a late dispute after a claim agreed
Declarer claimed last 3 tricks.
All agreed and result was put into Bridgemate. The next deal was removed from board but no calls yet made. Opponents started discussing the previous hand and decided that declarer must have revoked because he must have had some spade losers.
How best to rule on this?
Comments
Like any other revoke. The round has not ended, and no call has been made on the next board (64 B4 and B5). The TD is going to have to go through the play and work out if there was a revoke or not; if there was it is ruled as on any other established revoke.
I do realise that getting everyone to agree on what the play was can be a bit of a challenge, but I think the Law is clear here.
If it turns out there was no revoke, the defence are also in time to object to the claim if the claim was faulty.
Isn't there, or should there not be, a difference between the two situations where a player remembers only after the end of the board that an opponent had in fact revoked because he had turned up with a card in a suit having discarded earlier, and the one mentioned here, where a player thinks that the opponent 'must have revoked'. Is 'must have' a good enough reason to make the TD go through this exercise?
Yes, it's a good enough reason. Two arguments why:
First, if a player thinks an opponent 'must have revoked' and you just tell him that it's too late, he is going to be upset, and then you risk an argument between the two pairs, and someone is going to think they've been accused of cheating and they obviously didn't revoke etc etc. I've seen these before (although usually what happens is that one of the pairs cannot remember how the play went at all, which makes the poor TD's life even harder)
Second is that it's not uncommon to be able to deduce that someone has revoked without knowing in which suit. For example, declarer counts and hand and sees his RHO show out of two suits. He knows his LHO therefore has, say, 9 cards in those two suits, he has seen 3 cards in a third suit and thus LHO has at most one spade. When he claims with 3 tricks to go and sees that LHO has two spades left, he knows something has gone wrong somewhere.
Now it's true that must of the time what has gone wrong is that declarer has mis-counted. But some of the time RHO has revoked. Which is more likely depends on who the players are, but you can't really rule on the basis of 'you are a poor player so I assume you have miscounted'.
Is it not too late after all parties agree, accept the entry into Bridgemates and then muck their cards?
Unless the 3 parties (not counting dummy) all agree to the order of play, how can it be established if a revoke took place or not?
No, it's not too late. You have until the end of the Correction Period in which to ask for a TD ruling. Correction Periods are a matter of Regulation and not Law and you will find all the EBU Correction Periods in Section 2.5 of the White Book. Your club can regulate different Correction Periods, but assuming your club uses EBU Correction Periods, and it's an ordinary Pairs session, then you have until 20 minutes after the end of play to ask for a ruling.
The longer it's left before a ruling is sought, then the more difficult it is for the TD to establish the facts.
Also, of course, in the case like the OP where it is thought that there may have been a revoke, once the non-offending side has called on the next board, there wouldn't be an automatic transfer of tricks anyway and the TD could only adjust for equity. (Law 64B/C)
Barrie Partridge - CTD for Bridge Club Live
It's more difficult for the TD to ascertain the facts in these circumstances, and if he cannot establish to his satisfaction that there has been a revoke or a bad claim, then he will allow the agreed score to stand. So the side claiming the revoke is at a disadvantage in practical terms, in comparison with the position if they had noticed that something was wrong and called the TD earlier. But that does not make it too late in theory.