[campboy]

Let's consider for a moment how this interpretation might work in practice. Suppose declarer leads up to Kx of a suit in dummy and plays the king, covered by the ace. Three players turn the trick, but dummy does not; declarer's RHO leads to the next trick. Declarer quickly plays a card, then says "Oh dear, the previous trick was defective. I'd better play a card to it from dummy. Small, please."

Is this right? If not, why is it different from the other cases?

[pran]

dburn, on 2011-April-25, 01:23, said:

The novel idea of using Law 67B to say that there has been a defective trick when there has not been a defective trick does not seem to be based in rationality. Indeed, it is one of the most absurd pieces of thinking I have ever encountered. A player who plays a card to a trick, and later picks that card up again by mistake and puts it back in his hand, has not thereby unplayed the card to the trick so that the trick becomes defective in retrospect. Four cards, no more and no fewer, were played to the trick, which was not defective then and is not defective now.

The Director may use Law 67B to determine that there has been a defective trick if there is no other explanation for the fact that a player has too few or too many cards in his hand. But when there is another explanation, and it is an explanation consistent with reality on which all the players at the table are agreed, then the Director may not determine that there has been a defective trick when this is plainly not the case.

This comment appears to deny the principles behind and use of Law 67 (and its predecessors) since the beginning of Bridge. It is understandable that someone not experienced with Law 67 can make such "mistake" from just reading the actual words in that law rather than understanding the reality of the law, but I believe this calls for moving the thread to "Changing Laws & Regulations" (or starting a new thread there).

[Cascade]

pran, on 2011-April-25, 03:09, said:

This comment appears to deny the principles behind and use of Law 67 (and its predecessors) since the beginning of Bridge. It is understandable that someone not experienced with Law 67 can make such "mistake" from just reading the actual words in that law rather than understanding the reality of the law, but I believe this calls for moving the thread to "Changing Laws & Regulations" (or starting a new thread there).

Is that use or misuse?

[pran]

Cascade, on 2011-April-25, 03:40, said:

Pran said:

This comment appears to deny the principles behind and use of Law 67 (and its predecessors) since the beginning of Bridge. It is understandable that someone not experienced with Law 67 can make such "mistake" from just reading the actual words in that law rather than understanding the reality of the law, but I believe this calls for moving the thread to "Changing Laws & Regulations" (or starting a new thread there).

Is that use or misuse?

I cannot see how an entry in "Changing Laws & Regulations" raising the question of a change in the wording in Law 67 to make it better complying (literally) with the existing principles and use of that law can be misuse of anything?

For my own part I feel comfortable with Law 67 as it is and have no desire for any change.

[nige1]

This one will run and run. To a layman, a defective trick is simply a trick containing the wrong cards or the wrong number of cards, so law 67 or whatever seems appropriate. The alternate "Bridge-logic" argument also has merit : at the time the trick was played, it was not defective. You pays your money and you takes your choice. As usual, the director must rule on a whim and a prayer. Alternatively, we can just keep arguing until 2018 or 2028 or whenever the WBFLC finally decide to bite the bullet and make the hard decision to write a simpler, clearer, less subjective, more deterrent, and more complete law-book..

[Cascade]

pran, on 2011-April-25, 06:11, said:

I cannot see how an entry in "Changing Laws & Regulations" raising the question of a change in the wording in Law 67 to make it better complying (literally) with the existing principles and use of that law can be misuse of anything?

For my own part I feel comfortable with Law 67 as it is and have no desire for any change.

I was referring to the misuse of Law 67.

The penalties prescribed therein that relate to a situation when a player has one (or more) too few cards among his quitted tricks only applies "When the offender has failed to play a card to the defective trick...". It is impossible to properly apply this provision of the law when in fact a card from the hand in question was played to the trick in question. This fact is plain. Doing so contrary to the written law is therefore a misuse of that law.

[pran]

Cascade, on 2011-April-25, 12:57, said:

I was referring to the misuse of Law 67.

