Questioning a bid
The guidance says you should not question your opponent's bid if you have no interest in bidding. The rationale given is that your partner could have unautorised info because you have asked. My question is, if you can only ask when you are considering whether to bid surely if you then pass your partner has unauthorised information because they know you were thinking of bidding.
Comments
I quote from the EBU's club etiquette guide:
_Avoid asking questions about the bidding while it is continuing, unless you really need to know the answer in order to decide what your next call should be (because if you then pass, your partner might draw an inference about your strength, or your interest in the suit bid). Otherwise, wait until the auction is finished.
_
https://www.ebu.co.uk/documents/cmh/Club Etiquette.pdf
It looks like this document needs to be updated because this is simply wrong, for the reason given by the original poster.
The up-to-date guidance for this subject is in the Blue Book section 2E, and is rather more subtle than the quotation given, though of course there are still difficulties that might arise.
I will update the wording in the Club Management Handbook.
Jonathan Lillycrop
Club Liaison Officer
This is an "Ask Robin" question/answer I wrote for the Discovery magazine due in the summer.
Shouldn't that answer also cover the fact that not asking is also unauthorised information to partner? Knowing that your partner's choice of call is not affected by the meaning of the opponents' call can be very relevant information in some cases.
The only way to avoid giving unauthorised information is to have an agreement to always ask about calls that meet particular criteria, and to follow it strictly – questions that are compelled by system give no information. I frequently end up asking about calls where I have no interest for this reason; if I didn't ask, partner would know I had no interest! Not asking is therefore probably a violation of Law 73B1, in that it communicates by means of questions not asked; the only exception is situations in which you can't possibly hold a hand for which you would need to ask, and in that situation the question doesn't convey any information anyway. (It is probably the case that the only way to avoid violating Law 73B1 is for your questions, or lack of questions, to always be determined entirely by the bidding sequence so far, and never dependent on the contents of your hand. This means that any advice for varying your questions based on whether you need to know the answer or not is, in effect, advising players to break the Laws.)
There are some common auctions where the information from questions not asked can matter a lot, e.g. your left-hand opponent opens 1NT, your right-hand opponent bids 2D (no alert or announcement). If you pass in this situation without asking, you're giving away to partner the information that you don't care whether responder has diamonds or hearts, which in turn normally implies that your hand is fairly weak – that gives partner the useful information that it might be unwise to, e.g., protect if opener passes 2D.
Years ago I was told off by a member of a club committee for asking a question and then not bidding. I cannot now remember the sequence of events. I was made to feel awful about doing so as one of the opposition had gone to the committee without my knowledge to complain. The chair at the time then published a set of guidelines including one which said that if you asked a question then you must then bid. I knew that this was not quite the correct information as I had passed the EBU directors course myself. To this day I have always felt that this scenario needs more clarification. I am glad to see a better explanation in the club handbook. I seem to remember that the question did not have any effect on the score at the time. But the incident left me feeling bad and one of my regular partners who was on the committee at the time explained that the club rule was you did not ask.
There are two problems:
1. The existing guidelines allow experienced player to bully less experienced players (when the less experienced players want to ask questions to understand what is going on)
2. Regardless of imprecise regulations and guidelines, some players will always find a way to bully others. These bullies are the problem, not the other players, or the regulations/guidelines.
Quite right - as a club we encourage our 'students' to start playing as soon as possible. So they want to ask questions just because they want to know what is happening. I am fine with that and we teach them when to ask and what questions to ask - such as, "what is the meaning of the 2C bid?", rather than with a surprised tone, "Does that show clubs?".
When I play against them I will often prompt them at the start to ask whatever questions they want to and when alerting something that is very different to what they get taught, I will alert and let them know that they will probably want to ask what it means. I want to get tops through good understandings and good card play, not by bamboozling new players.
Other people like bullying others and getting good scores via BS tactics.
My number one rule is to be nice to the opposition and your partner(s) - you want them to play next week.
In the final published version, this sentence became