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

• We received the sad news from Toni Dana informing us that Tiny died suddenly on March 21, 2009. 

            Condolences can be sent to Toni at: 12102 Steepleway Blvd. Houston, TX  77065.

• We have received the sad news that Penny Tye passed away during March 2007.
• Sadly we report that Alan Kotok, a player at this club for many years, and Alan Frantz's partner for 37 years, has died unexpectedly. Bryan Marquard wrote an excellent obituary which appeared on page B-10 of the Boston Globe Tuesday June 6, 2006. More information is at w3c.org and www.kotok.org, as well as some typical witty remarks on Wikiquote at: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alan_Kotok
• Susan Carr who played frequently at our club over many years and who taught adult education bridge classes has also died recently. Condolences to and more information from Sandy Eaton, one of her long time partners.
• Barbara Forman, of Framingham, died in April 2006 after a long struggle with cancer. You may remember this attractive lady occasionally coming to our club, but being scarcely able to speak. She last played at our club on February 17th and 24th, winning some MP on both occasions.
• Francis (Frank) McDermott died on August 30, 2005. Frank had been a long-time member of this bridge club, and continued to play with Tiny Dana most Friday mornings even as his health declined. 

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

• Scoring corrections in Section A:  There were one major and two minor scoring corrections in Section A. The
  major problem was that Boards 5 and 6 had travelers that said one thing on the outside, but had the wrong
  board number on the inside, so I entered the Board 6 results as if they had occurred for Board 5 (wondering
  how everybody got the vulnerability wrong!), and vice versa.  Of course the pick-up slips for these boards
  were entered correctly in the midst of the wrong scores.  I did not figure this out until I rechecked the
  boards at home, and obviously many pairs were affected.  The two minor corrections were:
  Board 16 NS10 v EW3 +200 not +260  and  Board 28 NS5 v EW11 -430 not -630
  These scoring corrections did affect the rankings, including a different E-W winner (and Free Play).

• The only scoring errors in Section B were caught and corrected before we left the club.  Pair 10 had
  entered their score on the wrong line on both board 2 and board 7, skewing all scores below them, and
  fixing this led to some ranking changes, but the scores posted at the club are identical to those posted
  below.  Thanks to the pairs who helped me find and fix this problem.  And PLEASE, all Norths must be 
  very careful to get their scores on the correct line of the traveler.

• 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.

There were problems in getting the game started promptly.  Some of these were due to getting tables set up.  Others were due to the process of duplicating boards between the two sections.  I fear that my optimistic plan for pre-dealing one set of boards does not work well in practice, and that the next time we have such a special game, I will simply have the players deal the boards from hand records distributed to each section.  I received several constructive criticisms and suggestions on how to do this better, as well as offers of help.  I will figure out how to assign specific tasks to some helpers to get the game going more quickly next time.  BUT THERE IS ONE THING YOU CAN DO TO HELP -- SHOW UP EARLY!  The last minute chaos can be alleviated if players plan on arriving a mere five minutes earlier.  For those with standing reservations, do not expect me to hold these for you if you have not arrived by 7:25 unless you have explicitly warned me you are coming late.  Once the game got going, it moved along at a good pace, coming close to the desired 20 minutes per 3-board round, and we finished by 10:45, with scores available ten minutes later.  I know this is late for those going to work the next morning, and our target remains 10:30.  We cannot alleviate this by starting earlier since several of our players have work commitments that make it tough to arrive by 7:30.  If we were assured of enough players to always have two sections, we could consider starting Section A at 7:15, but that is not yet feasible.

The scoring across sections works well, with each pair compared to all the others in the field (top of 15 on each board, 180 average).  Check out the Results page for details.  This permits awarding slightly more masterpoints also.  With scoring across sections, there might be some question as to how many Free Plays get awarded.  Last night I decided to award Free Plays to five pairs, first N-S and E-W in each section, and to any other pair that finishes 2nd Overall. (Mel Marcus and Alan Applebaum had this distinction last night with a 66% game that was only second in their section.)

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)."

• Despite warnings to the contrary, Washington Street remained open to vehicular traffic until 11:15, although the side streets were blocked off about 10:00.  It was easy to drive into the Temple Reyim parking lot at 10:30.  The Exit driveway was already being taken over by a crew of about thirty red-jacketed Marathon volunteers and a huge Belmont Springs truck.  They were setting up six tables and pouring hundreds of cups of water in anticipation of the race.  The Gatorade people were working at another set of tables next to them.  I walked down to the corner of Commonwealth and bought hot dogs for lunch at the Newton Fire Station.

• The first wheelchair racers came past at about 12:15, and the lead women came past at 1:05, two Ethiopians or Kenyans well ahead of their field.  Over the next five minutes, another ten women came along, and a total of about 2-25 women preceded the men's leaders who arrived in a pack of about eight at 1:25.  The other elite male runners were spread out over the next 15 minutes or so, and then masses of running humanity began to surge past about 2:00.  They eagerly accepted cups of water, but most poured it over their heads instead of drinking it.  It was a very hot day for April and a stiff west wind followed the runners.

• The Newton police, that I talked to along the course, said that they would be later than usual in reopening the street because a hot day meant slower times for most of the field.  I retired inside Temple Reyim to work on my computer and direct my zero table non-game.

• At 3:00 I ventured out for another look at the race.  A steady stream of humanity was jogging past and dowsing themselves with water.  At 3:15, the crowd was still thick, but now about half were walking, and by 3:30 very few were making an effort to jog with the majority walking painfully along.  The crowd of walkers gradually diminished but a steady stream was still present at 3:45.  The police came along at 4:05 and told the remaining trickle of participants that they should keep to the right to permit vehicles.  The Belmont Springs truck, a bus for stragglers, and a couple ambulances began the return of vehicular traffic to Washington Street.

• I drove out of the Temple Reyim parking lot without incident at about 4:15.  I was grateful not to be leading a parade of impatient bridge players.  I want to thank all of those who wisely dissuaded me from attempting to run a bridge game on April 19th.

• If we wanted to run a TWO SESSION game some year, we could start at 10:00, break for lunch from 1:00 to 1:45, and finish the second session before 5:00, but this would require a groundswell of enthusiasm from the club that seems unlikely. 

The club had two parties honoring Harvey.  On Monday, March 29th, the daytime players brought in a lavish potluck.  Dotty Gavin and Marilyn Wolman were among the principal organizers, but many, many people contributed.  On Tuesday evening, March 30th, we had a second party, a second chocolate cake, and a punch bowl.  Alan Frantz and Sondra Caplin led in organizing this second event. 

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.