[lamford]

Those who watched the final round-robin matches of the Pacific Islands team tournament in the early hours of the morning will have seen the Chief TD warning the players that they must continue to play normal bridge, even though both teams had qualified for the quarter-finals. N/S wanted to avoid the strong Polo Islands team in the next round, while East-West, if they won, would face the equally formidable Heixiazi Islands. The following board was tough to rule on:

---

Lead 9♦ Table Result: Yang and Wang, N/S and Ha and Kim, E/W, both disqualified from event.

Both pairs were playing standard methods for teams in a round-robin that wished to lose the match when both had qualified for the next round. 7NT was 0-40, any distribution, and East doubled on the strength of having all four twos, normally an advantage at this form of scoring.

After the lead of the nine of diamonds, declarer won three rounds of this suit, East underplaying as high as possible without winning the trick, while South pitched a spade. Declarer now cashed five rounds of clubs, pitching the ten of hearts from dummy, and West foud herself 'unsqueezed'. If she kept three spades, she could be forced to win the third trick in that suit, whereas if she kept three hearts, she could be made to win a heart trick.

However West had one last gambit to try. She conceded the last five tricks and insisted on the TD dealing with the concession. South tried to claim one down, but West argued that the concession had to be dealt with first.

The TD disqualified both pairs under Law 72A, but both appealed, arguing that the overall result of the event was intended in this Law. How would you rule?

[campboy]

Nice hand I didn't see this happen but I was irritated by headline writers who don't understand the difference between match-fixing and dumping.

IMO the RA should (best) design the tournament so that it can't be in your advantage to dump or (distant second-best) clarify in the CoC how the law is to be interpreted in this case. Well, even better they should do both, just in case they have missed some edge case in their analysis of why it is impossible.

[ahydra]

What about Law 74C6? [Also 7NT should be 0-37, surely. ]

Edit: Just spotted 73F - if the two pairs at the table are contending that 72A applies to the whole tournament, then 73F should do as well, and this messing around has resulted in damage to the innocent opponents that these two pairs will be meeting in the next round, so the TD is within his rights to issue a penalty. And I don't think you can appeal a disqualification (see 91A / 93B3)?

ahydra

[gnasher]

72A doesn't require you to try to obtain a higher score than other contestants at all times. It doesn't use any word like "should" or "must", and it doesn't set out any specific procedure. Hence it's irrelevant.

74C6 is inapplicable too - the players are all obviously showing considerable interest in the deal.

73F is irrelevant, because nobody has violated any of the proprieties in Law 73, and anyway an opponent is defined as "a player of the other side; a member of the partnership to which one is opposed".

Dumping is normally handled by regulation. The ACBL's and WBF's regulations make it illegal; the EBU's make it legal. I prefer the EBU's approach, except that I would add a further rule than any tournament organiser who negligently allows a "sportsmanlike dumping" situation to occur and then blames it on the players should have the word "idiot" tattooed to his forehead.

[BunnyGo]

I don't understand how E can be forced to win a trick. If he matches dummy's shape and then plays the K of a suit whenever dummy plays the A, then he can't win a trick; just like with the diamond suit.

[campboy]

BunnyGo, on 2012-August-02, 06:22, said:

I don't understand how E can be forced to win a trick. If he matches dummy's shape and then plays the K of a suit whenever dummy plays the A, then he can't win a trick; just like with the diamond suit.

It is West who can be forced to win when declarer leads a major-suit 4 from one hand and discards from the other.

[marcD]

Nice post on the olympics badminton ruling

[iviehoff]

The concept of an unsqueeze is particularly amusing.

Of course there were those Norwegian players who took aiming for a mutually convenient result to its logical conclusion of not playing the match at all, which seems to me quite logical if playing for a mutually convenient result is a permitted strategy, or at least one that in practice is impossible to prevent.

