, said:

I grant you it is an inequitable solution if you were playing rubber bridge, but at rubber we just redeal.

That's also an option at duplicate, at least in some cases.

[Vampyr]

blackshoe, on 2012-November-01, 17:10, said:

Is it? When you switch the only hand that will bid from EW to NS?

Sure; why not? The same thing will happen at other tables during the scheduled arrow-switch.

[blackshoe]

Vampyr, on 2012-November-01, 17:35, said:

Sure; why not? The same thing will happen at other tables during the scheduled arrow-switch.

What scheduled arrow switch?

[Vampyr]

blackshoe, on 2012-November-01, 17:34, said:

I asked if another option (let them play it out and adjust the score later if knowledge of the card made a difference) might not be better in this case. You haven't addressed that question.


That's also an option at duplicate, at least in some cases.

If you arrow-switch you are guaranteed a valid result, so it is a better option.

[Vampyr]

blackshoe, on 2012-November-01, 17:37, said:

What scheduled arrow switch?

Well, if it is a two-winner game then of course you cannot arrow-switch. Perhaps previous posters thought that went without saying.

[pran]

I don't understand this discussion at all.

How do you rule if a board is (mis-)placed on a table so that East picks up South, South picks up West, West picks up North and North picks up East.

Then they discover the error.

You let them play the board the way they have picked it up, don't you?
And then it is just a question for the scorer (whether manual or program) to sort out the correct scores to each side. This is routine for any scorer.

No problem.

Is there any problem with similarly applying Law 16C2{a} in this case?

[pran]

Vampyr, on 2012-November-01, 17:39, said:

Well, if it is a two-winner game then of course you cannot arrow-switch. Perhaps previous posters thought that went without saying.

Frankly I don't understand why not?

For scoring purposes East-West are scored in the North South direction (and vice versa) on this board only. One consequence can be that the total scores for the two directions do not balance, is there any problem with that?

[CarlRitner]

I asked if another option (let them play it out and adjust the score later if knowledge of the card made a difference) might not be better in this case


That was the very first thought I had, and seemed to me to be the least disruptive.

[pran]

CarlRitner, on 2012-November-01, 17:53, said:

I asked if another option (let them play it out and adjust the score later if knowledge of the card made a difference) might not be better in this case


That was the very first thought I had, and seemed to me to be the least disruptive.

If it had been a deuce or something probably insignificant like that it is worth a try. But a Queen?

[CarlRitner]

pran, on 2012-November-01, 17:56, said:

If it had been a deuce or something probably insignificant like that it is worth a try. But a Queen?

The only player other than south (the owner) to see the Q is now dummy.
So it can (and in this case would have) worked out OK.

Queens are over-rated anyway....

[Vampyr]

pran, on 2012-November-01, 17:52, said:

Frankly I don't understand why not?

For scoring purposes East-West are scored in the North South direction (and vice versa) on this board only. One consequence can be that the total scores for the two directions do not balance, is there any problem with that?

Yes, I was thinking about this after posting.

CarlRitner, on 2012-November-01, 17:53, said:

I asked if another option (let them play it out and adjust the score later if knowledge of the card made a difference) might not be better in this case


That was the very first thought I had, and seemed to me to be the least disruptive.

I think that the least disruptive option is one that does not involve the possibility of cancelling the board.

[Cyberyeti]

Movement was a 3/4 howell which functioned like a Mitchell with arrow switch with a couple of wrinkles, so it was not a problem to play the board switched.