[ggwhiz]

Being told that this is not a firm agreement seems to be all of the explanation you were ever going to get whether the bid was alerted or not and you chose to ask.

So misinformed? No. There is potential for UI down the road but no damage yet.

[NickRW]

The only comment I can really make here is that I am a reasonably intelligent guy and I try to be honest at the table. And I have sometimes directed with an effort to uphold the spirit and letter of the law while trying to remember "it's just a game". But I frankly find this too confusing.

[Bbradley62]

When his partner bids 1N, LHO has two choices: (1) he can alert and tell you that there is no agreement, so no one can be sure of what's going on, or (2) he can refrain from alerting which tells you that the bid is not alertable. It seems to me that he did the right thing. You are entitled to know everything that he knows about their partnership agreements/understandings; now you do.

[Vampyr]

 Bbradley62, on 2014-November-12, 10:53, said:

You are entitled to know everything that he knows about their partnership agreements/understandings; now you do.

No, they were a first-time partnership and I do not think that RHO had ever played a sandwich 1NT as showing the two unbid suits; in fact he seemed not to have heard of the treatment. So the information I was given was simply made up and false.

[nige1]

 Vampyr, on 2014-November-11, 20:22, said:

Recently I played in a match. In the first half of the match I played against a new partnership, who had few agreements. Naturally some of their agreements would have been implicit ones, like things that were common in their circle of players, or at their club, or with partners they had in common. So. RHO bids 1NT in the sandwich position . Lefty alerts and says "I don't know, but it could be the other two suits". Before the opening lead we ask LHO to leave the room while we ask RHO what his understanding of the agreement was. He had assumed that they were playing the standard meaning of a strong NT; certainly the correct assumption if they had not discussed the situation. We never phoned and asked for a ruling because in the end it didn't matter. But I have been thinking about it. If a player truly has no agreement but speculates, is the opponent misinformed if she chooses to assume that the speculation is their de facto agreement? One thing that complicates this question is that you do not know how strong a basis the player has for his guess. Please share your thoughts on the matter.

Some players seem sure of their partnership agreements but I guess that the majority, like me, are never certain. With each putative "agreement", I could associate a rough probability in an open interval e.g. Stayman (about 99%) and e.g. some potential Kickback bids in a competitive auction (about 1%). The problem is that different players deal with uncertainty in different ways.

• If they're reasonably sure, some state their surmise as unqualified fact. They open themselves to misinformation rulings
• Unless they're pretty sure, most just claim "no agreement" and won't be budged. As far as current Bridge law is concerned, that's the safest position.
• A few like me, say they're unsure, but offer to speculate. And now we're in vampyr territory

IMO, the law should be changed to "If you don't know and it's not on your system card, then you must guess". You can point to your system-card but if opponents can't find it there, then you must guess. If you get it wrong, then you should be subject to MI law. Shades of Bobby Wolf but it would encourage players to complete their system-cards or to adopt a standard card.

[WellSpyder]

 Vampyr, on 2014-November-12, 11:16, said:

No, they were a first-time partnership and I do not think that RHO had ever played a sandwich 1NT as showing the two unbid suits; in fact he seemed not to have heard of the treatment.

And did LHO know that? Presumably not. So what was false about his explanation?

[Vampyr]

 WellSpyder, on 2014-November-12, 11:35, said:

And did LHO know that? Presumably not. So what was false about his explanation?

What was false was, we, the information he gave me. I believe, as Nigel above, that if I am given a meaning of a bid, however uncertainly, I should be able to rely on it and be protected if I have been given MI. I also think that Nigel is right that the player should have to guess; if told "no agreement" the opponents may find it impossible to proceed, and must themselves guess, and will receive no protection if they guessed wrong. Does anyone think that this is satisfactory?

[pran]

 barmar, on 2014-November-12, 09:55, said:

The law says you have to disclose any explicit or implicit agreements. How much more complete can you get than saying that you don't have any explicit agreements, but X could be an implicit agreement? It seems like he's really trying to comply with that law.

There are three possibilities:

1: The player being unable to give a complete and correct explanation because he has forgotten the agreement - he is (of course) at fault

2: There is indeed no partnership understanding (explicit or implicit) - the player making such a call is at fault!
A good player will never place his partner in a position where the partner cannot be expected to have any idea on what is going on. If he does he is the one causing his partner to misinform opponents.

In either case, opponents have been misinformed, and if they are consequently damaged then they should receive redress.

3: Partner does indeed have the idea which then, being an implicit partnership understanding, is what he is supposed to tell opponents.
If partner now gives the correct explanation then no damage is done.
However, if he turns out to give an incorrect explanation then we have an unfortunate example of alternative 2 above!

[blackshoe]

Please let's not confuse what we would like the laws to say with what they do say.

[nige1]

Addendum to my previous post. When you're unsure what partner's call means, the director has the power to ask you to leave the table and to instruct your partner to explain it's systemic meaning to opponents. An excellent theoretical solution, although unused, in my practical experience. Even better, if the law empowered players to exercise that option themselves. A cynic might predict a miracle-cure for system-amnesia

[blackshoe]

One more time: stick to what the laws say, not what you would like them to say. If you want to discuss the latter, there's another forum here for that.