The Olympic badminton players, or at least some of them, got a clear warning, so can hardly complain of being disqualified when they carried on in that fashion. At least it looks more like incompetence than corruption, as some other dubious disqualifications in the past have done.

[lamford]

gnasher, on 2012-August-02, 05:26, said:

Dumping is normally handled by regulation. The ACBL's and WBF's regulations make it illegal; the EBU's make it legal.

The relevant regulations seem to be (with different wording for team events):
WBF: It is not permissible for a partnership to play by design to obtain a session score inferior to that of its opponents

ACBL: Players are expected to play each hand to win at all times. No dumping is permitted even if such dumping may be in the contestant's best long-term interest.

The critical word here is "play". This is defined in the Laws:
Play – 1.The contribution of a card from one’s hand to a trick, including the first card, which is the lead. 2.The aggregate of plays made. 3.The period during which the cards are played. 4.The aggregate of the calls and plays on a board.

Even if we adopt the fourth meaning here when applying the ACBL and WBF regulations, that does not prevent selection of a system that all hands that expect to lose at least one trick systemically open 7NT as dealer. Having done so, the players are then obliged to do the best they can under the circumstances, and this includes the opposition attempting to defeat the contract. I think that the infraction in our example above is the failure of East to win one of the diamond tricks that he could, and South's systemic 7NT opener did not breach the regulations. Indeed, failure to open 7NT on the South hand when it is systemically required would amount to a psyche, and repeated violations would result in a CPU, and these are prohibited. And there are are no regulations of which I am aware which prevent any agreement for a seven-level opener.

I agree with gnasher that the organisers are to blame in such cases. But the Olympic organisers could not tell the difference between the two Koreas, so what hope did they have in running a badminton tournament? The way out of the issue (suggested by Vampyr) is that the team with the best score in the round-robin, say total IMPs in the case of a tie, selects its opponent in the next round. A Wimbledon-style draw only works when the whole event is a knockout.

[RMB1]

The misere 7NT system may fall foul of the system regulation - in some international competition systems have to be registered in advance and there is a limit to the number of systems per team. In such circumstance you need a suicide partnership who only played together for matches to be lost with this system as their system.

[Cyberyeti]

iviehoff, on 2012-August-03, 02:14, said:

The concept of an unsqueeze is particularly amusing.

I wonder if this concept already has a name from misere calls in solo, I'm sure it's known from there.

And great original post, now to get the diet coke out of the keyboard

[barmar]

lamford, on 2012-August-04, 04:31, said:

The relevant regulations seem to be (with different wording for team events):
WBF: It is not permissible for a partnership to play by design to obtain a session score inferior to that of its opponents

ACBL: Players are expected to play each hand to win at all times. No dumping is permitted even if such dumping may be in the contestant's best long-term interest.

The critical word here is "play". This is defined in the Laws:
Play – 1.The contribution of a card from one’s hand to a trick, including the first card, which is the lead. 2.The aggregate of plays made. 3.The period during which the cards are played. 4.The aggregate of the calls and plays on a board.

I don't think any of these definitions are applicable. Only #1 is a verb, and it only applies in the context of "play a card", not "play each hand". So I think we must infer that the common definition of "play" is intended.

[lamford]

barmar, on 2012-August-04, 23:26, said:

I don't think any of these definitions are applicable. Only #1 is a verb, and it only applies in the context of "play a card", not "play each hand". So I think we must infer that the common definition of "play" is intended.

I agree that the intention is for "play" to mean "perform". But I do not think "select a system" can be included. And I am sure that one is permitted to changed the meaning of one opening bid during an event, if not during a session, so I do not agree that changing the meaning of an opening 7NT is covered by the system regulations.

