[Trinidad]

This is a story that I heard this week. I wonder what the BBF-ers think the TD should do.

In a team match (with computer dealt hands) the following happened:

On one of the first boards, a player calls the TD and says that he recognizes the hand. The TD takes him away from the table and asks for more details. The player says: "I am the dealer and I will open a weak 1NT. Then, my LHO will show his spade suit and they will reach 4♠. This will go down when I cash my ♣AK and give my partner a club ruff. He has a singleton club.".

You are the TD, what would you do?

Rik

[FrancesHinden]

What was the source of the boards?

When this has happened to me, it's been at a match played privately where the boards were hand-dealt and it's entirely plausible that one has remained not redealt from the previous match. In that case we just redeal the board.

I know you say 'computer-dealt' boards, but is it still possible this particular one has not been re-dealt since the last time they were used? And would the player concerned have played then?

[Trinidad]

FrancesHinden, on 2012-December-15, 11:44, said:

What was the source of the boards?

I don't know. But let's assume -for the sake of the discussion- that the boards were made by the 16 year old daughter of the TD to earn some pocket money. (There is no reason whatsoever to assume that this is close to the truth in the case at hand. In fact, I am pretty sure that the boards were not made by a 16 year old girl.)

Rik

[pran]

TD must investigate the allegation and verify whether it is correct. If so he has no choice other than to cancel the board at all tables where it is scheduled to be played (and also at tables where it has already been played). (See Law 6D2)

If the allegation is indeed confirmed then the Director must conduct further investigation to determine whether more boards can be faulty in the same (or similar) way, and he may as the result of such investigation have to cancel more, or even all the boards for the event.

The situation should be reported to a proper authority which should conduct investigations to validate:
- the computer program used for generating deals,
- the procedures followed by the operator of this computer program and of the machine in case used for physically sorting the cards to each board,
- the routines for distributing pre-dealt boards to the various events. (I know of situations where the same set of boards has acidentally been distributed again to a second event.)

[pran]

Trinidad, on 2012-December-15, 12:22, said:

I don't know. But let's assume -for the sake of the discussion- that the boards were made by the 16 year old daughter of the TD to earn some pocket money. (There is no reason whatsoever to assume that this is close to the truth in the case at hand. In fact, I am pretty sure that the boards were not made by a 16 year old girl.)

Rik

There is nothing wrong in having a 16 year old girl (or even younger) operating a computer card dealing program or a card sorting machines provided routines and training are satisfactory.

[axman]

Trinidad, on 2012-December-15, 11:40, said:

This is a story that I heard this week. I wonder what the BBF-ers think the TD should do.

In a team match (with computer dealt hands) the following happened:

On one of the first boards, a player calls the TD and says that he recognizes the hand. The TD takes him away from the table and asks for more details. The player says: "I am the dealer and I will open a weak 1NT. Then, my LHO will show his spade suit and they will reach 4♠. This will go down when I cash my ♣AK and give my partner a club ruff. He has a singleton club.".

You are the TD, what would you do?

Rik

It’s a bit curious that this morning I ran across an anecdote from 1989 concerning a similar subject.

It is noticeable that the law doesn’t give much of a procedure for dealing with perceived replay of previous boards- except that such results are canceled. Maybe it ought to be formally addressed.

I personally believe that the TD should not be notified until after all the spots are known. Yes, that can lend to sharp practice of obtaining a bad result and then claiming [by falsehood] that the board had been previously played and then the TD will need to decide whether the coincidence was real or cheating. But let me finish.

If the board is not the same, but the partner of complainer discerns which hand complainer is referring to then the partner is in a position to know the relevant cards sitting opposite. And that fouls the comparison. I think it is better to play the hand and should it eventuate that you believe the spots to be identical then explain to the TD the concern and then he should investigate.

This is the anecdote to which I originally referred:


I was quite taken by the story how he recognized a hand and immediately got the TD. It would be of service to players everywhere to point out that when one feels he remembers a previous hand he should resist the temptation to draw attention to it until after it has been played. To draw attention prematurely can/will foul a legitimate hand since other players have been alerted that there is something special about the hand. To illustrate I once was in the third round of a shuffle each round Swiss teams [after the boards had been exchanged] where I picked up a hand that looked particularly familiar. The bidding was eerily familiar [I had a sick feeling when partner bid 6D]. And the dummy was eerily familiar. In fact the honors were the same while there was some difference in the spots. The limit of ‘the hand’ the day before was 11 tricks while the ‘second time around’ the limit was 12 tricks. The deals were in fact different. And it would have been worse than sad to foul the hand without justification.