[StevenG]

 pran, on 2014-November-12, 12:01, said:

2: There is indeed no partnership understanding (explicit or implicit) - the player making such a call is at fault!
A good player will never place his partner in a position where the partner cannot be expected to have any idea on what is going on. If he does he is the one causing his partner to misinform opponents.

This is nonsense. If your opponents use a convention you have never heard of and therefore have no defence to, and pass is not sensible, how can you possible conform to this? If you volunteer to "host" as some clubs do, and find yourself playing with a complete stranger, who has maybe braved a bridge club for the first time and has never played duplicate before, how can you possibly conform to this?

I play at low-grade non-EBU clubs. If I were to ask opponents about their agreements and call the TD when I got a muddled answer because they were clueless, that would probably work well for me against 80%+ of opponents - and I would consider myself a cheat. Play at an EBU club and even then you're probably up somewhere around 50% of opponents, at leat for non-routine sequences.

Once again, the elite who discuss every nuance of every sequence after the game are trying to dictate impossible regulations to the rest of the bridge world. Do they not realise that if a normal pair gets in a muddle, they just forget it, throw their scorecard away, go home at the end of the evening, and not even think about bridge until the next session?

If you want to do this as regulation (not law) for tournament bridge, then that's fine by me - but even at that level you still can't expect a pair to have every situation discussed. But it's impossible at club level, and the elite shouldn't think that it is.

[blackshoe]

I don't think it's impossible - it depends on the club. In general, for most clubs of which I'm aware, I'd say it's probably undesirable.

I have a regular once a month partner whose attitude is "I want to play cards and have fun". She's far more interested in the social aspects of club bridge than in the bridge aspects. We play a simple card, and even then we have our mixups. We don't hold post-mortems, she doesn't care. If the club tried to hold her to the standard Sven proposes, she'd either ignore that altogether, or quit playing at this club. She's just one example. This is the largest club (30 tables usually, sometimes 40) in the area. It would die under Sven's standard.

[weejonnie]

The correct thing to do is to alert and then say "No agreement" - I have done this twice recently when my partner bid 3NT after mistaking a Lebensohl 2NT for being natural. Naturally I passed on the assumption that my partner knew I was making a Lebensohl bid but for his own reasons was bidding 3NT. My partner should of course continue to play my 2NT bid as natural and double any opponent bids afterwards.

[helene_t]

3NT is a well-defined and natural response to Lebensohl. There is nothing to alert. And after partner's failure to alert your 2NT I think it's a particularly bad idea to alert 3NT since it could wake up partner.

[helene_t]

 lamford, on 2014-November-12, 05:23, said:

I think that is an unnecessary burden on any partnership. There is enough work forming agreements over things like a 1H opening fert, without having to have an agreement over an "undiscussed" but alerted 1H opening bid.

Yes but there isn't much to do about it if your true agreement is "undiscussed".

You can relieve opps a little bid from that burden by avoiding explanations like "I am not sure but I think that ....". Just say that it is a fert if that is what you think it is and if it turns out that partner does not have a fert and the correct explanation was "no agreement" then at least it is clear that there is MI.

This approach has the added advantage that you don't give p the UI that you are unsure. If playing behind screens you don't have that issue but OTOH you don't want too many situations in which different explanation is given on the two sides of the screen.

[mycroft]

Seems to be about time for me to mention that "undiscussed, but..." is almost always more correct, and more useful than "undiscussed". Don't tell them what you're "taking it as", but do tell them the special knowledge of your system that you will be using to guess what she meant this time.

Obviously, much less "almost always" with pickups, but even then, "he's from my area, and standard around here is..." or "is either...", provided the opponents aren't also from "my area", is not GBK.

[blackshoe]

 helene_t, on 2014-November-13, 05:43, said:

Yes but there isn't much to do about it if your true agreement is "undiscussed".

You can relieve opps a little bid from that burden by avoiding explanations like "I am not sure but I think that ....". Just say that it is a fert if that is what you think it is and if it turns out that partner does not have a fert and the correct explanation was "no agreement" then at least it is clear that there is MI.

This approach has the added advantage that you don't give p the UI that you are unsure. If playing behind screens you don't have that issue but OTOH you don't want too many situations in which different explanation is given on the two sides of the screen.

How does "no agreement, but there are the following possibilities…" fit in? IOW, you're not uncertain — you know it could be one of two or three possibilities, say, but you don't know which one because you haven't made an agreement with this partner on the call.

[barmar]

 helene_t, on 2014-November-13, 05:30, said:

3NT is a well-defined and natural response to Lebensohl. There is nothing to alert. And after partner's failure to alert your 2NT I think it's a particularly bad idea to alert 3NT since it could wake up partner.

I know that exists when Lebensohl is used after a double of a weak 2. Does it really exist when it's used after an overcall over 1NT, which I suspect is the case in that example?

[helene_t]

 barmar, on 2014-November-13, 10:17, said:

I know that exists when Lebensohl is used after a double of a weak 2. Does it really exist when it's used after an overcall over 1NT, which I suspect is the case in that example?

Oops yes of course, I don't know why I only thought of the response to dbl.