[mr1303]

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This was board 4 of last Thursday night's pairs at our local club. In particular, you are the last but one table to play this hand. You are South. You sort of recognise this hand, but aren't entirely sure, so say not very much at the time.

After a few tricks have been played, you realise that you really do recognise this hand. You went off in 3NT on a different sequence last week, and the board hasn't been shuffled from last week. No-one else has remembered since last week (different pairs playing, different polarity at a number of tables etc).

You call the director over, and he says that no-one else has noticed, so just keep quiet about it.

Any thoughts?

[campboy]

Law 6D2: "Unless the purpose of the tournament is the replay of past deals no result may stand [...] if the deal has been imported from a different session."

[blackshoe]

The director is apparently from the "I can make any ruling I want" school.

I can understand why he made this "ruling" though — Law 6D2 leads to A+ for every pair in the game on this board. This is almost guaranteed to draw protests from somebody.

[RMB1]

No great crime has been committed by TD or players.

I don't much like "so just keep quiet about it" (not even a "please").

As a TD I would announce to the room what had happened and explain that I was going to allow the scores to stand except at the table where the hand had been recognised.

[gnasher]

This has happened to me a few times - at least twice with single hand-dealt boards, and once with an entire set of duplicated boards that had been used six months earlier. In all cases the director ruled as Robin suggests, but without making any announcement.

With the duplicated set, the recollection didn't seem to help me much - I kept recognising the problems, but couldn't remember what the successful action was. I don't think there was a single board where I actually had UI at the point that I needed it.

I agree with Robin that the director should be pragmatic about this sort of thing. People go to clubs to play bridge, not to accumulate artificial scores.

[Cyberyeti]

This has happened to me twice at the same club. One was recognised the first time it was played, I sat with KJxxxx of diamonds and a 13 count and the auction went 1♦-P-P- to me on both occasions. It turned out that the first set of 4 boards in one section (was the county league so several sets of boards in play) hadn't been duped so we borrowed one of the other sets.

The other occasion was much funnier. The same board was played on 3 occasions (Edit, consecutive weeks), and I didn't recognise it till dummy hit on the third occasion (late in the session). When you get a 7-5 2 count in first seat and a (misfitting) 8-4 hand opposite anything can happen in the auction and I sat in 3 different seats for this one. I explained to the director what was happening as soon as I realised and given the auction, director worked out that whether we took 1100/1400 wasn't going to matter much so allowed us to continue playing it.

[pran]

Not exactly the same, but the funniest I ever have encountered as TD (I think) is when I scored a Howell traveller and discovered that the same pair had played the board three times (against different opponents, two times one way and one time the other) with three different results.

Quite a few artificial scores on that board!

[StevenG]

Once at the club, a pair at table 8 received new boards from table 9 - and promptly passed them down to table 7. They then continued by replaying the boards they had just played on the previous round without either player noticing. Meanwhile table 7 played the wrong board set without anybody noticing either. It was only on the next round, when somebody realised they were bidding a board for the second time did the problem come to light. The scorer had fun with that one.

[axman]

gnasher, on 2012-August-06, 06:09, said:

This has happened to me a few times - at least twice with single hand-dealt boards, and once with an entire set of duplicated boards that had been used six months earlier. In all cases the director ruled as Robin suggests, but without making any announcement.

With the duplicated set, the recollection didn't seem to help me much - I kept recognising the problems, but couldn't remember what the successful action was. I don't think there was a single board where I actually had UI at the point that I needed it.

I agree with Robin that the director should be pragmatic about this sort of thing. People go to clubs to play bridge, not to accumulate artificial scores.

On one memorable occasion scuttlebutt came to my attention that a pair of boards in my section were the same as the previous session [had not been duplicated for this session]. At the end of the round I approached the TD to so inform him that there was a pair of previously played boards. When he refused to correct the fouling I raised cain- and he still refused to correct the fouling.

What is curious is that I didn't recognize the hands, but did pick up a couple of tricks on each board the second time around.

As for the pragmatic thing, sometimes it takes getting riled to create the attitude of the value of getting it right the first time; and a necessary precondition is a fastidious application of the rules.

[gordontd]

axman, on 2012-August-06, 07:36, said:

scuttlebutt

What does this word mean here?

axman, on 2012-August-06, 07:36, said:

What is curious is that I didn't recognize the hands, but did pick up a couple of tricks on each board the second time around.

I'm not surprised by this: we all expect to learn from our experience, and this just shows that we do.

[f0rdy]

gnasher, on 2012-August-06, 06:09, said:

This has happened to me a few times - at least twice with single hand-dealt boards, and once with an entire set of duplicated boards that had been used six months earlier. In all cases the director ruled as Robin suggests, but without making any announcement.

With the duplicated set, the recollection didn't seem to help me much - I kept recognising the problems, but couldn't remember what the successful action was. I don't think there was a single board where I actually had UI at the point that I needed it.

I agree with Robin that the director should be pragmatic about this sort of thing. People go to clubs to play bridge, not to accumulate artificial scores.

When it happened to me we were fortunate/unfortunate that the board was the most memorable from the previous session; my partner put down the dummy after an auction something like 2H - X - P - 2S - P - 4S - AP with the comment "Let's see if you can do better than last time we had this auction". I quickly realised that it was the hand we had discussed the play of on the drive home the previous week, and proceeded to announce "It is that hand, she (pointing) has the K♣ and I need to eliminate the red suits and endplay her... Director!". We tried to play the next hand of the 4 board set, but realised after the auction that it had also not been shuffled.

