"Fun, competitive duplicate bridge at a very convenient location"

In rechecking the scores only one problem was found in Section A: Board 15 NS3 v EW1 is -90, not +90 -- I typed into wrong column.  A variety of problems led to scoring corrections in Section B:
 1. Board 4   NS8 v EW4  +680 not +650, poor handwriting misread the first time.
 2. Board 22  NS3 v EW7  -630 not -600, inconsistent score (3n/4=600) investigated and corrected.
 3. Board 22  NS10 v EW1 -630 not -660, correcting an incorrect ruling.  This is interesting:
     A defender faced her cards when four tricks remained with only spades in the dummy and she
   holding SA and three good hearts.  However, the lead was not in dummy, but in declarer's hand.
   I wrongly ruled that all of the exposed cards were penalty cards, and that declarer could choose
   which card must be played to each subsequent trick.  So the SA was forcibly discarded and this
   allowed declarer to make an extra trick.  Gary Schwartz was declarer and felt uncomfortable with
   this ruling so sent me e-mail after the game, suggesting the correct ruling.  This should really
   be treated as a Disputed Claim under Rule 68, instead of multiple penalty cards under Rule 57A.
   The vast majority of diputed claims are made by declarer, but this one was made by a defender, and
   the director's responsibility works the same as if declarer had made the faulty claim.  The goal
   is to restore equity, so the defender is allowed to win the SA and declarer gets one less trick.
   Thanks to Gary for knowledgably pointing me to the right ruling although it cost him one MP.
 4. Bruce Emond's entry in our database erroneously showed 619 MP, but he really has less than 500,
   so Bruce and Tony got moved from Stratum B to Stratum C.
 5. A player alleged a possible fouled board on Board 12, because the North and South hands were
   reversed when compared against the printed hand records.  She thought the E-W hands were not
   reversed, and that the board might have been fouled part way through the session.  We checked the
   board before beginning play Tuesday night, and discovered that the East and West hands were also
   reversed.  So the fault had occurred in duplication with the board simply rotated 180 degrees.  If
   we had been scoring across the field, this would be treated as a fouled board, and both pairs at
   Table 4 would have been assessed a 15-MP penalty.  Looking carefully at the scores indicates that
   the cards were this way the first time the board was played, so no fouling occurred during the game.
   Since all Section B players played the same board, it is ruled "no harm, no foul".

FOULED BOARDS MIS-DUPLICATED: Two days after this event, I received an e-mail telling me
that each of Boards 10, 11, and 12 were rotated 180 degrees in Section A.  I went to the club and physically
verified that this had indeed happened.  This may not seem like it would cause major problems, but remember 
that the auction will now begin with a different hand as dealer, and in all three cases, very different 
auctions are likely to result with the board rotated.  This constitutes a  "fouled board" and it is clear
that the problem occurred in duplicating the boards at Table 4.  There is a procedure in ACBLscore to handle
fouled boards.  The algorithm does comparisons only within the same section, then multiplies those MP by two 
and adds 0.5.  So everyone's scores on those three boards are now slightly different, but this did not 
have any major effects on the rankings.

The more interesting question concerns the penalty for those who mis-duplicated the board.  I had thought 
it was half-a-board, but I checked with David Marshall who informed me that the penalty is a full board for 
each fouled board.  With top on a board of 15, this means a penalty of 45 MP to the players at Table 4 who 
didn't check to see that they had put the right hands in the right slots.  Fortunately, neither of these pairs
were among the leaders, so nobody lost a lot of masterpoints, but let this serve as a warning to all to check
your duplication carefully.

We had a couple major scoring problems that were corrected before we left the club, and then two more
errors that I found while auditing the results at home.  Board 1 got messed up halfway through the 
session when Pair 6 scored on line 15 instead of their own line, and then Pairs 5 and 4 compounded
the error by also scoring on the wrong lines.  When I blithely typed the scores in the order that I
saw them on the page, many pairs got the wrong score.  The other major problem was that the travelers
for Boards 25 and 26 got reversed at the outset of the game, that is, the traveler which was in Board 25
said "26" on the inside and vice versa, with no external markings on either traveler. PLEASE find a
way to put the board number on the outside of the traveler also.  Some players suggested that I could 
simply ignore this error since the scores would merely be flipped between the two boards.  Not quite that
easy, because the scores entered on the pick-up tickets for the last two rounds were for the correct boards.
So, I reentered all the scores on those two boards, getting one wrong in the process.  The two errors found
later each primarily affect only two pairs, with other pairs gaining or losing only half a matchpoint. 
These errors were:
Board 22  NS 3  v. EW 8  -170  not -140
Board 25  NS 4  v. EW 8  -50   not -550  (done in the haste of reentering this board).

