[kgr]

Cascade, on Aug 23 2009, 08:29 AM, said:

kgr, on Aug 23 2009, 06:05 AM, said:

ArtK78, on Aug 22 2009, 07:43 PM, said:

He told me that it was his belief that it was important to psyche early in any team match, so that for the rest of the match, the opponents would be uncomfortable, never knowing if you were being serious or were psyching.

Are opps not allowed to receive this info? Shouldn't you tell opps that you psyche early in the match and not so much latee on?

Shouldn't you tell the opponents if you do not do this?

If you have an arrangement explicit or implicit to psyche early in a match then I think effectively that means that you have an implicit understanding that is different than your explicit understanding and disclosure by way of your convention card to your opponents (unless this is actually written on your card). Depending on the nature of your likely psyches it seems reasonably likely that your implicit agreements would fall foul of the system regulations.

Nevertheless it gets problematic if you have to disclose psyching tendancies as who do you expect to make such a disclosure? Everyone - hence the question at the beginning of this post? If not where is the list of psyching tendancies that need disclosure?

...created new post for this:
http://forums.bridge...topic=33808&hl=

[blackshoe]

jillybean, on Aug 22 2009, 03:14 PM, said:

kgr, on Aug 22 2009, 11:05 AM, said:

ArtK78, on Aug 22 2009, 07:43 PM, said:

He told me that it was his belief that it was important to psyche early in any team match, so that for the rest of the match, the opponents would be uncomfortable, never knowing if you were being serious or were psyching.

Are opps not allowed to receive this info? Shouldn't you tell opps that you psyche early in the match and not so much latee on?

This is likely why some players want psyches banned. This underhanded tactic should fall under Conceled Partnership Understanding.

I would like to point out that Art was an opponent of the player who told him of this tendency, not his partner. However, if this player was doing that on the first board of every match, as Ark says, then his partner would have to have become aware of it eventually, even if they had not discussed it. In that case, yes, it has become a partnership understanding, and so must be disclosed. How to disclose it depends on the regulations in force.

It is also true that the ACBL deleted long ago that section of the system card in which players were supposed to disclose psyching tendencies. They did this, I think, for two reasons. First, there is the view that psychs are by their nature not something that should be disclosed in advance — they should be a surprise to all three of the other players at the table. Second, there has been for a long time (at least thirty years) a marked anti-psyching sentiment in the ACBL. Don Oakie even used (abused?) his position as President of the ACBL to try to get them banned. IAC, it seems clear that prior disclosure of psyching tendencies, at least in the ACBL, is neither required nor desired, at least by the rule makers. Whether it's desirable is another question. Certainly if one player's tendency is clear enough to his partner that his partner might say "he has a tendency to psych in X position" then the psych in that position is a partnership understanding, and may be a violation of the convention regs. So it seems the ACBL's position is that if you have enough expectation that prior disclosure would be appropriate, it's not a psych, it's an agreement.

OTOH, if a player psychs on the first board of a team match once in a blue moon, there's no CPU, and should be no problem.