As for this case where the player has announced to the table what he has there can be no comparison. Since the board was preduplicated there is no way to substitute. Without knowing as to the truth of the assertion [replay of board] there is no way to judge the next course of action except to investigate the facts.

[RMB1]

Trinidad, on 2012-December-15, 11:40, said:

You are the TD, what would you do?

Compare the hand with the hand record.

If it does not match, then I cancel the board and get them to play the correct board later.

If it matches then I tell the player to get on with the hand. Meanwhile I check the hand records against the hand records of the earlier event where the player said the board came from. If the two sets match then I cancel all boards at both tables and start again. If the two sets do not match but one board is the same I seek guidance from a higher source.

[Trinidad]

pran, on 2012-December-15, 12:48, said:

There is nothing wrong in having a 16 year old girl (or even younger) operating a computer card dealing program or a card sorting machines provided routines and training are satisfactory.

I did not mean to imply in any way that it would be wrong for a 16 year old girl to operate the dealer machine. I just meant that I had no reason to expect that the scenario that I sketched was true.

(In fact, my own kids -younger than 16- have duplicated boards by hand on a couple of occasions.)

Rik

[Trinidad]

axman, on 2012-December-15, 14:32, said:

I was quite taken by the story how he recognized a hand and immediately got the TD.

Well, the players had this eery feeling on the board(s) before. When the player recognized the 1NT hand too, he called the TD. So, I don't think they called prematurely, nor do I think they were late.

Rik

[Trinidad]

RMB1, on 2012-December-15, 14:35, said:

Compare the hand with the hand record.

If it does not match, then I cancel the board and get them to play the correct board later.

If it matches then I tell the player to get on with the hand. Meanwhile I check the hand records against the hand records of the earlier event where the player said the board came from. If the two sets match then I cancel all boards at both tables and start again. If the two sets do not match but one board is the same I seek guidance from a higher source.

The hand matches the hand records. The players say that they know they have played the boards before, but they don't know where or when. The TD cannot compare with previous hand records.

Rik

[pran]

axman, on 2012-December-15, 14:32, said:

It’s a bit curious that this morning I ran across an anecdote from 1989 concerning a similar subject.

It is noticeable that the law doesn’t give much of a procedure for dealing with perceived replay of previous boards- except that such results are canceled. Maybe it ought to be formally addressed.

I personally believe that the TD should not be notified until after all the spots are known. Yes, that can lend to sharp practice of obtaining a bad result and then claiming [by falsehood] that the board had been previously played and then the TD will need to decide whether the coincidence was real or cheating. But let me finish.

If the board is not the same, but the partner of complainer discerns which hand complainer is referring to then the partner is in a position to know the relevant cards sitting opposite. And that fouls the comparison. I think it is better to play the hand and should it eventuate that you believe the spots to be identical then explain to the TD the concern and then he should investigate.

This is the anecdote to which I originally referred:


I was quite taken by the story how he recognized a hand and immediately got the TD. It would be of service to players everywhere to point out that when one feels he remembers a previous hand he should resist the temptation to draw attention to it until after it has been played. To draw attention prematurely can/will foul a legitimate hand since other players have been alerted that there is something special about the hand. To illustrate I once was in the third round of a shuffle each round Swiss teams [after the boards had been exchanged] where I picked up a hand that looked particularly familiar. The bidding was eerily familiar [I had a sick feeling when partner bid 6D]. And the dummy was eerily familiar. In fact the honors were the same while there was some difference in the spots. The limit of ‘the hand’ the day before was 11 tricks while the ‘second time around’ the limit was 12 tricks. The deals were in fact different. And it would have been worse than sad to foul the hand without justification.


As for this case where the player has announced to the table what he has there can be no comparison. Since the board was preduplicated there is no way to substitute. Without knowing as to the truth of the assertion [replay of board] there is no way to judge the next course of action except to investigate the facts.

OP told us that TD immediately took the player away from the table before obtaining the details. It is of course hopelessly wrong to have the alleged details "broadcasted" at the table, but it is of great value for the TD to have these alleged details outlined to himself before the player could legally know them.

Now if the player's description of the hands that should be unknown to him matches those hands it is a strong evidence that his allegation is correct and that the deal must be cancelled.

On the contrary if a player approaches me with an allegation that the board he just played is the same as a board he has played before I shall require more solid evidence before taking any action at all.

(And I did indeed consider it unnecessary to point out the obvious that TD should verify the hands against the printout of the deal as part of his initial investigation.)

[Trinidad]

This was a case where multiple matches were played in the same division at the same place at the same time. The same boards were used in other matches.

