Removing hands after play
I often get boards where contracts contradict and it looks like someone has put the hands back in the wrong order. I suspect this is happening with some pairs I have who regularly remove hands after play and talk about who did what and why and the board and the hands spin round and end up in the wrong place. There is something in the back of my head that recalls a law that states that doing this (removing hands from boards) is verboten - where is that law?
Comments
It's Law 7C.
If players need to enter opening leads, it can help to identify where a rotation of the hands (mis-boarding) has occurred, and that can help to identify culprits if you don't catch them transgressing Law 7C anyway!
Barrie Partridge - CTD for Bridge Club Live
It looks like Law 7 is not helping me here. I want to stop them taking the hands out after the have been played and talking about who did what and why which apart from slowing play leads to the possibility of hand being replaced in the wrong order and unfortunately Law 7 allows this as long as the others are present (which they are)
_Law 7
C. Returning Cards to Board After play has finished, each player should shuffle his original thirteen cards, after which he restores them to the pocket corresponding to his compass position. Thereafter no hand shall be removed from the board unless a member of each side, or the Director, is present. _
L90B. Offences Subject to Procedural Penalty
The following are examples of offences subject to procedural
penalty (but the offences are not limited to these):
player (see Law 7).
the board.
LAW 7 - CONTROL OF BOARD AND CARDS
B. Removal of Cards from Board
own cards, not permitting them to be mixed with
those of any other player. No player shall touch any
cards other than his own (but declarer may play
dummy’s cards in accordance with Law 45) during or
after play except by permission of an opponent or
the Director.
LAW 7 A. Placement of Board When a board is to be played it is placed in the centre of the table where it shall remain, correctly oriented, until play is completed. . . .
Can I know the reason for this rule?
You can, since I was the person who suggested its inclusion. The greatest source of mis-boarding in clubs is people turning the boards 90 degrees to make space for dummy, or taking the board off the table entirely and putting it back incorrectly. I got fed up of people arguing that nothing said they weren't allowed to do this.
There's a minor secondary benefit in removing a potential source of communication between defenders.
Thanks Gordon . . . can I also know . . . . as Law 7a is 'tjhe law' is there a penalty if that is done done - what is that penalty?
Usually just a warning - most laws don't have prescribed penalties for their breach, simply an adjustment if it causes damage. However, a misboard should be penalised - 25% of a top is the standard penalty in the EBU - and so should repeated breaches of this law.
I don't think that was a "minor secondary benefit" since major championships have been won by players using the position of the board as a means of communication.
(If there are 11 tables, is the 'top' always 20 (penalty 5) or, if there were shared tops and the highest score 16, would the penalty be reduced to 4?)
Minor in the sense that I believe misboarding to be far more frequent than collusive cheating based on an agreement as to where the tray is put.
I think "top" in terms of a penalty is referring to the hypothetical top a pair would get on a board if they beat the score of every other player, not the actual highest number of matchpoints that anyone scored on the board. (Bear in mind that penalties aren't necessarily attached to any particular board – although they are in this case, it's easy to imagine giving a pair a "50% of a top" DP for misbehaviour between rounds – so varying the size of the penalty based on the number of pairs sharing the top wouldn't make sense in that case.)
Absolutely correct.
A penalty does not necessarily relate to a particular board. A top can only be the common top to which all boards in a session are scored, as the previous posters have said.