[kfay]

Funny situation came up in a game the other day. Basically the situation was:

Some contract in NTs.

Declarer leads a ♦ off the board towards his KQ(xx...?). RHO revokes and shows out, declarer winning the K and then has the chance to win a trick or two in some other suit.

RHO after the K is exposed says 'oh wait I have a diamond' (in fact he has several) and plays the diamond ACE!!!

As it turns out the defense now has the rest of the tricks in some other suit.

What's the ruling?

TD here gave a split score.

[FrancesHinden]

A split score is crazy, the rules are quite clear.

1. Was the revoke established or not i.e. was the "RHO after the K is exposed says 'oh wait I have a diamond' and plays the diamond ACE!!!" before their side played to the next trick?

It seems from the description that the answer is yes (in fact it seems that the revoke was discovered before 4th hand played to the trick).

2. In that case the revoke is not established. RHO changes their card to the ace of diamonds. Declarer can change his king of diamonds to another diamond. If LHO has already played to the trick, he can if he wishes also change his card, but the original card becomes a penalty card.

The card that RHO originally played (the revoke card) becomes a major penalty card.

3. Now RHO is on lead, having won the ace of diamonds. He has to lead his major penalty card, the card with which he revoked. Play now continues with no further penalty.

4. Further complications:
i) RHO should have all this explained to him. It may be that he prefers to correct his revoke with a non-ace of diamonds because the consequence of having to lead his penalty card is so dire that it's worthwhile correcting to a low diamond.

ii) If LHO also changes the diamond he originally played to the revoke trick, so that he also has a penalty card, life is a little more complicated. But he'd be crazy to do that (as he wasn't winning the trick in either case).

iii) if any of this is at trick twelve, or the revoke became established in some other fashion, we need to look at a different Law.

iv) I don't believe any of this (related to unestablished revokes) has changed under the new laws.

[jtfanclub]

Yeah, but it's cheap and cheesy, or it can be. If the discard made no sense, I might give a split score.

Say that RHO had left

x
xx
Ax
AKQxxx

and discarded the queen of clubs, so when the correction occurred they 'had' to lead the club queen. I would assign a split score. Revoking for the purpose of finding out more information about delcarer's hand violates a different set of rules (I can look it up if you want).

[RMB1]

FrancesHinden, on May 20 2008, 03:35 PM, said:

2. In that case the revoke is not established.  RHO changes their card to the ace of diamonds.  Declarer can change his king of diamonds to another diamond.  If LHO has already played to the trick, he can if he wishes also change his card, but the original card becomes a penalty card.

LHO can only change his card if declarer changes his card (Law 62C2, 1997 or 2007).

Robin

[FrancesHinden]

I don't understand your point. I can see no reason ever to give a split score for an unestablished revoke.

You are right that deliberately revoking in order to discover something about declarer's hand is illegal (the Alcatraz coup) and can be adjusted for under a different Law- I should have mentioned that.

edit: replying to JT not to Robin

[OleBerg]

TD could be right.

I only have a version of the laws in my native language (Danish), so I cannot give you the excact wording of §23, which I believe the TD has used.

The point of §23 is, that whenever the TD feels that the offending side has gained an advantage by an irregularity, the TD should adjust the score, if the offender, at the time of the irregularity, might have known that it would likely be detrimental to the non-offending side.

So if TD feels that ducking a diamond, instead of playing the ace, is a reasonable alternative, it could be correct to give an adjusted score.

This does not imply that the offending side has cheated.

(All this is assuming, that the non-offending side ended up with fewer tricks, after the major penalty card was lead, than they would have done, if the ♦K had been allowed to take the trick.)

§23, in this form, is relatively new. I actually believe it is from the latest revision.