bluejak, on May 22 2010, 06:14 PM, said:
Are you seriously telling me that when a normal revoke occurs, one trick does not usually restore equity?
I am not quite sure what you mean by "a normal revoke". What I tell you is this: that the "random" transfer of anywhere between 0 and 2 tricks certainly does not "restore equity" in the vast majority of cases. This is to be expected, of course, for any "random" penalty will have little to do with "equity" in the first place.
It may be worthwhile to examine why the revoke Law and other Laws are as they are.
One begins with the reasonable notion that if you steal what is not yours, you should give it back. One supplements this with the equally reasonable notion that you should be punished for attempted theft. Hence, the earliest form of the revoke law involved an implacable transfer of two tricks - the one that you stole (by ruffing when you could follow suit) and the one that constituted your debt to society as embodied by your present opponents.
The assumption underlying all this is that no one would actually revoke except for immediate gain - that is, miscreants would cheat by ruffing when they could follow suit. Similarly, the assumption underlying the Laws relating to calls out of turn, or insufficient bids, is that no one would actually make them except for gain; so, the Laws were constructed to ensure that [a] no gain could ensue and [b] the offenders would be punished (by having to bid in the dark).
Now, there was no question of "equity" involved in any of this. The notions were more primitive: the penalty for doing wrong combined an element of restitution with an element of deterrence (you gave the opponents their trick back, and you were penalized another trick to encourage you not to commit the same offence again).
Of course, this would not do - it became clear (if it was not clear already) that even after the prescribed penalty was paid, some revokes could gain more than the trick transferred by way of restitution and the trick transferred by way of deterrence.
What was done about this? Well, by that time an enlightened society had chosen to distinguish between deliberate and inadvertent transgressions; so that if you swindled the opponents out of three tricks (with or without meaning to), you didn't have to give them anything by way of a deterrent in order to prevent you from trying the same swindle again. If on the other hand you swindled them out of no tricks at all (as by showing out, then showing back in again while an opponent ran a solid suit), you were punished to the full extent of the Law. That extent is now one trick rather than the two it used to be, but whatever else it is, it is not "equitable".
This is, of course, hopeless. But it is the Law, and (as with many of the other Laws to which I have alluded), it is an unacceptable compromise between one of two equally tenable positions. The first (and the easier) of these is to cast the Laws as if everyone were potentially a cheat. The second (and the more difficult) is to cast the Laws as if everyone were determined to follow them to the letter, and to ignore transgressions by calling them all "irregularities" rather than "infractions", and to refer to "rectification" rather than "penalty". Moreover, one refers - as Bluejak refers in his more lucid moments - not to a "cheat" but, pardon him, to someone who has "inadvertently" failed to follow the rules.
Almost all games have rules that follow the first of the paths outlined above. Bridge is the
only game I know that follows the second. Hinc, as someone wisely remarked, illae lacrimae.
Help
Posted 2010-May-22, 16:06
the offenders would be punished (by having to bid in the dark).