The penalties prescribed therein that relate to a situation when a player has one (or more) too few cards among his quitted tricks only applies "When the offender has failed to play a card to the defective trick...". It is impossible to properly apply this provision of the law when in fact a card from the hand in question was played to the trick in question. This fact is plain. Doing so contrary to the written law is therefore a misuse of that law.

I believe you are not appreciating the significance of the following clause in Law 67B:
or when the Director determines that there had been a defective trick (from the fact that one player has too few or too many cards in his hand, and a correspondingly incorrect number of played cards)

We have always (to my knowledge) used the condition specified between brackets in this clause as the main criterion for a trick to be deemed defective and Law 67 to apply.

Even evidence to the effect that a card thus found in a player's hand instead of among his played cards had indeed been played to a trick and afterwards somehow must have found its way back into the hand in question has always been considered irrelevant in this context.

[Cascade]

pran, on 2011-April-25, 13:44, said:

I believe you are not appreciating the significance of the following clause in Law 67B:
or when the Director determines that there had been a defective trick (from the fact that one player has too few or too many cards in his hand, and a correspondingly incorrect number of played cards)

We have always (to my knowledge) used the condition specified between brackets in this clause as the main criterion for a trick to be deemed defective and Law 67 to apply.

Even evidence to the effect that a card thus found in a player's hand instead of among his played cards had indeed been played to a trick and afterwards somehow must have found its way back into the hand in question has always been considered irrelevant in this context.

I understand that clause. And the director finding that one hand contains too many cards is evidence suggesting a card was not played. However you can not simply ignore that the card was played.

Furthermore it is impossible to apply Law 67B1 when the card has in fact been played.

Also there is a completely separate law that deals with the issue of quitting a trick. I can think of no reason to not rule under that law when that is in fact the infraction. Sure that law does not provide a specific penalty. Nevertheless there are ways of rectifying any damage that has been done to the non-offending side when the laws do not prescribe a specific penalty.

It seems a complete distortion to rule that a played card has somehow become unplayed in order to apply Law 67B1.

[dburn]

pran, on 2011-April-25, 03:09, said:

This comment appears to deny the principles behind and use of Law 67 (and its predecessors) since the beginning of Bridge. It is understandable that someone not experienced with Law 67 can make such "mistake" from just reading the actual words in that law rather than understanding the reality of the law, but I believe this calls for moving the thread to "Changing Laws & Regulations" (or starting a new thread there).

There is no "reality of the law" apart from the actual words in the law. If, as pran and bluejak seem to assert, Law 67 has been "used" to say that a card was not played to a trick when that card was played to a trick, then the people who have been "using" the law in that fashion are guilty of dereliction of duty and a complete absence of common sense. To claim that there have been a lot of such people since the beginning of Bridge is to claim only that there have been a lot of people since the beginning of Bridge who do not have any common sense and do not know what they are doing. Whilst this is undoubtedly the case, the situation is to be remedied, not perpetuated.

Confronted with a player who has too many cards in his hand and too few played cards in front of him, it is likely that a Director will correctly determine that the player must have failed to play a card to some trick or other, because this will often be the true explanation of the fact. But it will not always be the true explanation of the fact, and the actual words in Law 67B do not compel the Director to decide that it is the true explanation of the fact when there is incontrovertible evidence that it is not. Instead, the actual words in the law compel the Director to follow Law 67 when and only when the discrepancy between the cards remaining in one player's hand and those remaining in the other players' hands can only be explained by the occurrence of a defective trick. It is true that those words could have been more clearly written, in order not to confuse pran and others who are deceived by the fallacy known as post hoc ergo propter hoc [after this, therefore because of this], but I cannot help that.

Meanwhile, it remains the case that no trick is defective to which exactly four cards were played. In the case of the original post, the card remaining in dummy was played to the trick on which declarer called for the card and was played at the moment declarer called for it. What happened to the card afterwards is neither here nor there: it might have been left face up in dummy; it might have been stolen by a passing beaver to form a sluice gate for a dam; it might have been transformed by a malevolent wizard from the three of hearts to the jack of diamonds in order to confuse everyone. But it was played to a trick, and that trick was not defective then, is not defective now, and will be defective never.

