[Barry]

My bridge club uses curtain cards. I have been trying to stop the use of these cards for some time because they cause more problems than they are worth. What is the E.B.U. position on the use of curtain cards? Are they still legal?

What do you do if the cards from one hand have been mixed with another hand and the previous players cannot remember how they were arranged?

[CamHenry]

Disclaimer: I have no official capacity within the EBU, and I am posting as an individual who may be wrong.

That aside, my understanding is:
- Curtain cards are allowed if that's what you want to use; they're not required or even encouraged.
- If boards are fouled, and unrecoverable, you have two options - either play it as a distinct board for the second half of the movement (if you have 5 scores with one layout and 5 with another, for example), or award Av/Av to pairs deprived of the opportunity to gain a valid score (if it's fouled in the penultimate round, for example). In any case, if you can determine who put the cards back in the wrong place I'd recommend a PP - 10% of a top the first time around.

[bluejak]

Av+/Av+, please.

Curtain cards crate a myriad of TD calls, nearly all to do with bad writing or wrong writing.

So you get a fouled board every so often. Big deal. Ask the previous table to reconstruct.

When they had curtain cards at Deva BC I used to get about twenty calls a night. Never a meaningful one.

Since they dropped them, no fouled boards.

The simple answer is that not having them saves time and trouble for both the TD and the players while saving trees somewhere.

Legal? Sure they are legal: they are a matter of regulation, so a club can have them. But please don't!

[JoAnneM]

What are curtain cards?

[blackshoe]

When I lived in England (about 20 years ago) hands would be dealt at the table, and you would write your hand down on a piece of paper — a curtain card — and put it in the pocket with your hand after you'd played it. Subsequent players would check the hand against the curtain card to make sure there were no mix ups. I don't recall ever seeing any problems either caused by or solved by curtain cards, but I was only there three years.

[helene_t]

If the problem is that people look at the curtain card, notice a mistake, call the TD, then realize that there was no mistake, then a simple solution would be not to put the curtain card with the board but keep them in the pocket of the player that wrote it, or give it to the TD.

Then again I think it happens so rarely that a messed-up board cannot be reconstructed that it isn't worthwhile to write the curtain cards. Anyway, machine-dealt cards solve the issue.

[StevenG]

At least with curtain cards, when a board gets fouled it's picked up at the next table. Without, if the normal contracts remain similar, it can get halfway round the room before somebody notices a problem, and nobody then knows when the fouling happened.

[barmar]

We had a long thread about curtain cards several months ago.

http://forums.bridge...showtopic=36961