What I would have done:
I would have concluded from the fact that the player could predict the deal that he indeed had played the boards before. I would have stopped the play throughout the room, tell what happened, apologized, canceled all the boards and instruct the players to shuffle and deal by hand and I would have started all matches again.

What happened:
The TD called his superior, the competition leader. The competition leader told him to let play continue and instruct the players that they were not allowed to use any UI. This is what the TD did and what the players did. The result of this "bending over backwards" was that the pair that knew the boards was missing some good contracts (because there were LAs) that were actually bid at the other table. Obviously, the pair complained a few times to the TD, predicting more and more hands. They kept on "bending over backwards" and were trailing at half time.

At the start of the second half the pair complained to the TD, saying that they cannot possibly play like that. The TD understood this. He called the competition leader again. Again, the competition leader instructed the TD to let play continue and the TD relayed this to the pair. At that point, the pair told the TD that they wouldn't play on under these circumstances.

The TD informed the other players in the match and called the competition leader to bring him the news. The competition leader ruled that there was a walk over and penalized the team 10 VPs.

The team protested to the league. The first thing they did was search in their database whether they could find the deals as they were played before. But they couldn't. Then they ruled that if a player is able to consistently predict how the cards are, just from seeing his own hand, he will have played these boards before. This match was ruled as not played and will be replayed at a later date. (The results of the other matches will be valid.) The 10 VP penalty was withdrawn.

Rik

[pran]

The entire session should have been declared void because of organizer's error. There may be an excuse for what had happened, but definitely not for the rulings made.

The Director in charge was correct in reporting to his superior, but assuming that he was the director in charge he should not have accepted the instruction to play on with the deals unchanged:

Law 81 B said:

1. The Director is responsible for the on-site technical management of the tournament. He has powers to remedy any omissions of the Tournament Organizer.

2. The Director applies, and is bound by, these Laws and supplementary regulations announced under authority given in these Laws.

[gnasher]

The competition organiser's decisions on the day were both illegal and awful, and as Sven says the TD shouldn't have agreed to apply them.

Trinidad, on 2012-December-16, 04:40, said:

Then they ruled that if a player is able to consistently predict how the cards are, just from seeing his own hand, he will have played these boards before. This match was ruled as not played and will be replayed at a later date. (The results of the other matches will be valid.) The 10 VP penalty was withdrawn.

This seems a very practical solution, even if it is illegal. Obviously players shouldn't be made to play boards that they recognise. It was quite wrong to place them in that position, and wrong to penalise them when they refused to waste their time in this way.

Equally, obviously, if no one in any of the other matches recognised the boards, then for their purposes the deals were random and there is no reason (apart from the rather inconvenient Law 6D2) to cancel any of their results or make them replay their matches.

This post has been edited by gnasher: 2012-December-16, 09:45

[blackshoe]

gnasher, on 2012-December-16, 09:42, said:

Equally, obviously, if no one in any of the other matches recognised the boards, then for their purposes the deals were random and there is no reason (apart from the rather inconvenient Law 6D2) to cancel any of their results or make them replay their matches.

Are you suggesting that TDs ignore "inconvenient" laws? I would not have expected that, although I see that's just what the league did.

I still wonder how one player can recognize a hand as having been played before, and no one else agrees. Not just the others at his table, but all the players in the session. If he can name even just the significant spots, he's probably right*, but then why couldn't anyone else remember them, and why couldn't the TO find a previous session in which these boards were played? Something seems fishy.

I prefer Rik's solution: stop all the matches and have them hand-deal the boards and start over. But do it early, or you'll be there all night.

* I recall a story about, I believe, Al Roth. He called the TD during a club pairs, and said "we've played this board before". All three opponents at the table disagreed. Roth then proceeded to name the locations of all fifty two cards. I'm lucky if I can name the cards in my own hand unless I'm looking directly at them.

[Vampyr]

blackshoe, on 2012-December-16, 10:47, said:

I still wonder how one player can recognize a hand as having been played before, and no one else agrees.

Perhaps he was the only one who had played them previously.

[Trinidad]

blackshoe, on 2012-December-16, 10:47, said:

I still wonder how one player can recognize a hand as having been played before, and no one else agrees.

His partner agreed.

This was a league with teams from different clubs competing against each other. It is certainly possible that the hands were played at the club where this pair normally plays. Remember that over here many clubs play predealt boards. A logistic error is all that is needed...

Rik

[gnasher]

blackshoe, on 2012-December-16, 10:47, said:

Are you suggesting that TDs ignore "inconvenient" laws? I would not have expected that, although I see that's just what the league did.

No, I was agreeing with the league's subsequent decision to let the results of the other matches stand. That is, I'm agreeing with the league's decision to ignore a law in circumstances where obeying it would inconvenience a large number of people and benefit absolutely no one.