[Trinidad]

Technically, I don't see any definition of "defective trick" in the Laws. The term defective trick appears in the heading of Law 67 and in the body of Law 67B, but is not defined.

However, it isn't too hard to imagine that Law 67A was actually meant to contain a definition for "defective trick":

"When a player has omitted to play to a trick, or has played too many cards to a trick..."

Yes, technically it would have been better if Law 67 actually started with: "A defective trick is a trick to which a player has omitted to play to, or has played too many cards to." (Maybe good for the next edition of the Laws?) But you need to be pretty far off to think that a trick to which each player has played exactly one card (as was the case here) can be covered by Law 67 as "defective". In other words: I am with Burn. The trick was never defective.

The question remains: What to do then in a case where a trick is not quitted or someone adds a quitted card back to his hand?

There are two cases:
1) The card is still in the hand.
The card will be removed from the hand and put back where it belongs.

2) The card has been played to a subsequent trick and this trick has been quitted.
I think that you can make a much stronger case to treat this subsequent trick as defective (since the card contributed wasn't a legal play) than the first one where everyone legally played one card. Odds are that it is a lot easier to restore too, since it is later in the play.

Rik

[pran]

Bridge laws are written by humans to formalize the rules under which bridge is to be played. Associated with the written laws are commentaries issued by the lawmakers and resolutions issued by the lawmakers in response to interpretation problems they have received. Tournament directors have in general been trained through various courses.

All this combines to a set of existing rules that sometimes are not readily grasped by people for instance reading just the law text without any of the guidance available to certified directors.

Law 67 received its present form in 1987, the revision performed at that time appears to having been made for the purpose of allowing defective tricks to be corrected also after both sides had played to a subsequent trick. This shifted the focus from the tricks as such to the number of cards held by each player at any instance during the play (but the heading to this law was not changed). Notice, however, that the headings in the laws are not, and never have been part of the laws proper.

Law 67 now kicks in whenever during the play a hand is discovered to contain a number of cards not consistent with the number of tricks played so far. (The only exception to this is that Law 14 rather than Law 67 applies when one or more cards are missing.)

Those who are familiar with the laws will simply recognize this as a fact. Others will have to accept it, but they are of course free to suggest (through the appropriate channels) a change of the law text to correct what they consider erratic.

[axman]

dburn, on 2011-April-25, 16:34, said:

There is no "reality of the law" apart from the actual words in the law. If, as pran and bluejak seem to assert, Law 67 has been "used" to say that a card was not played to a trick when that card was played to a trick, then the people who have been "using" the law in that fashion are guilty of dereliction of duty and a complete absence of common sense. To claim that there have been a lot of such people since the beginning of Bridge is to claim only that there have been a lot of people since the beginning of Bridge who do not have any common sense and do not know what they are doing. Whilst this is undoubtedly the case, the situation is to be remedied, not perpetuated.

Confronted with a player who has too many cards in his hand and too few played cards in front of him, it is likely that a Director will correctly determine that the player must have failed to play a card to some trick or other, because this will often be the true explanation of the fact. But it will not always be the true explanation of the fact, and the actual words in Law 67B do not compel the Director to decide that it is the true explanation of the fact when there is incontrovertible evidence that it is not. Instead, the actual words in the law compel the Director to follow Law 67 when and only when the discrepancy between the cards remaining in one player's hand and those remaining in the other players' hands can only be explained by the occurrence of a defective trick. It is true that those words could have been more clearly written, in order not to confuse pran and others who are deceived by the fallacy known as post hoc ergo propter hoc [after this, therefore because of this], but I cannot help that.

Meanwhile, it remains the case that no trick is defective to which exactly four cards were played. In the case of the original post, the card remaining in dummy was played to the trick on which declarer called for the card and was played at the moment declarer called for it. What happened to the card afterwards is neither here nor there: it might have been left face up in dummy; it might have been stolen by a passing beaver to form a sluice gate for a dam; it might have been transformed by a malevolent wizard from the three of hearts to the jack of diamonds in order to confuse everyone. But it was played to a trick, and that trick was not defective then, is not defective now, and will be defective never.

