Stop card out of rotation
My partner, sitting West, was second in hand and before her RHO called she pulled out the stop card. The other players at the table all indicated that it was not her turn to bid. The director was called. He ruled that North could accept the bid she was going to make. If he didn't then the bidding would revert to her RHO. She could then make any call she liked over South's call but I was to remain silent throughout the auction period. A quick look at the rule book this evening didn't seem to show if this ruling was correct or not. Can anyone help?
Comments
By Law 18A, a Stop card is not a bid; and by Law 18F, it's up to the Regulating Authority what counts as a valid method of making a bid. That means that the White Book has legal force here. White Book 1.6.2 refers to the Blue Book 3Z, which has a clear ruling on this section in 3ZB4:
(This is the sort of information I'd expect to be in the White Book, not the Blue Book, but it's a very clear ruling.)
Thus, a Stop card out of turn produces UI but otherwise has no effect (and the only grounds on which you can punish or rectify it would be "misuse of UI", i.e. the usual "had a logical alternative to the bid made, the alternative was less suggested by the UI, the bid actually made gave a better result").
As ais says. :)
Even if your partner had produced a bid card rather than the Stop card, the ruling could not have been more wrong! (You'd need Laws 29 and 31A.)
Barrie Partridge - CTD for Bridge Club Live
That's a fantastic answer ais 523 and thank you.
How's a director to find his way around the rules when there are two cross-references to be made - I sympathise with the ruling he made, especially as he is a playing director.
One has to assume the TD didn't have access to the current law book (the club should buy two or three copies) since he made a ruling that might have had some validity under the 2007 laws, but not the 2017 laws. Obviously if a club decides to adopt EBU regulations then they should have a copy of said regulations to refer to. Since most clubs probably use electronic scoring these days, having a copy on the desktop of the computer would seem a sensible step to take.
Otherwise I suggest the club sponsor the director to go on three of the many excellent EBU club-TD training days. https://www.ebu.co.uk/laws-and-ethics/td-training You get a good understanding of the common situations.
I would also suggest downloaing and printing off http://www.ebu.co.uk/documents/laws-and-ethics/laws/flow-charts.pdf and laminate them.
There are some instances where the Laws are out of logical sequence (arising from the fact that the WBFLC is allergic to re-numbering), but the Laws relating to calls out of rotation are in a pretty logical order (28 Calls not considered out of rotation; 29 General procedure; 30 Passes; 31 Bids; 32 Doubles and Redoubles).
All good practice, of course. It's a good idea to make a habit of giving rulings by quoting from the Lawbook. It gives players confidence in the ruling and avoids the occasional howler when it turns out that the Law isn't quite what the TD thought it was.
However, there are a lot of club TDs out there who are qualified by nothing more than experience, who do it out of the goodness of their hearts, perhaps having fallen into it (rather as I first did myself) somewhat by accident. It's difficult to expect such people necessarily to be thoroughly familiar with how to deal with all questions that might arise, although I would recommend everyone who directs even occasionally to familiarise themselves with the rulings that come up most often, which are (in no particular order):
(a) calls out of rotation
(b) insufficient bids
(c) leads out of turn
(d) revokes
How so? Surely the regulation that a stop card out of turn is not a bid out of turn is of some long standing.
I find that - by far - the most frequent thing I'm called to deal with is to correct a score.
Peter
Same here - although last Tuesday I had 4 revokes at 9 tables. ) Including one at trick 12.
(I meant the rule that the partner a player who bid out of turn had to be silenced for the auction)
Hello , I'm new to this site
W opens a strong 2D ,East bids 4 C's (Gerber), W bids 4D , E pulls stop card out and thinks for a while ,then he puts back the stop card and bids 5 D .
W then bids 6 D , Is this U I ? and what action should The director take.
Thanking you
Hi Zeta,
Welcome to the forum! The replaced stop card does provide UI and it certainly seems to suggest bidding 6D rather than passing, ,so we would need to see West''s hand and poll players with it to find out if passing is a Logical Alternattive.
West has unauthorised information from the fact that East considered using the stop card. As such, West must do something that's counter-suggested by this information, unless it would be illogical (i.e. unreasonable) to do so.
Any possible jump bid by East would go beyond 5!d and thus commit the side to slam. This means that West has unauthorised information that East was considering a slam force, and thus West must take a counter-suggested action – which in this case would be passing 5!d, the only non-slam-forcing action – unless doing so is unreasonable.
In most bidding systems, it would always be reasonable to pass 5 of the agreed suit after partner has asked for Aces, unless you have three of them in your own hand (thus guaranteeing that the side is not missing three Aces); the point of Ace-asking is to avoid a slam missing two Aces, and "missing two Aces" is a likely reason for a signoff after an Ace ask. So it's likely that passing is a logical alternative for West, and as the counter-suggested action, West must in that case take it. If there were a dispute about whether passing 5!d is really reasonable – e.g. if West has three Aces, the King of Diamonds, and a stronger hand than 2!d guaranteed – then the Director would find players of a similar strength to West, show them the hand, and say "suppose the bidding has gone 2!d strong by you, 4!c Gerber, 4!d, 5!d, what would you do next with this hand?". If some of the players pass, and a reasonable proportion of the players consider passing (even if they eventually do something else), then passing is a reasonable option. If nobody passes, or if hardly anyone considers passing, then we let West bid their next-weakest bid (in this case, 6!d); again, East's behaviour suggested strength, so West has to do the opposite and bid as weakly as would be reasonable.