The cumulative effect of these last two small corrections did not change any of the top five rankings in
either direction, but did create minor perturbations further down the standings.    -- Alan

Here is the hand where Alan's ruling got overturned. It is an interesting and instructive case: Board 5 North S- J8 Dlr N H- A7 Vul N-S D- AQJ West S- KQ C- AKJ832 East S- T9543 H- T862 H- KQ9543 D- 8752 D- 9 C- QT4 South S- A762 C- 9 H- J D- KT643 C- 765 North chose to open 2NT on this 2-2-3-6 shape with 20 HCP, and South bid 3C, North then bid 3D, which South properly ALERTed. When asked by the opponents, "Puppet?", South responded that their agreement was indeed Puppet Stayman (and this was marked on South's card). [When playing Puppet Stayman, this bid denies a 5-card major, but promises one or more 4-card majors, a fact that all of the experienced players at this table knew to be the case.] South now bid 3H, which shows four spades but denies four hearts, and North concluded the auction by bidding 3NT. Both opponents are now under the erroneous impression that North holds four hearts. East led the S10, and dummy rose with the SA, and proceeded to run five diamond tricks, cleverly discarding a club on the 4th diamond. On the 5th diamond, West has a problem finding a discard from K-10xxx- -QTx, and thinking that he needed to protect hearts, discarded a small club. This enabled declarer to run five club tricks and make +690.

When the Av-/Av+ decision on Board 5 then got overruled, Rolf
and Sandy moved back ahead of Dave and Howard into
first place E-W.
   The defenders claimed to have been injured, and at
this point examined the convention cards, discovering
that North had not marked Puppet, although she said
this was the partnership agreement, and she had
momentarily forgotten when she made the erroneous 3D
response to 3C, and North now added this agreement to
her card.
   Alan ruled that E-W had indeed been injured, both
by the opponents not having the same convention cards,
and by the failure at the end of the auction to warn
the opponents that the auction may not have conformed
to their agreements.  N-S appealed this ruling to the
STaC Director in Charge, Kevin Griffin, who overturned
Alan's ruling and let the 690 score stand.  The
relevant points of law are in Law 75, where a fine
distinction is made between a "mistaken explanation",
which this was not, and a "mistaken bid", which was
what happened with the 3D response.  More to the
point, the laws specifically do NOT require N-S to
warn the opponents that a mistaken bid may have
occurred, and Alan got this wrong.  E-W are entitled
to an accurate description of the opponents'
agreements, which they got, but no further information
that might describe their hands.  The law explicitly
states that in cases of mistaken bids, "Regardless of
damage, the Director shall allow the result to stand."
 The player making the mistaken bid must not profit
from the Unauthorized Information created by the Alert
and explanation, but there is no question of that
occurring in this auction.  Further, if such "mistaken
bids" were to occur frequently enough that partner has
reason to be wary of this possibility, then it becomes
an illegal unannounced agreement, but again there is
no evidence of that in this case.

Peter Matthews did an outstanding job of entering all of these scores efficiently and accurately under considerable pressure at the end of the game.  He erred only in misreading a 300 as a 200 on Board A16 10v12.  I caused the other and more serious error, when I made a ruling that awarded AV- to N-S and AV+ to E-W on Board 5 12v8.  In the chaos at the end of the game, I incorrectly made this scoring change in Section B when it actually happened in Section A, so there are corrected scores in both sections for Board 5.  These relatively minor scoring corrections only affected the ranking order in one place.  Dave McClintock and Howard Siegel nosed ahead of Rolf Paul and Sandy Nyman for first place in Section A E-W.

Thank you all for your attendance, your helpfulness, and your continuing suggestions on how to improve the game.
-- Alan

The policy on correcting scoring errors requires the aggrieved party to notify the director within about 12 hours after the game, and to provide full details on why the score should be corrected.  E-mail to NewtWellDBC@yahoo.com is the preferred form of communication, but you might get lucky calling the club cell phone (as Steve did)."

Harvey plans to remain in the area, will show up and play occasionally, and has accepted appointment as "Principal Guest Director" for 2004-2005, so when Alan is out of town, Harvey will be directing some games, usually Fridays.