Not that it is particularly helpful to point it out, but quite a number have been experiencing the proverbial non sequitur. Figuratively speaking, the law has loaded everybody on a long distance bus and taken them to the middle of a large and impressive apple orchard and declared, ‘there is a fruit called an orange.’

For they whom never had known anything about oranges it is quite likely that they now will believe that they are surrounded by a lot of oranges. The field trip may indeed have been interesting, yet not necessarily helpful, at least in the way envisioned.

It may be all well [but it probably is not] to tell an instance when a defective trick exists; but for someone to write a law about defective tricks who does not take the pain to describe a defective trick, there is sound basis to believe with a high probability that the writer does not know what a defective trick is, yet.

[blackshoe]

From Chapter One of the Laws:

Quote

Trick: The unit by which the outcome of the contract is determined, composed unless flawed of four cards, one contributed by each player in rotation beginning with the lead.

Is not "defective" synonymous with "flawed"? Okay, a player contributed to a trick. If that trick is now amongst the quitted tricks (not being any longer the trick currently in progress), then if the four cards of the trick are not all where they are supposed to be, viz. amongst the quitted tricks, respectively, of the players who played them, is the trick not "flawed"? The alternative, it seems to me, is to consider that once a card is played to a trick, it is always and forever a part of that trick (well, until the final result is agreed, and the hand returned to the board), wherever in the Universe it may be. Is that truly the case?

[Trinidad]

pran, on 2011-April-25, 17:41, said:

Bridge laws are written by humans to formalize the rules under which bridge is to be played. Associated with the written laws are commentaries issued by the lawmakers and resolutions issued by the lawmakers in response to interpretation problems they have received. Tournament directors have in general been trained through various courses.

All very fine. But the original problem doesn't give any interpretation problem. It was clear to all that the ♥3 was played to trick 9. The OP actually states that the card was called, therefore it has been played. Each player played a card to trick 9, hence the trick wasn't defective. The fact that the ♥3 wasn't quitted properly doesn't in any way make trick 9 defective. There is no room for misinterpretation.

The same holds for a card that has been played at trick 2 and is discovered at trick 10. If it is reconstructed that it was played at trick 2 and all players have played one card to that trick, then trick 2 wasn't defective. No interpretation problem, just follow the Law book.

If it is reconstructed that the card had not been played to trick 2, then trick 2 was defective. Again, no interpretation problem, just follow the Law book.

The interpretation problem only comes if it was impossible to reconstruct whether the card had actually been played. In such a case, by all means use the commentary from the Law makers. But in this thread it was very easy to reconstruct that the cards in question had actually been played, so this was not the case in this thread.

Rik

[Cascade]

bluejak, on 2011-April-18, 18:54, said:

Trick nine. Declarer leads the ♥A and calls for the ♥3 from dummy. When the trick is turned down, dummy fails to turn his card down - no-one notices.

Trick ten. Declarer leads the ♠K, LHO follows, and when declarer looks at dummy he sees the ♥3 which he had played to the previous trick! He counts dummy's cards and finds there is one too many!

Director!

blackshoe, on 2011-April-25, 18:10, said:

From Chapter One of the Laws:

Quote

Trick: The unit by which the outcome of the contract is determined, composed unless flawed of four cards, one contributed by each player in rotation beginning with the lead.

Is not "defective" synonymous with "flawed"? Okay, a player contributed to a trick. If that trick is now amongst the quitted tricks (not being any longer the trick currently in progress), then if the four cards of the trick are not all where they are supposed to be, viz. amongst the quitted tricks, respectively, of the players who played them, is the trick not "flawed"? The alternative, it seems to me, is to consider that once a card is played to a trick, it is always and forever a part of that trick (well, until the final result is agreed, and the hand returned to the board), wherever in the Universe it may be. Is that truly the case?

