A card was exposed during the auction. Where shall we start? It seems obvious to start with Law 24. This law tells us what to do with such a card: leave it face up on the table until the auction period ends. Okay, then what?
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If the offender becomes declarer or dummy, the cards are picked up and returned to the hand. If the offender becomes a defender, every such card becomes a penalty card (see Law 50), then:
I'll get to "then" in a minute, but first, why is there a reference to Law 50 here? Well, ordinarily, Law 50 tells us what to do with a penalty card. It says
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A card prematurely exposed (but not led, see Law 57) by a defender is a penalty card unless the director designates otherwise (see Law 49, and Law 23 may apply).
Now, Laws 49 and 23 are not germane to this discussion. So this part of the law gives the TD authority to "designate otherwise", in which case the discussion is over. So, let's say he doesn't do that (most of the time he probably shouldn't, anyway). Now what? Well, the "lead" is the first card played to a trick. The "opening lead" is the card led to the first trick. Certainly the player in this case
thought he was leading. But was he? Consider the timeline of a hand. First we have some preliminaries (counting your cards, sorting) during which the "auction period" begins. There is no "play" during this period that occurs during the play period. The auction period ends when the opening lead is faced, but before that, the
auction has to end, and that requires three consecutive passes, which hasn't happened here. The offender in this case exposed his card, so
maybe this is a face up lead. So let's see what Law 57 tells us.
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When a defender leads to the next trick before his partner has played to the current trick
Clearly this law requires both a "current trick" and a "next trick". But if there's a trick at all it cannot be both the current trick and the next trick. Besides, the play period has not started yet. So Law 57 cannot apply. Or so it seems to me.
The Law may be poorly organized or poorly worded, or both, but that does not mean that in making practical TD rulings we should spent a significant portion of our time spinning our wheels or discussing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. That phenomenon is why I left blml. I think dburn brought up a valid point, but I also think that we've spent more than enough time on it here, and that the practical, if not the literal, answer is that Law 57 doesn't apply. We should apply Law 24(B in this case). I would think TDs should be trained to do it this way, and not look to Law 57 until after the play period begins.
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