Law 15B: Wrong Board Discovered During Auction or Play Period
In one round last week, two pairs managed to play the completely wrong set of boards.
15B2 says the score stands.
What is interesting here is that neither pair was scheduled to play the boards at any point during the session.
15B2 makes no reference to that, and I can't find anything that says it matters, but it somehow feels different.
Any observations?
Comments
Well, if they weren't scheduled to play the boards at any point, it really just means you don't have to worry about the sections of the law that reference them 'playing' the board later. Obviously that limits the damage and makes everything simpler. It doesn't really matter in terms of what you do with the score obtained on the board.
There is one interesting outcome here that usually doesn't happen: one board has received fewer comparisons than scheduled (common and we know how to deal with it), but one board has received more comparisons than scheduled (much rarer).
When a board receives fewer comparisons than scheduled, we normally move the score for the top and bottom result slightly towards the average, to allow for the possibility that the unplayed comparison might have been a top or a bottom.
As such, it seems to me that if a board receives more comparisons than scheduled, then to get a mathematically correct result, we should move the score for the top and bottom result on that board slightly away from the average (so that a top is worth slightly above 100% and a bottom is worth slightly below 0%). This allows for the possibility that the extra comparison may have deprived a pair of a top, or been the only thing holding them away from the bottom. (The more pairs you are being compared against, the harder it is to get a top, so getting a top on that board should notionally be worth more.)
I don't think I've seen anyone argue for doing this before – presumably, the situation where a board receives too many comparisons is rare enough that Directors haven't thought about the need to correct it (and the possibility to receive more than 100% on a board is a bit surprising / might be undesirable even if it is theoretically needed for fairness).
Scoring programs will do this routinely by applying the Neuberg formula. Of course you can't get more than 100%, but the other boards can be reduced by an appropriate amount to take account of this.