From: rainbow@cbnewsc.cb.att.com (Rob Buchner)
Subject: Re: Ethics question
Organization: St Barts
Date: Tue, 15 Dec 1992 21:29:11 GMT
Keywords: ethics, laws, agreements


>>To clarify further, in the midwest, for an expert player to claim
>>ignorance of an auction is an automatic procedural penalty.

>This is total BS. ACBL has no such policy. In the Midwest or anywhere else.

You may be correct about the ACBL, however it is the policy
of our district in the last few months. And according to the 
directors it is the direction in which the ACBL wishes to 
move in, all in the spirit of practicing active ethics.
I can cite numerous upon numerous examples during the last
couple regionals where anyone and everyone who was unable
to provide information to the opponents as to what their
partnership agreements are pertaining to any given auction,
or any bidding misunderstanding, were given automatic procedural
penalties, no appeal, regardless of how established the partnership
may or may not happen to be. Now I didn't attend these tournaments
and have no first hand knowledge/experience of the events,
but after hearing these stories from my many friends who were 
"victimized" by this new law, I was quick to check out whats 
happening with some local regional and national directors I know.
And here's the scoop. It is indeed confirmed. Procedural
penalties will now assessed to any partnership which
inaccurately describes a bid or claims to not have an
agreement or says they don't know what a bid means.
This is not BS. This is not a joke. This is real life.
And I'm not particularly happy about it either.
It seems like they have gone too far this time.
I know that even with my best partnerships we are
often on undiscussed ground, especially given the
near infinite auction possibilities, and I'm not
going to feel its fair to be penalized each time.
How can we possibly discuss everything, not to mention
most of us play with a variety of different partners?
The directors say, its out of our hands, we just carry
out what the rules committee wants us to implement.
Supposedly there is a lot of pressure to address the
problem of lack of full disclosure by partnerships.
This is their solution, though overboard it may be.
I wouldn't be surprised to see this policy revisited.
In the meantime, the directors told me I better make
sure I can provide full explanations for all bids.
The theory is, if you haven't agreed on a meaning
of a bid, you shouldn't even be making the bid,
once you make the bid, you do so on the assumption
partner will understand what it means, and that
there is either an explicit or implicit agreement
in place which must be explained to the opponents.
It is unfair to the opponents to possible hinder 
them from achieving a normal result because your
partnership doesn't know what they are doing.
The onus is on the partnership to know their bids.

>There are 128,745,650,347,030,683,120,231,926,111,609,371,363,122,697,557
>possible bidding sequences.  So this means that after playing 26
>boards, you and your partner are responsible for all 1.29 * 10**50?

Basically, yes, see above. Although nothing says your partnership
has to play all those zillions of sequences. But for those that you
do play, yes you are responsible for explaining them to the opponents.

>Your LHO opens 1H, and partner bids 3H.  Now RHO asks you what it
>means.  Well, this auction didn't come up in your first session
>together (it's a pretty rare bid), and you didn't get around to
>discussing anything remotely close to this...
>So are you required to tell RHO anything?

See above again. Partner made the bid. You are obligated to explain it.
Assumption is that partner will not be making bids you don't understand.
Procedural penalties are given for making bids with no agreements.
Arguing that the bid is general knowledge/experience and therefore
need not be explained is no longer considered active ethics.
It is simply too vague to determine what is an actual agreement.

I'm not sure what the outdated laws say, they don't cover ethics.
I for one am going to explain everything to the best of my ability
and if my partner doesn't hold what I think they should hold, let
the chips fall where they may, but I'll avoid the procedural penalty.
Naturally when in doubt, I will strongly qualify all my statements,
and ask partner to leave the table. Hopefully it will be sufficient.