It was a multiple teams and we received the board halfway through the movement, so while we dealt 4 spare boards and used them for our match, every other match had already played the board. I agree that there was no decent solution other than to let the rest of the matches carry on, but I was surprised no-one else in the room (most of whom would have been there the previous week) had noticed this set of 4 familiar hands travelling round the room.

[campboy]

Several years ago at the university club I played the same board in consecutive weeks without noticing. North had a very strong hand with one long minor and a void in the other; South had a solid suit opposite North's void and nothing outside. I sat South on the first occasion and North on the second, playing with different partners, and had two different auctions to 7NT-4. Gareth Birdsall did recognise the board a couple of rounds later, and when he heard what had happened suggested we should play it again the following week to give me a chance to get it right

[axman]

gordontd, on 2012-August-06, 08:24, said:

What does this word mean here?

It is slang, probably american, for rumor/gossip. It was used a lot in military pictures, particularly from the forties and fifties.

As I recollect, the occasion happened around the seventh round when my opponent mentioned that a pair of boards from 'last night' were in play. It sounded like he had heard it from someone else- hence- scuttlebutt.

[blackshoe]

In (US, anyway) Navy speak, a "scuttlebutt" is a water fountain. Around which people gossip, so…

[barmar]

Last week at the club, the director noticed that the date on the hand records was from June, although it was not the day of the week we hold our games. He announced this at the beginning of the game, and asked that anyone let him know if they recognized the boards from a previous session. One of the LOLs sitting at our table was incredulous that anyone would remember hands from a month ago, she said she can't remember them after playing the next board.

[blackshoe]

barmar, on 2012-August-06, 23:32, said:

Last week at the club, the director noticed that the date on the hand records was from June, although it was not the day of the week we hold our games. He announced this at the beginning of the game, and asked that anyone let him know if they recognized the boards from a previous session. One of the LOLs sitting at our table was incredulous that anyone would remember hands from a month ago, she said she can't remember them after playing the next board.

Heh. There are times I can't remember a hand after I put it back in the board, much less after I've played another one. OTOH, sometimes I remember a hand weeks later, or longer.

Your LOL would be even more incredulous at this story about, iirc, Al Roth: He picked up his hand, looked at it, and called the director. "We've played this hand before". All three of the other players at the table said they didn't think so. Roth then named the location of all 52 cards. I don't know whether the hand was from a previous session, but I imagine so.

[barmar]

In fact, I was trying to recount that exact story when responding to her, but I just remembered it as "some famous bridge expert". I think the way I heard it, the hand was from at least several weeks earlier, maybe much longer.

[Cyberyeti]

blackshoe, on 2012-August-06, 23:50, said:

Your LOL would be even more incredulous at this story about, iirc, Al Roth: He picked up his hand, looked at it, and called the director. "We've played this hand before". All three of the other players at the table said they didn't think so. Roth then named the location of all 52 cards. I don't know whether the hand was from a previous session, but I imagine so.

One of the worst instances of cheating in UK bridge where a player substituted a stacked board into hand dealt swiss teams competitions was IIRC picked up by some time apart the same hand being described to an expert twice. He didn't need to play it.

[jh51]

This reminds me of something that happened to my partner and I in a Round Robin event at the Philadelphia NABC. In two consecutive rounds, my partner and I played at the same table. When we and our opponents sat down, we shuffled and dealt, but none uf us noticed that one of the boards had not been tuoched in this process. When we came to that board, I did not immediately recognize the hand but as the bidding proceeded the feeling of deja vu increased. As I prepared to lay down dummy I commented on this and partner suddenly recognized the her hand as well. When she described the opponents hands they were convinced that the shiffling of the board had been missed. Since this was the first time it was played, we reshuffled and dealt.

The worst case of seeing a board twice was when a NS messed up the movement. They were at something like table 13 in a 13 1/2 table movement. They were supposed to receive their boards from table 14 (the sit-out for east-west) but they instead took then from table 1 and passed them to table 14. (The geography of the room somewhat increased the likelyhood of this as table 14 was somewhat out of the way.) I think that the director became aware of this somewhat early but did not really correct it. As a result, about half way through, the east-west pairs started to encounter boards they had played before. We were directed to try to achieve a normal result, which the director seemed to interpret as one where the final contract was the same as the first time we played it and we did not take advantage during the play of the hand. For one of the boards that we replayed, we got to a better spot because our opponents bid differently than the first time. The director gave them an AVE+. We were getting our original score in any case.

[EricK]

This has twice happened to me. The first time the deal was very distinctive (one hand had 8 ♥ to the Jack); the second was a more normal hand however it had been left over from a simultaneous pairs that had been played the week before (so everyone had received a booklet with all the hands and some commentary). In neither case did anyone else notice what had happened. The first time I was young and I kept quiet about it and collected my good score; the second time I felt I should mention it to the director who seemed doubtful that it could have happened. But even when I did persuade him of what had happened he did nothing. My partner, unfortunately, did not remember the hand so completely misplayed it - my fault, I should have bid the making 3NT rather than let him struggle in a 5-3 major fit. Both times it was more than half way through the evening, so it is understandable that the director didn't want to do anything drastic like cancelling the board.

To be honest, it doesn't surprise me how few average club players remember the hands from one week to the next - they generally can't remember them from one minute to the next. How often at the end of a hand do you hear declarer ask partner how many points dummy had etc?