EBU online BBO games - how to apply law 68D when a claim is disputed
Yesterday I played in an EBU online tournament on BBO. Declarer was in 4H and made a claim, without any statement as to his intended line of play. There were 2 trumps outstanding in my hand. Also possibly relevent is that there was sufficient time remaining in the round for declarer to have made a simple statement as to his line of play and how he would have navigated the missing trumps.
BBO software asks you whether or not you accept the claim. I rejected the claim. However it appears that the default is just to play on. This is contrary to law 68D, in a real world bridge situation I would call the director as play becomes suspended, law 70 then applies. So my questons are firstly:
- Is it correct in an EBU online game that we should expect law 68D and Law 70 to apply? Or, do different standards, etiquette and protocols apply?
- If so how do you actually call the EBU tornament director? Do you go through the blue button, or via the chat function?
regards Mark Humphris
Mark Humphris
Comments
Additionally, 3. if time is short, ie the end of the round is about to happen and TD has told the players to "hurry or claim", is it reasonable to lower the standards applied when making a claim as there may not be sufficient time to type an explanation?
Mark Humphris
A clarification (not an answer!) :
BBO is not a perfect simulation of real bridge and is geared to running without TDs. BBO implicitly applies law 68D 2 (b) - i.e. all four players agree to continue playing without calling the TD or using law 70.
I think this is correct - certainly the first clause of it - though you could still ask the TD to look at it instead of playing on. You call the TD using the TD button. It's worth noting that if you reject a claim as a defender, declarer doesn't know who rejected it.
I had a situation in one of the matches where I claimed, it got rejected, so I clarified my claim and claimed again, again rejected. So I started to cash my top winners, when one of the defenders (presumably not the one who rejected it) claimed the same amount on my behalf!
Not sure one defender can overrule their partner like that in face-to-face bridge.
if one defender claims the other defender gets no say in the matter (unlike f2f bridge and unlike what the laws say)
in general claims are much more relaxed online, partly because you can't see who has rejected the claim (so you don't know who thinks there's a problem) and partly because as said it was designed for play without a TD
one thing I've learnt to be careful of with claims is that inexperienced opponents don't realise you aren't claiming all the tricks. I claimed 4 of the last 5 tricks in 3NT with 4 winning clubs in dummy and a spade loser, and it was rejected because one opponent thought I was claiming the rest. Took a surprisingly long time to resolve, because you don't know if people are being slow or don't understand or what....
If you are not claiming ALL the remaining tricks, I have found it quicker to play it out because of what Frances says.
... and unlike Bridge Club Live. In BCL if one defender claims the other gets a pop-up box asking whether they agree with the claim.
Indeed, and if the other defender doesn't agree, then obviously declarer gets to know. I have never been asked for a ruling relating to this.
Barrie Partridge - CTD for Bridge Club Live
Another big problem with BBO claims is that they ask the opponents to accept/reject when you attempt to concede all the tricks (which can be a big problem if you were conceding in an attempt to save time in the round).
I find claiming can be faster than playing out the remaining tricks, but only if there are a lot of remaining tricks. Something like 5 remaining tricks is probably the minimum. (If you only have trumps left, and the opponents don't, claiming the last 3 or more tricks can save time, as that's a very quick claim to check.)
I'm also in the habit of cashing a trump immediately before claiming as declarer (assuming that the contract still makes afterwards), as an easy way of demonstrating that I know that there are no trumps remaining (because both opponents showed out on the trick), but this is a habit I picked up in real-life games and extended onto BBO. I think it's helpful for getting the defenders to agree to claims more quickly.
That's not our experience running EBU games and we do ask people to claim when they are running out of time. But perhaps it helps that on the whole the games are quite strong.