Another unintended call
Playing pairs the contract has clearly been decided (1NT - 3NT) and everyone goes to pass. One player on the non-bidding side bids 7C by mistake. Nobody notices and everyone else continues passing. They notice when the expected player is unable to make an opening lead. The auction is over, but not the auction period.
Scenario 1: On BBO, the player who misbid has not called again, so under SBB 4.3.1 they are allowed to change their call, but the system will not allow them to do so. What do we do?
Scenario 2: On Realbridge (this is what actually happened). The Law 25A limit of "until partner calls" applies (as you can stop people calling by an appropriate utterance, that is what the orgnaisers do). Do we have any choice but to allow a clearly absurd contract to go ahead?
Comments
Law 25A4 is very clear on the issue, but I agree that the consequences in this situation are unfortunate. (Interestingly, depending on vulnerability, 7!c undoubled might well be a good score against 3NT making, but it isn't really bridge.) My guess is that when writing the law, nobody appreciated that everyone at the table could somehow end up missing a mechanical error that caused a grand slam to be bid. (Note that the 7!c card and Pass card are next to each other in real-life bidding boxes, too, so this isn't a completely implausible mistake to make even in real life.)
Was the 7!c bid in direct or protective position? I think there's a reasonable case to be made that if the 7!c bidder's partner were paying sufficiently little attention that they managed to pass out what they thought was the same contract twice, then they deserve the result they get as a consequence (and if the opponents are paying sufficiently little attention that they fail to double…). It isn't like a 7!c card looks anything like a pass card, even if they're pretty close to each other in terms of physical position.
If the 7!c were in direct position, then it's a more understandable mistake. (It possibly also matters whether the 7!c bidder were a passed hand; if unpassed, I can just about imagine hands that could plausibly bid 7!c intentionally even if both opponents had their bid. So it wouldn't be 100% obvious to the other players at the time that the call was a mechanical error.)
In short, I don't think there's any good fix here, and the fix recommended in the Laws isn't obviously wrong (even though it may be unfair). The result isn't going to have much to do with bridge, but undoubled, it probably isn't going to be so extreme as to override the results of the other boards (say you go for 1100 against an available 400 for the opponents, that's only a bottom at matchpoints and only a 12-IMP loss at IMPs, well within the range of normal random variation; and the actual result probably won't be as bad as that).
I think the section of SBB 4.3.1 that says " – UNDOs are allowed even if partner has called
as long as the situation has not got completely out of hand" is intended to cover this. If it's gone too far for the software to allow an undo, then it's not allowed.
I'm not sure it has got out of hand (nobody has given any meaningful information by their actions).
Isn't the fact that the platform won't allow something that should be allowed similar to that in SBB 4.3.2: The TD will rule under Law21B3, as if it had been too late to change the call by the non-offending side.
I think the table deserves whatever result happens. If nobody is paying sufficient attention to realise there has been a 7C bid, what is the TD supposed to do. One of the players can ask 'is that what you meant?'
I don't think those two things are equivalent.
I would have taken "got out of hand" to mean:
"If we wind back and make the correction, it would no be longer possible for the players to play the hand normally"
with "normally" meaning unhampered by excessive UI.
What is an alternative meaning?
All that or "it is no longer possible for the software to let us take the call back".
I has a similar situation last weekend, except here the partner of the player making the "unexpected" bid did notice.
Unfortunately, they are not allowed to say anything, nor can they wait too long to see if partner notices. They can't even alert and hope (above 3NT).
Are we not allowed to draw attention to an irregularity?
Certainly in a friendly social club environment, it seems rather counter productive to the aims of the club.
Should the bidding for example go:
1NT - 2D (transfer)
2H - 2NT
7C, then this looks rather irregular?
My usual habit in real life if I think RHO has made a mechanical error (assuming I think this for reasons unrelated to the contents of my hand – it's important to avoid UI) is to ask what the bid means – there is no rule against asking a question for the benefit of the opponents, and it usually prompts them to realise they played the wrong bidding card. (As a bonus, this will let you know what the bid means if it was intentional; after all, if a bid doesn't make sense then there has probably been a missed alert.) It would make sense to extend this to online play too, especially in social games (so far, I don't think I've ever been in this situation, though).
Trying to fix your partner's mistakes like this, though, is much more of an ethical minefield. The Laws go to quite some effort to prevent players trying to save their partners from themselves (e.g. you can't tell your opponents that your partner failed to alert until after the auction – sometimes even after the play – because this would also let your partner know that they had misinterpreted your bid). In a social game I can imagine agreeing that such fixes should be allowed; however, in a social game I'd also expect the opponents to automatically suggest/allow an undo if something like this happened.
An irregularity is defined as "a deviation from correct procedure" (Laws, Defintions). A strange looking call is not a deviation from procedure (even though it may be a deviation from their agreed system).
Although I agree we need to manage the situation. I don't think we can allow partner to question a call (that opens up too many issues), and I'm not sure that encouraging common conversation such as "7C partner? Wow!" would work either. We certainly need to be lenient where we can - we don't want to put people off.
It strikes me that in most of these cases, the 7!c bidder's LHO isn't going to have paused for 10 seconds over the skip bid, like they're supposed to (and an unexpected 10 second pause in real life would probably clue the bidder into what was going on, although pauses that long frequently happen online due to connection trouble and so this might not have the prompting effect we'd want). So there is an irregularity there, even if it isn't one that's really connected to what actually happened. (I think RealBridge also shows an actual stop card on the table, doesn't it? Does the bidder see it, in addition to the bidder's LHO?)
The intended purpose of the 10-second pause probably wasn't to give the bidder time to work out whether they'd misclicked, but it may well be a good idea to make that an "official" purpose of the pause (so that someone who passes too quickly over 7!c has some responsibility for the misclick not being noticed).
It's not unreasonable to read L25A3 as allowing precisely that. I have certainly heard more than one member of the WBFLC say so.
So a player can question their partner's call ("did you really mean that partner?") but at the risk of creating UI if the answer is yes? I guess UI is unlikely for such an extreme bid.
Actually I don't think there's anything stopping a player from questioning a call (contrary to my earlier post). You can give UI but not use it.
Yes it does, and everyone sees it (I think!).
Of course not every misclick or blatantly odd bid will be a skip bid.
Should we be telling players this?
I think the players should be told that if something odd happens they can ask the table or call the TD to find out if there has been a technical problem, a misclick, or just a deliberate odd action.
I think they should be told something similar for face-to-face bridge. If partner (face-to-face) opened 7C without alot of 'grand-standing' (and no stop card), I would politely ask if they were messing about.
As Gordon suggests above, a neutral 'is that what you meant partner?' could be permitted by law, and some law makers think it already is.