There is a further, and worse, downside to the WBF wording. It says "to play by design to obtain a session score inferior to that of its opponents". Let us say that there are two groups, with the top four in each group qualifying for the quarter finals. The teams that are lying equal third in one group are exactly 16 points ahead of the fifth team, are playing each other, and agree to pass throughout on all boards. Assuming they have a spare "system" to get round RMB1's objection, then they are not playing to get a score inferior to their opponents, as the final score will obviously be 15-15, qualifying both teams. I bet you the WBF would act even if they could not find a rule that had been broken.

The contrived result is not generally endemic in bridge, but has been a problem in chess for many years. In every Olympiad I played in, the then USSR coasted home in the last few rounds with 2-2 results made of four quick draws. Organisers have tried to avoid the grandmaster draws by requiring 30 moves to be played by each side, but then the players got round that by games such as 1 Nf3 Nf6 2 Ng1 Ng8 3 Nf3 Nf6 4 Ng1 Ng8 5 Nf3, drawn by repetition. (For non-chess players, the game sees both players shuffling their knights around meaninglessly and the game being drawn because there is a rule that it is a draw if the same position has occurred three times.)

Unless one has a blanket rule about "bringing the game into disrepute", there will always be players who will use the rules to their advantage, and I do not think there is any ethical duty on them to do otherwise. It is a game, and it is played by a set of rules.

[blackshoe]

lamford, on 2012-August-05, 01:18, said:

[snip]

I bet you the WBF would act even if they could not find a rule that had been broken.

[snip]

It is a game, and it is played by a set of rules.

You contradict yourself.

I don't believe the WBF would do that. If they did, they'd be wrong.

[gnasher]

Where's the contradiction? The second sentence is about what a player should or should not do; the first is about how a tournament organiser would respond to the player's actions.

[Phil]

iviehoff, on 2012-August-03, 02:14, said:

The concept of an unsqueeze is particularly amusing.

Indeed

As for the claim statement made by west, the fact South can spot an unsqueeze should put to any rest what a 'careless or inferior (play) for the class of player involved' would be.

[barmar]

gnasher, on 2012-August-05, 09:29, said:

Where's the contradiction? The second sentence is about what a player should or should not do; the first is about how a tournament organiser would respond to the player's actions.

Yeah, they'll come up with some kind of "well, obviously what's intended by that rule is...."

I think it's really hard to come up with bulletproof rules that require that players perform the way we expect. If you make it too vague, it's open to interpretation and becomes hard to enforce. If you make it too specific, it may cover too much (e.g. preventing ducking a trick) or too little (allowing dumping in a round or session to attempt to win the event). Most people have an intuitive notion of what's expected from players in a particular sport, and I expect that they mostly agree with each other, but codifying it is difficult -- violations are very much "you know it when you see it."

[barmar]

My point about how difficult it is to codify requirements like this also brings to mind Law 74. Think of all the times someone in this forum has suggested that this or that action be considered a 74A2 violation ("remark or action that might cause annoyance or embarrassment to another player or might interfere with the enjoyment of the game"); it's so vague that you can use it almost any time you want to rule that someone is behaving badly.

[lamford]

ahydra, on 2012-August-02, 04:49, said:

[Also 7NT should be 0-37, surely. ]

Actually the strongest hand that would be a 7NT opening would be typically ♠ AKQJ ♥ AKQ ♦ AK2 ♣ AK2. You want to be big favourite to go down in the contract when attempting to do so. If you have ♠ AQT ♥ AQT9 ♦ AQT ♣ AQT, then opening 7NT is crazy, as you are almost certain to make it. If you do not open 7NT, you are favourite to go plus (or should that be minus), as the opponent will open (or overcall) 7NT and you will almost always collect a penalty. However, given that making the contract scores an average of over 1800, while beating the opponent say 2 or 3 tricks will be a fraction of that, one should not gamble 7NT unless one is around 9-1 on to go down with worst defence. And you need to convert all the possible scores to IMPs to get the true odds!

[Fluffy]

Today Spain and Brazil play for the second place in their groups in Basket Olympiads.

Whoever wins gets to play earlier against USA. So both want to lose. What will happen?