Second revoke
My apologies if this has been discussed before but I need to confirm that after East (say) has revoked, the revoke established and noted, if East then subsequently revokes in a different suit on the same hand, and this revoke is established, there is an additional transfer of trick(s) for the second revoke if East won tricks subsequent to the revoke.
Is this a common occurrence because it is the second time it has come up hereabouts in the last two weeks?
Comments
Yes, the second revoke is subject to the usual laws.
I would start by saying that any established revoke is subject to a penalty unless the laws say otherwise.
64B2 states that a second revoke in the same suit is not subject to (an automatic) penalty.
The implication, if any were needed, is that a revoke in a different suit is.
I've not had to deal with this situation but 64B2 only gives leeway if the second revoke is in the same suit as the first revoke (and by the same player). Of course, you still have to check whether is additional damage to rectify in any case.
I'm pretty sure the exemption in the laws only applies to subsequent revokes in the same suit, so I think you'd apply the law again from the point of the second revoke, as you think.
I can't recall it happening, but it probably has, discovering a revoke can further confuse a player who has already revoked once after all.
In applying the law to the second revoke, I assume that tricks won by the offending side are counted taking into account any tricks transferred as a result of the first revoke, so that there is no question of a trick being transferred twice or the offending side losing tricks won before the revoke in question.
Under your assumption (which I sympathise with), it matters which trick is transferred as a consequence of the revoke penalty, when normally that doesn't matter. (For example, say the second revoke card wins a trick; could the revoking side attempt to make that trick the trick which was transferred as a consequence of the first revoke, in order to reduce the penalty for the second?) This isn't a topic that the Laws seem to address.
The extreme situation is where the revoking side won only two tricks at the table, with a revoke card each time (and both tricks were prior to the tenth trick). A literal reading of the Laws implies to me that in this case, the first trick should be transferred to the non-revoking side (fair enough), and the second trick should be transferred to the non-revoking side twice (???); Law 64A1 is clear that the transfer only happens at the end of play, so the trick in question has definitely been won by the revoke card, even though it also gets transferred as a consequence of the first revoke. In this case, the Laws seem to be prescribing a penalty that's physically impossible to carry out. (I guess you could count the trick twice, but then the nonrevoking side would have made fourteen tricks, a situation which most scoring software will be unable to deal with.)
This seems to me like a gap in the Laws. I'd suggest using a mechanism like "at the end of play, the revoking side transfer 1 trick to the non-revoking side for every revoke for which the irregularly played card failed to win the trick, and 2 tricks to the non-revoking side for every revoke for which the irregularly played card won the trick. However, tricks prior to the first revoke cannot be transferred this way; if there are insufficiently many tricks to transfer, transfer as many as possible". That's equivalent to the current Laws in the 1-revoke case, and unambiguous as to what happens when multiple revokes occur.
A related situation is the situation where both members of a partnership revoke on the same trick, but that seems to be handled unambiguously under the present Laws (you transfer two subsequent tricks, plus the trick itself if the revoking side won it).
I can't see a problem with this. A trick can't be transferred if it doesn't exist. You don't need to identify which trick is transferred and when: at the end of play you just transfer the correct number of tricks provided sufficient were won from the revoke trick(s) on.
Not common. Perhaps you need better lighting :)
Any ambiguity over this should be resolved if you assess the penalty for the two revokes independently, and in reverse order:
When applying the law to the first revoke, we need to know whether any tricks have been won subsequently to this revoke, and we may not know this for sure until we have assessed the penalty for the second revoke. So...
If you do it in this order, it doesn't matter which tricks you choose to transfer. But if you assess the penalties in non-reverse order, it is possible to affect the overall result if you have the choice of which tricks to transfer.
Note that you don't do this in the case of two revokes in one suit, since equity for the second revoke is based on the position just before the second revoke including the penalty for the first one.
One learns something new every day. Of course it makes perfect sense when you think about it.