If West violates the rules via bidding on after gaining unauthorised information (UI) from East, while having a logical alternative that was less suggested by East's hesitation than the action West actually took, then at the end of the hand, the Director tries to calculate what would have happened if West had played legally (if this is uncertain, the Director will calculate the expected score taking into account the probability of the various scenarios). If West benefited from their infraction, i.e. if they scored better after their bid than they would have done passing, then the Director will use the score from their simulation as the score for the board. If West's infraction didn't help the partnership (say West bid 6!c, and it ends up going down), then the table result stands.
It's also possible that the East/West partnership will be given a procedural penalty for deliberate misuse of unauthorised information; this will happen if the director judges that West intentionally took advantage of the UI to make a bid they wouldn't otherwise have made. That doesn't change the score on the board (which, assuming we're playing duplicate bridge, has to be adjusted as fairly as possible so that the score comparisons at other tables aren't affected). Instead, an amount will be taken directly from their total score at the end of the night (again, this means that the relative order of other players aren't affected). The amount will depend on the length of the tournament and the form of scoring, but as an example, in a 25-board matchpoint event, East/West's final score would probably be reduced by 1% of the total top for all boards (i.e. 25% of the top for one board); a final score of 60% would become 59%, etc..
Incidentally, the normal advice to avoid having your partner's actions be constrained by UI is to think before you Ace-ask; work out what your next bid will be over each of the possible responses before you ask, so that you'll be able to make your next bid at normal speed. That way, if your partner wants to do something unusual (like raising five to six), their action won't have been suggested by the unauthorised information and thus won't be penalised.
Hi, Zeta,
Even without the use of the Stop Card, there was, by your account, a significant period of thinking, and that provides the same UI.
You might also take a look at EBU White Book Para 8.16.4, which you can look up from elsewhere on this site.
It is titled "Hesitation Blackwood", but I would suggest that the advice applies equally well here in this case of "Hesitation Gerber".
Barrie Partridge - CTD for Bridge Club Live
I have just realised that West's 4D response may show either of two different numbers of aces. Maybe none or three? In that case, there may be cause for East to bid 5D in case West has none but expecting West to raise to 6D if holding three. This is mentioned in WB 8.16.4. But the difficulty here is that West has made a strong opening and is unlikely to have no aces at all. This may be why East is thinking about what to do. East would have been wiser to do this bit of thinking before bidding Gerber. So we are back to polling as per Gordon and ais523, and I would expect it more likely that we will adjust
Barrie Partridge - CTD for Bridge Club Live
These are the hands ,I didn't understand their bidding
West
spade J 4
heart A K Q 7
diamond A Q 9 6 3
club A 4
East
spade A 6 3 2
heart J 6 3
diamond K 10 9
club A J
There may be another problem, both hands have the Ace of clubs.
The traditional response to Gerber is that 4 !d shows 0 or 4 Aces - which is impossible. I wonder if East deduced that West hadn't picked up the call as Gerber (was it alerted)
This
is unauthorised information, It suggests East was thinking of bidding more, or wanted to make a jump to show more.
West bidding 6D may well be using Unauthorised Information.
interestingly, I was taught that asking for aces was not to tell if we are in 6 or not, but rather 6 or 7 (possibly in a suit or NT too).
So, after 4NT, slam is inevitable... so logical alternatives would not apply for me as it should be using a partnerships methods?
Most people don't play 4NT as forcing to slam. If 4NT were played as a slam force in a particular partnership, then continuing after 5-of-a-suit would obviously be reasonable. In that case there would still be potential adjustments for UI, but they'd be in the opposite sense, i.e. we'd be adjusting if a player bid 5 of a suit quickly and it was unexpectedly passed, rather than if a player bid 5 of a suit slowly and it was unexpectedly raised.
This seems quite odd to me, given how much effort goes into organising Blackwood variants to try to ensure that it's possible to stop at the five level if you hear the right answer. Have you never stopped short of slam after asking for aces?
It's also not usually the number of aces or kings that determines whether you should be in a small slam or a grand, save that you won't want to be in a grand with an uncontrolled suit.
Good points. Just as well I don't actually play Gerber very often if I forget the responses! :3
Indeed, it now seems surprising that West bid 4 !d as he has three aces. We can't do much until we do understand their bidding, so that's the first step now. In addition to checking whether 4 !c was alerted, I want to ask West
Why did you bid 4 !d?
Why did you bid 6 !d?
(These days, many of us would open the West hand with 2NT. The use of the Basic Acol 2 !d opening here, with wide application of Gerber, is a very old fashioned style and becoming quite rare.)
Barrie Partridge - CTD for Bridge Club Live
The 4c bid was normal Gerger and was not alerted.
I think W's bid of 4D's was a mistake . it should have been 4nt showing 3 A's . That's proberbly why E was hesitating , he then bid 5D's.
I did wonder why W then decided to bid 6 D , perhaps he realised that he had given the wrong reply to E, or did he take into account the UI given by the stop card error .
Gerber should have been alerted (if the Blue Book is being followed) as a suit call in the first round of the auction - even if over 3NT.
Unfortunately if West realised that he had given the wrong reply to East then, given the facts, this is almost certainly due to the hesitation/ use of the stop card - and should be proscribed. Which is why we need to know why he bid 4 !d and 6 !d - since that sequence means that the pair can never play in 5 !d.
I agree. If E had bid 5 !d in tempo, without the Stop card issue, then it would have been much less likely that W would have realised that his 4 !d had been a misbid, and it seems quite likely that he would have passed.