The players in all the other matches had not seen the boards before. Their scores were the results of playing bridge, untainted by UI. They spent an evening obtaining these results. Do you think that they should have been made to come back on another evening and play the matches all over again?

Anyway, on reflection I don't think Law 6D2 applies. We can't say that the deals were "imported from a different session", because that would imply that someone or something had "imported" them. The organiser's database doesn't contain a session from which they might have been imported, and there is no evidence that any such import occurred.

The pair who recognises the boards seem to have played an identical set of boards in some other event, but that isn't evidence that the deals were imported from that event. It might conceivably be random bad luck because the other event used the same seed for generating the deals, but it was probably human error. If I deal two identical sets of boards, then use one set for a pairs session and another for a league match two months later, I haven't imported boards from one session into another. I've imported boards into two sessions from a common source.

Obviously this isn't what the lawmakers intended, but I don't care. If obeying the letter of the rules and ignoring its intent allows me to avoid doing something idiotic, I'm quite happy do to that.

This post has been edited by gnasher: 2012-December-16, 12:35

[pran]

gnasher, on 2012-December-16, 12:27, said:

No, I was agreeing with the league's subsequent decision to let the results of the other matches stand. That is, I'm agreeing with the league's decision to ignore a law in circumstances where obeying it would inconvenience a large number of people and benefit absolutely no one.The players in all the other matches had not seen the boards before. Their scores were the results of playing bridge, untainted by UI. They spent an evening obtaining these results. Do you think that they should have been made to come back on another evening and play the matches all over again?

How can anybody trust that no other player has seen the board before, and that their scores were the results of playing bridge, untained by UI?

This can only be ascertained by identifying exactly when the boards were played the first time, the participants in that event and that the boards have not been reported to commented in journals of any kind.

gnasher, on 2012-December-16, 12:27, said:

Anyway, on reflection I don't think Law 6D2 applies. We can't say that the deals were "imported from a different session", because that would imply that someone or something had "imported" them. The organiser's database doesn't contain a session from which they might have been imported, and there is no evidence that any such import occurred.

The important question is not whether boards have been imported from another session, it is whether the boards have been played at an earlier time in a different event so that players may know the boards' features that depend on the dealing process.

Law 6D2 most certainly applies: no result may stand if the cards are dealt without shuffle from a sorted deck*. (Note the footnote to this law: * A 'sorted deck' is a pack of cards not randomized from its prior condition.)

gnasher, on 2012-December-16, 12:27, said:

The pair who recognises the boards seem to have played an identical set of boards in some other event, but that isn't evidence that the deals were imported from that event.

It is most certainly evidence that the boards are reused from a previous event.

gnasher, on 2012-December-16, 12:27, said:

It might conceivably be random bad luck because the other event used the same seed for generating the deals, but it was probably human error. If I deal two identical sets of boards, then use one set for a pairs session and another for a league match two months later, I haven't imported boards from one session into another. I've imported boards into two sessions from a common source.

That is an example of incorrect computer operator procedure and should normally result in revoking that operator's authorisation to deliver computer generated deals.

gnasher, on 2012-December-16, 12:27, said:

Obviously this isn't what the lawmakers intended, but I don't care. If obeying the letter of the rules and ignoring its intent allows me to avoid doing something idiotic, I'm quite happy do to that.

You should care!
It is idiotic to ignore the danger of destroying an event by having the contestants (re)playing boards they already more or less know.

The prime objective of Law 6 is that players shall never be asked to play a deal they might know from before unless the very purpose of the event is such replay.

[Trinidad]

I obviously don't know, but to me it seems likely that the board set was taken from a set that was played at this pair's bridge club, some time ago. In that case, it was this pair and possibly their team mates who would know about the boards.

I agree with Andy that -given the situation at the end of the day- the league's decision is the most practical solution and it is fair. We are not talking about regular club bridge nights. These are 24 board matches and they are played during a weekend, at 2 matches per day at a central location. (I believe it was a conference center this time.) Some teams are traveling over three hours to play.

The playing days are scheduled more than a year ahead. Many players have families and are involved in other activities than bridge. Given that the other matches -most likely- were not influenced at all, I think that it would be entirely disproportional to:
- ask people to come an extra day
- try to arrange a conference center at short notice

This would be the equivalent of deciding that a pairs event at a regional needs to be completely replayed 3 weeks later.

The two teams that were involved in the match where the boards were recognized are from clubs that are located only 30 km (20 miles) from each other. They also happen to both play their club games on Thursday evenings. It is relatively easy to arrange a new match between these two teams.

Rik