So what cards composed trick nine?

We are not told what the defenders' cards were but declarer played the ♥K and dummy the ♥3. These were properly contributed by each player in rotation.

Noone is attempting to answer the crucial question of what subsequently could make the ♥3 unplayed?

All that is happened is that this card has improperly not been quit. This should be dealt with under Law 65 not Law 67.

[blackshoe]

I wished to get more information about peoples' thinking. That's why I was asking questions instead of answering them. However, if you want an answer, I'll say that I have no idea what could make a card "unplayed", save for the provisions of Law 47.

[blackshoe]

There is this:

Quote

Law 65A: When four cards have been played to a trick, each player turns his own card face down near him on the table.

Quote

Introduction: Established usage has been retained in regard to … “does” (establishes correct procedure without suggesting that the violation be penalized)…

So if Law 65 is the right approach, the card should be put among the quitted tricks where it belongs, and that's the end of it.

[dburn]

Cascade, on 2011-April-25, 18:49, said:

No one is attempting to answer the crucial question of what subsequently could make the ♥3 unplayed?

That is not entirely accurate. I have attempted to answer it by saying that nothing can make the ♥3 unplayed. Pran has attempted to answer it by saying that those in charge of training tournament directors have the magical power to convince them that a played card was not played, and impart to them in turn the magical power to convince players at the table that a card they saw played with their own eyes, one of them having played it with and indeed from his own hand, was not played.

This would be laughable were it not a rather serious matter. The attitude among certain tournament directors that there exists some "reality of the law" apart from the words in the Laws, that this "reality" can only be perceived by the trained adept, and that the untrained should grovel at the feet of the masters instead of pointing out to them that they are talking abject nonsense, is not good for bridge at all.

[dburn]

campboy, on 2011-April-25, 03:06, said:

Let's consider for a moment how this interpretation might work in practice. Suppose declarer leads up to Kx of a suit in dummy and plays the king, covered by the ace. Three players turn the trick, but dummy does not; declarer's RHO leads to the next trick. Declarer quickly plays a card, then says "Oh dear, the previous trick was defective. I'd better play a card to it from dummy. Small, please."

Is this right? If not, why is it different from the other cases?

It's worse than that. Consider the position in which South drops not the three of hearts on the floor, but the ace. When he discovers, having retrieved the card from the floor and put it back in his hand, that he has one more card than everyone else, pran is summoned to the table.

"The trick to which you allegedly played the ♥A is defective", says our hero. "You must choose one of your hearts to be played to that trick."

South places the four of hearts among his played cards, then cashes the ace of hearts again. Since the ownership of the "defective trick" was not changed, South has in effect won two tricks with that ace of hearts.

Of course, pran will then use the entrails of a toad, the eye of a newt and Law 12A1 to adjust the score. But this is a complete and utter waste of time; instead, the ace of hearts should just be put back where it belonged, and the players should just get on with the game.

[pran]

dburn, on 2011-April-26, 06:00, said:

It's worse than that. Consider the position in which South drops not the three of hearts on the floor, but the ace. When he discovers, having retrieved the card from the floor and put it back in his hand, that he has one more card than everyone else, pran is summoned to the table.

"The trick to which you allegedly played the ♥A is defective", says our hero. "You must choose one of your hearts to be played to that trick."

South places the four of hearts among his played cards, then cashes the ace of hearts again. Since the ownership of the "defective trick" was not changed, South has in effect won two tricks with that ace of hearts.

Of course, pran will then use the entrails of a toad, the eye of a newt and Law 12A1 to adjust the score. But this is a complete and utter waste of time; instead, the ace of hearts should just be put back where it belonged, and the players should just get on with the game.

Don't try to tell me what I am going to do in a particular case when you (ought to) know that it is not true.

If it is clear that the heart originally played by South to the (now) defective trick was the Ace I shall require South to select this Ace (and not the four) to be placed among his played cards in order to avoid a PP (in addition to the automatic revoke rectification specified in Law 67B1a).