On Apr 23, 12:35 pm, Michael Angelo Ravera <marav...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
wrote:
> ACBL, Midchart, Dealer and Vulnerablity irrelevant. No hand records.
> Partner and I are both BLMs. Opponents are both SLMs.
>
> I opened 1C [ART, 15+, any shape] which partner alerted (approximately
> in time. He is sometimes a slow alerter).
>
> LHO asks for an explanation and gets "15 or more points and the club
> bid is artificial".
>
> LHO asks "could he have a weak no trump" (may have intended to ask
> instead "do you play weak no trump").
Or he could have gotten it confused with the Polish Club.
> Partner explains "No, 15 or more
> points. I don't know anything about his shape right now".
>
> LHO asks "so when would he open 1NT instead of 1C." Partner answers
> "1NT would be completely different hand".
>
> LHO may have asked another question or two, but ended up passing.
>
> My partner ends up declaring (3NT, I believe). RHO leads a club and I
> call the TD. When she arrived, I explained that the "lead may have
> been 'inspired' [demonstrably suggested] by unauthorized information".
>
> When I layed my dummy, LHO was somehow surprised to see a balanced 16
> count. (Didn't listen, didn't comprehend, didn't understand. I don't
> know. Language wasn't a problem. LHO and I are both third generation
> of the same ethnic background and all 4 of us at the table have West
> Coast accents).
>
> When the (weak) TD arrived at the table, she basically ruled that the
> lead was obvious (wrong thing to say in any case. I would have said
> "play the hand and we'll have a look after you complete play").
> Whether the ruling was right or wrong wasn't something that I was
> going to try to determine at least until after the hand was played. I
> don't even remember the result. I had called for a ruling and had
> gotten one. I moved on.
IMHO, when you play a basically unfamiliar system, it shouldn't be
unexpected that you would get a lot of questions; the questioner,
knowing that this isn't a familiar system, isn't going to know what
the implications of the bid are (and, in particular, what other bids
could have been made with other 15+ hands). Questions that try to
ascertain the basic nature of the system you're playing don't really
suggest anything about the questioner's hand, even if it takes
multiple questions to do so; and in general, unless there were
questions that mentioned "clubs", I would tend not to rule that
anything is suggested by the questioning. Of course, if the
questioner had asked something like "But he doesn't necessarily have
clubs, right?" more than once, there might be a suggestion about his
club suit. But this doesn't appear to be the case here. Based on the
information you gave, I don't see any reason to believe that the UI
suggested a club lead, so I don't think I would have adjusted.
When I played Precision, I carried a couple of index cards around
describing the key information about 1C, 1D, and 1NT opening bids that
the opponents would need to know (1C=17+ if balanced, 16+ otherwise,
1NT=10-13 or 13-16 depending on vulnerability, 1D could be on two
diamonds on a balanced hand 10-16 outside the 1NT range for the
vulnerability). Something like that would help even though it's not
required; apparently, in your case, it could very well reduce the
number of questions the opponents ask and thus avoid some of these
potential UI problems.
> It appears that my LHO talked to the head of our directors'
> association and complained that I had "accused him of cheating". Well,
> first, it isn't him in any case. It would be his partner's acting on
> the UI that would be a viloation (not even cheating anymore than a
> false start caused by the center sneezing in American Football is
> cheating).
Of course asking for a director ruling is not an accusation of
cheating, but lots of players don't understand that. I had a case
some years ago:
1H 2NT(1) (1) Game-forcing raise, 4 hearts
3C(2) ...4H (2) Shortness
4NT(3) (3) RKCB
Responder hesitated before bidding 4H, the weakest possible bid; when
opener bid 4NT, I called the director, since the auction was
suspicious; the hesitation would tend to show a hand thinking about
taking stronger action, and would suggest bidding on. Director ruled,
after the hand (correctly), that opener's hand was too strong to pass
(she had 20 HCP) and thus there was no violation. But there was some
bad feeling at the table after that; the opponents were miffed that I
had called the director.
Perhaps the ACBL hasn't done a good enough job of educating players
about the Laws; on the other hand, there's only so much they can do,
and I'm afraid there will always be players who take director calls
personally.
> Second, he mumbled something about impropper disclosure, but I am
> pretty sure that it was his own misunderstanding or failure to
> comprehend implications.
>
> The ACBL alert procedures specifically state that players are expected
> to be prepared to defend against strong 1C openers and that no
> prealert is required for them.
But "being prepared to defend against strong 1C" doesn't mean "knowing
instantly about the details of your system as soon as you open 1C"---
something that would require a divine level of omniscience. To me,
the fact that you explained 1C as 15+ would raise some red flags---
Precision is normally 16+ or 17+, which makes it quite possible that
you're playing some fundamentally different system, and that I may
need to find out what the heck is going on before I continue playing.
If you have a properly filled out CC, I would have done my asking
before the round started, but not everyone does that.
> So, my question for the group, whether you agree with me about calling
> the director or not in this particular case, is "How many questions
> can your partner ask about a bid and then pass before it demonstrably
> suggests a lead?"
One. Or 1,000,000. It depends on the exact auction and the exact
questions. As I said, I do not believe the questions asked in this
instance suggest a lead, no matter how many there were. More
generally, questions about an artificial suit opening don't
necessarily suggest a lead of that suit, but some types of questions
might.
-- Adam
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