Faced cards by Opponent
This story was posted by a local club. Bidding complete & dummy faces their cards but their LHO faces all their cards. Declarer played 2 rounds when someone noticed the error - all asleep it seems. Further more, the offender demands that she can pick the rest of her cards up - TD called.
Declarer is allowed to play all the offenders (penalty cards) but there is more - if offender's partner is on lead 51b - declarer can forbid or insist on a particular suit. If declarer uses this law, all the offender's cards may be picked up and play continue normally.
The TD at the time was not qualified but uses a little yellow book to find answers when he gets stuck!
Any comments
elizabeth
Comments
I think the director has to be Solomon in these cases. People come to play Bridge and have a bit of fun. You don't want to put them off coming - we're haemorrhaging players at too fast a rate as it is. At some clubs members aren't there attempting to make improvements to their NGS. Sticking to the rule of the law all the time can cause upsets for inexperienced players especially when hesitations are involved. If I was directing I'd probably explain what the law book says but then I'd try to lighten the mood by saying something like " I'll give you an option - why doesn't LHO pick up their cards and you play out the hand? If you're not happy with the result call me again and I'll have another look at it. What you have here is an interesting double-dummy problem". And give them all a big smile! A tournament or a club with top players would get the Law applied.
I had this happen at a congress once! I was directing and it caused much confusion, even for declarer. Only point you may have wrong is that L51b allows only the cards in the suit required/forbidden to be picked up, not all that remain.
At a lower key game you may wish to fudge things a bit ...
Peter
Thanks for the replies. I thought it was only the specified suit that may be picked up but the TD insisted on all the cards. People do get upset with some rulings but as Alan said "a big smile".
elizabeth
I wonder how this should be dealt with in an important event? Of course we may say with justification that it would never happen in an important event as someone at the table would have noticed as soon as the second dummy went down.
There are a couple of possibilities: we might say that the two tricks so far were made without declarer exercising the right to specify a card and that in effect "play anything" had been said for the tricks that had been played, so that from here on we just continue applying the law as explained by Peter above, with all the defender's remaining exposed cards being penalty cards.
The other possibility is that the director could under L50 deem that the defenders' exposed cards should just be picked up and returned to hand without being penalty cards. The potential problem with this is that under L50E, the cards picked up would be UI to the other defender, who would have a hard time avoiding taking advantage of the knowledge of every card in partner's hand!