BBO Discussion Forums: Law 50D and Law 50E - BBO Discussion Forums

It seems to me that the law on penalty cards is too severe, and makes no distinction between leads out of turn and a card dropped accidentally, assuming it is an honour or there are more than one. It jars a little when someone is forced to under-ruff with the king of trumps, or discard an ace.

I think the culprit is the option to leave the card as a major penalty card even when the partner of that person is on lead. It seems to me better that, after the declarer has selected an option, the MPC is picked up, but it is still UI to its owner's partner. A player can still never benefit from a penalty card (as his partner must pretend he did not see it) and we avoid the nonsense of Law 50E and the infamous WBFLC minute, which are possibly contradictory. We should still keep Law 50E3 in case there is an incident at a North London club.

I am sure, also, that at bridge clubs up and down the country, the TD is not explaining the laws properly, particularly with regard to option 5. This is not surprising, as the WBFLC are not sure what they are.

IMO, unnecessary complications are caused by the options that rule-makers give to players after an infraction. A penalty card should be played at the first legal opportunity and there should be no other option. L23 seems to take care of most of the rest. I don't like the UI ramifications because I find them hard to understand and I feel that most players and directors have the same difficulty.

 nige1, on 2015-May-26, 18:34, said:

Wow I would make lots of leads out of turn if I felt that partner was not sure what to lead.

I agree with this

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but not this

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since it's just as easy to think of situations where a player has to do something ridiculous with his penalty card before his partner ever gets on lead.

Personally I think the problem is the requirement to play the card at the first legal opportunity. I see no reason for this, and it is the source of all the complications. If it wasn't required, then everything about the penalty card could be UI. With the consideration of UI and lead options it will still generally be advantageous to play the card as soon as possible, but usually not to the extent of underruffing or discarding winners.

 campboy, on 2015-May-27, 03:50, said:

Perhaps the reason is that the lawmakers wanted a deterrent to revokes. If players consider this part of the law "draconian" perhaps they'll be more careful about following suit. Or perhaps they just didn't want to leave when to play the PC up to the player who committed the infraction.

If you change the law in this way, what's the difference between a MPC and a mPC?

 blackshoe, on 2015-May-27, 08:39, said:

The place to deter revoking is in the revoke laws. Major penalty cards can occur in lots of other ways, such as honour cards being dropped.

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Lead restrictions on partner. (I would get rid of the restriction about not playing a different small card too.)

I agree with blackshoe that the PC law is intentionally draconian as a deterrent on actions that cause penalty cards. Maybe it's a holdover from rubber bridge, which doesn't have the same laws about unauthorized information that duplicate bridge does (its Law 16 simply says that a player may be subject to penalty if he transmits UI to his partner, there's no LA restriction on the receiver). I'm basing this guess on the distinction between major and minor PCs -- honors are generally more significant than non-honors, so the UI from seeing partner's honor has more impact, so the penalty is more severe. Theoretically, the UI laws should make this irrelevant, but in practice it's hard to enforce.

I think it's also designed to dispose of the PC as soon as possible, so that the rest of the hand can be played more normally.

 campboy, on 2015-May-27, 09:49, said:

This is an excellent idea. Echoing or playing up-the-line is often ambiguous before two rounds have been played. The opportunity to make such a clear signal on just one trick will improve many players' defense.

 Vampyr, on 2015-May-27, 17:59, said:

Except UI laws will mean that when the penalty card clarifies an ambiguous signal, partner will be required to interpret it wrongly.

I can certainly see an argument for keeping the can't-play-a-different-spot rule (mostly, that it reduces the need for TD judgement about whether UI has affected the play). But I don't think the advantages are worth the extra complexity.

I hadn't considered getting rid of the requirement to play the penalty card at the first opportunity, but I think campboy's idea is excellent. We don't require someone to make the same bid at their first opportunity when they bid out of turn, so why should we require them to play that card at the first opportunity when they lead out of turn?

 lamford, on 2015-May-28, 09:34, said:

We kind of do. If the BOOT was at RHO's turn, and RHO passes, we require him to repeat the call.

And in other situations, we bar his partner -- for 1 round if it was LHO's turn and we repeat the denomination of the BOOT, for the rest of the auction if it was at another player's turn or he doesn't repeat the denomination. All that barring is at least as onerous as requiring him to repeat the call would be. I suspect they didn't make him repeat the bid in other situations because it's too likely that the bid would not be legal (that can't happen with a penalty card -- it has to become legal eventually), and they didn't want to complicate the laws depending on this.

 Vampyr, on 2015-May-26, 19:19, said:

You would be punished by the catchall Law 23, not that I think nige1's solution is the correct one.

 Vampyr, on 2015-May-26, 19:19, said:

It turns out that there are lots of alternative ways of letting partner know what to lead without having to play a card. This subject has been one of nige's crusades for as long as I can remember. I happen to agree with him to some extent and think we can simplify some things like this. As has been pointed out, this rule is leftover from the early days of the game before UI rules were sufficiently developed. The difficulty of course is that these laws require better judgement and training from the directors than a direct penalty does and that is often not available at the club level.

 campboy, on 2015-May-28, 02:51, said:

What complexity are you talking about? And it's not only, as per Zel's comment above, that volunteer club directors (probably a lot of clubs use people who have not even attended a course) may well not be good enough directors or good enough players to deal with the UI implications; the opponents may not realise it so the director will not in fact learn of the illegal signal.

But even if all goes well and partner misinterprets the "signal", he will still know that you have another card in the suit.

 Zelandakh, on 2015-September-18, 07:21, said:

Yes, quite. Nigel is a good player; I am not sure why he wants all infractions (or maybe all boards) to be scored as A+/A- or Director's Error.

 Vampyr, on 2015-September-18, 08:19, said:

Complexity of the restrictions on what card a player with a penalty card must play. Which is more complex:

• "he may play any legal card", or
  
• "he may play any legal honour card, but he may not play a non-honour card which is not a penalty card if he has a non-honour card of the same suit which is a penalty card"?

In practice, you can probably write version 1 above as "", which is even simpler.

 campboy, on 2015-October-15, 04:30, said:

Rewrite version 2: he may not play another small card in this suit before playing the penalty card. Not very complex is it.

 Vampyr, on 2015-October-15, 05:04, said:

I assume you mean "if the penalty card is small, he may not play another small card in the same suit before playing the penalty card". My version is a bit more complex than that because I went out of my way to write something which would clearly cover all possible multiple-penalty-card situations (and which wouldn't require "small" to be defined elsewhere).

You are certainly right that the first eight words of 2 are just as unnecessary as the first six words of 1.

 lamford, on 2015-May-26, 03:27, said:

I don't know what too severe refers to, however, WBF2008 as written suggests that there is a lack of appreciation of the severe disadvantage that can arise from infractions that spawn PCs. It is not easy to balance the playing field after such infractions- and the law demonstrates the difficulty by failing to rise to the occasion. I think that if the law were properly constructed Lamford would suggest the severity meter would reach new highs.