[jdonn]

blackshoe, on May 31 2010, 08:38 PM, said:

Heh. You don't think much of people, do you Josh?

I just live in reality. I mean why do we even have punishments for breaking laws if we depend on everyone's self respect to stop them when they could get away with it?

I can't remember where I read it, but I recall reading that 93% of people would steal if they knew they could get away with it and didn't feel like they were badly cheating a specific person (ie they would steal cable but not pickpocket someone). And even if that were wrong, wouldn't we want to stop them if it was 90%? 80%? 10%?

[Lanor Fow]

If Burn's 25th law were implemented, IMO we should also change the EBU bidding box regluations on when a bid is made to be more like the ABCL ones.

[Vampyr]

dburn, on Jun 1 2010, 05:12 AM, said:

the current provisions for changing insufficient bids are more or less all wrong.

Was it you, David, who once suggested that Law27 should read, in its entirety, "When a player makes an insufficient bid, the offender's partner is silenced for the rest of the auction"?

This, like your proposed L25, would be simple to understand and uniformly applied. I am very much in favour of both changes, but I do think that there should be some laxity when bidding cards have stuck together. Perhaps, as suggested by the previous poster, change the bidding box regulations.

[axman]

dburn, on May 31 2010, 11:12 PM, said:

axman, on May 31 2010, 10:26 PM, said:

dburn, on May 31 2010, 07:49 PM, said:

Wherefore I propose for 2018, with apologies for the numerical discontinuity, Burn's 25th Law, which reads:

Law 25

A legal call once made may not be changed.

Law 26...

Three things occur to me-
1. Would Burn desire to partake of such proceedings?
2. When he did partake, how long would his sanity survive?
3. I sense an emptiness not knowing the consequences of a call not legally made.

Actually, a whole lot more than three things.

If you mean "would I rather play in a tournament where once you'd made a legal call, you could not change it", of course I would. I am as prone to "mechanical errors" as the next man, but unlike some of the next men I believe that whatever the penalty may be for those errors, I should pay it rather than moan about it and attempt to have it rescinded.

Probably, there should be some provision for changing illegal calls. The current provisions for calls out of rotation are more or less all right; the current provisions for changing insufficient bids are more or less all wrong.

The consequences of a call not legally made are that if it works, the one-handed people in the audience will clap vigorously.

Numbers greater than three may exist, but don't count on it.

I had been thinking about Burn25’s effect upon the behavior of players, opponents, and TDs- in addition to the effect upon the mental health of burn:

There are a modest number [of players] that appear to have inescapable difficulties in extracting the desired bidding card- they hunt around for quite some time first grabbing one and then another and another, taking upwards of a minute and even considerably longer. It should be expected that Burn25 would have such an effect on a dramatically considerable number- thereby nullifying the perceived advantages of BBs while making the low tech method of voice bidding resoundingly attractive.

It is quite probable that such theatrics are not lost upon the partner- and how they might imagine that some large portion of this time is actually being used to think about how best to communicate the desired messages.

There also are the occasions when a player is misinformed by an opponent and takes an action different from what he would have- had he not been misinformed. Such occurrences would necessarily cause L12 to see the light of day.

A couple of years ago I would have been confident that if burn were to get even three or four adjusted scores in a session it would drive him nuts [and it wouldn’t be because his side offended]- err, I mean drive him to sobriety. But I’m not so sure now.

[jeremy69]

Quote

Perhaps, as suggested by the previous poster, change the bidding box regulations.

Or perhaps the bidding box cards once they have had 5 pints of beer/wine/pepsi thrown over them (in one club I play in that means about once per week).