JanM, on Dec 12 2008, 01:05 PM, said:
As I understand the laws, in that situation:
a. You are required to bid as if your bid meant what you believed it meant when you made it (even if partner's action reminds you that you remembered your system wrong).
b. A director or committee may force you to choose, from among logical alternatives, a call other than that suggested by partner's action.
Not exactly.
Your first item is fairly close. The laws say that a player who has UI from his partner must carefully avoid taking advantage of it. That's Law 73C - a "player's law", if you will. There's also a "director's law", Law 16, which tells the director that a player "may not choose from among logical alternatives one which demonstrably could have been suggested over another by the extraneous information". In practice, if you continue to act as if your bid meant what you thought it meant when you made it, and partner's subsequent calls mean whatever they would mean in that context, you'll do pretty well. But the laws actually require you to consider what the UI might suggest, and then actively avoid taking any such action.
On your second point, I understand what you mean, I think, but the words as written are wrong, because neither the director nor a committee can force a player to do anything. What they
can do is say that in their judgement, the player committed an infraction in choosing the call he did, and adjust the score if that choice damaged the opponents, damage being defined as a worse score than they might have gotten had the infraction not happened.
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So what happened here? Partner opened 1NT, the opponent overcalled 2♦ and I bid a natural 4♥. Partner bid 4♠. Assuming that I know partner and I are on the same wavelength, surely 4♠ has to be a slam try in hearts. Of course it's unusual for a limited opener to make a slam try over what most would consider a sign-off, but maybe partner opened a slightly off-shape 1NT that is so good for hearts s/he is willing to take the risk that 5♥ will go down in order to be able to get to a good slam. Maybe partner thinks I'll have a slammish hand for 4♥. Who knows? But what I'm pretty sure I do know is that 4♠ can't be intended as natural. You just don't open 1NT with a hand that would want to play in 4♠ if partner wanted to play in 4♥ opposite a "normal" 1NT.
So Pass is actually not a logical alternative here. Partner just made a bid that agreed my suit and showed a good hand - the meaning of that bid may depend on partnership agreement (for me it would be Keycard, a really strange bid), but I can't imagine a partnership agreement where it would be natural. Responder has to bid as if opener knew that 4♥ is natural - with my agreements, responder should answer keycards; if 4♠ would be a cue bid, responder should either cue in response with a good hand or bid 5♥ with a bad one.
This was a pickup partnership. We agreed four suit transfers; we did not discuss Texas. To me, that means Texas is not on, even if that's partner's favorite convention and she plays it with every regular partner in her address book. So 4
♥ is a sign-off, and 4
♠ does not exist. That was the heart of my dilemma.
What are the LAs now? I thought pass and 5
♥. 4
♣ (I held the ace) did not occur to me, though perhaps it should have. To me, the UI suggests that I bid 5
♥, and I can now only bid it if I have no other LA. Since 4
♣ didn't occur to me, and I didn't recognize that pass was not an LA, well, that's why I passed. If the director or a committee had pointed out to me that my logic was flawed, I would have accepted their score adjustment, and perhaps learned something. But it didn't happen that way. See next paragraph.
It is true, on reflection now I'm not under the gun, that 4
♠ cannot be natural, whatever partner is doing. It is true that makes the bid forcing, and pass not an LA. It may not matter as far as the TD is concerned, though, because 4
♠ down 2 is a better score for the opponents than 5
♥ down 1 would have been, so there was no damage, and there would be no score adjustment. The real question is whether I should have cue bid my club ace, and whether that would have got us to 6 of something, or 5
♠. If the UI means I should have done that, and if we would have (or might have) ended up in whatever going down (possibly) 3 or more, then the opponents
were damaged. In practice, they were happy with down 2, so there was no director call. If there had been, I would have had to recuse myself. Fortunately, there was another director playing that night. On the other hand, I can't remember whether she was at another table, or was one of the opponents!
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Sometimes partner's bid can wake me up to the fact that partner misinterpreted my bid - maybe making a slam try in this auction is so unusual that I would know without the alert that partner thought 4♥ was a transfer, particularly when we don't have clear agreements. Then I am allowed to "field" this, just as (see the psyching thread) I can field my partner's psyche. What I should do if I have authorized information that partner misunderstood my bid is not clear - maybe passing is the best way to avoid a total disaster, but probably not.
Um. If you have no LA to whatever action would be "fielding", then yes, you can do that. But you have UI, and if you have LAs, and one (or more) could demonstrably be suggested by the UI, then the UI laws apply, whatever AI you may also have.
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I've gone on and on about this because it's my experience that committees virtually never force action as opposed to non-action, and players trying to be ethical virtually never recognize that the ethical thing is to bid more. If UA shows that partner's slam try is really a signoff, committees very rarely force a player to bid slam. I don't know why, but blackshoe's post suggests to me that part of the reason may be a misunderstanding of how the person with UA is supposed to behave.
There is certainly a lack of understanding on this, by players, directors, and committee members. I've been studying it (as a director) for a number of years, and I'm still unsure of myself - as witness this case. I think education is the answer, but first you have to find someone who, in the words of an expert bridge player friend of mine, "owns" this particular matter (that is, he knows what should be done, and will always get it right)
and who can teach what he knows to others.
I was going to say that the one thing I was sure of is that I didn't take advantage of the UI in passing, but if in fact I should have bid 4
♣, then I guess I can't be sure of that, either. I
am sure that I don't know what would have happened next.
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