[bluejak]

The reply that I gave to my correspondent was:

It is always more satisfactory to give opinions if I was at the table
so I can ask questions. For example, in this case, I would say to South
"In what way do you think you were damaged by the misinformation?" and
the answer might affect my ruling.

I should mention a few peripheral matters. The scores at other tables
do not affect a ruling, and if I had been there I would not have looked
at them before ruling. The fact that neither North nor South looked at
their opponents' system cards is irrelevant: alerting and questions, and
system cards are two different ways of letting opponents know your
agreements, and an opponent has a perfect right to rely on either
method.

It might be interesting to know whether West's system card mentioned
Michaels, but it is quite common for people in clubs to play with
different partners and not be sure whether they play a specific question
with any particular one. However, since West made the Michaels bid, and
East's card says Michaels, I think we can safely rule there was
misinformation.

The problem, as it seems to me, is that South went happily ahead to
slam when he believed West had shown a strong hand. If told correctly
that it showed spades and a minor, and not necessarily strong, I would
have thought he would have bid to slam just as happily, possibly more
so. Thus I cannot believe that South was damaged.

More interesting is North's bidding. Would he have bid 2S if he knew
West had spades? Perhaps, or he might have doubled. Either way, if he
shows reasonable strength I do not see why South would bid any
differently.

In view of the fact that North has not said how the misinformation
affects him, and since South's bidding seems unlikely to be different, I
believe that on this occasion the misinformation caused no damage so
there should be no adjustment.



Having read some of the replies here it seems to me that some of the unsympathetic replies are assuming a level of sophistication that was in my view completely absent. For example, a lot of poor English club players describe an old-fashioned cue-bid as "Strong". They do not describe it more acccurately because they have no idea what Strong means, and when they pick up a hand it will either look Strong or it will not.

Secondly, if you are going to treat TD calls from mediocre players as frivolous you are going to move towards the awful state of TD rulings that my reading of RGB and IBLF suggest are common in all but the best ACBL clubs. We train our club TDs, and sympathy for the players is an essential part of that training. If a player is upset because his opponents tell him something which turns out to be wrong we want him to talk to the TD always, and not be subject to problems of being told it is frivolous.

You should never treat a call from an average club player as frivolous, and the evidence from the story is strong that these were poor club players.