[bluejak]

"can hardly be anththing else"? Of course it can be something else. If I go into an English club and sit down with a partner with no discussion and he opens 1NT then I would guess that this shows 12 to 14 if it is outside London and 15 to 17 within London. That does not mean I have an agreement, explicit or implicit.

When playing bridge, especially in partnerships that are not scientific or very long-term [or both], you will often reach a position where there is no satisfactory bid in your agreements. At such time you will often rely on general bridge knowledge, which tends to be geographical, ie you tend to guess that partner may guess the same as you because other people in the area play something.

Speaking as someone who has played bridge constantly in medium clubs for 45 years this is not rare. You often find a guess is best.

[pran]

bluejak, on 2011-August-21, 11:42, said:

"can hardly be anththing else"? Of course it can be something else. If I go into an English club and sit down with a partner with no discussion and he opens 1NT then I would guess that this shows 12 to 14 if it is outside London and 15 to 17 within London. That does not mean I have an agreement, explicit or implicit.

When playing bridge, especially in partnerships that are not scientific or very long-term [or both], you will often reach a position where there is no satisfactory bid in your agreements. At such time you will often rely on general bridge knowledge, which tends to be geographical, ie you tend to guess that partner may guess the same as you because other people in the area play something.

Speaking as someone who has played bridge constantly in medium clubs for 45 years this is not rare. You often find a guess is best.

And implicit partnership understanding will often exist between two players who share a common background knowledge or experience even if they have not discussed agreements.

Such implicit partnership understanding forms part of their disclosable understandings.

So when you "assume" (or "guess" which in this case is just another word for the same) that 1NT shows 12-14 outside London and 15-17 within London then that is not part of your general bridge knowledge, it is part of your implicit (and disclosable) partnership understanding.

As I have far more important matters to attend to I shall not waste my time looking up the precise lecture where the above was tought. And I am quite confident that you too have seen or heard this about what constitutes implicit partnership understanding.

[bluejak]

That is just wrong. You do not have an implicit agreement with a player because you can make certain guesses based on his country of origin. For a start they may be wrong, so they are not agreements.

[pran]

bluejak, on 2011-August-21, 14:48, said:

That is just wrong. You do not have an implicit agreement with a player because you can make certain guesses based on his country of origin. For a start they may be wrong, so they are not agreements.

Then when do you have an implicit understanding, thank you?

[mgoetze]

pran, on 2011-August-21, 15:46, said:

Then when do you have an implicit understanding, thank you?

When for instance you know how your partner plays with other partners, or vice versa, or you can make an analogy to another situation which you have discussed, or when something else you have discussed almost always implies another treatment which you didn't explicitly mention. You're welcome.

[blackshoe]

pran, on 2011-August-21, 07:39, said:

Such reason can hardly be anything else than a partnership understanding (at least implicit if not explicit).

Nonsense.

[wank]

by your logic, pran, saying 'no agreement' in any circumstance would be a straight red card.

[barmar]

His reasoning could be something like "I know we haven't discussed it, but I've seen this bid often in Vugraphs or MSC, hopefully partner will figure it out."

[pran]

So the general attitude here is that when you use some convention trusting/expecting/hoping that your partner will understand it as intended although you have not explicitly discussed it with him then it is perfectly legal for you to conceal the meaning from opponents hiding behind "no agreement"?

Sorry, that is not my understanding of Bridge as a game for Gentlemen and Ladies. Neither is it my understanding of WBFLC intentions. Players in general are not lunatic, they hardly use conventions without any expectation that partner will understand, agreement or no agreement.

I despise "no agreement" as a means to conceal information from opponents. A player may be guessing, fair enough. But his guess is obviously based on some confidence. Why should it be legal to conceal this?

[pran]

wank, on 2011-August-21, 18:33, said:

by your logic, pran, saying 'no agreement' in any circumstance would be a straight red card.

Do you often make calls for which you have no agreement unless you feel some confidence that they will be correctly understood by your partner?

[pran]

mgoetze, on 2011-August-21, 16:39, said:

When for instance you know how your partner plays with other partners, or vice versa, or you can make an analogy to another situation which you have discussed, or when something else you have discussed almost always implies another treatment which you didn't explicitly mention. You're welcome.

Yes, and this is just another example of disclosable implied partnership understandings.

[blackshoe]

It occurs to me that riding into town on your white horse, slinging hot lead at the bad guys, is probably not a good way to direct a bridge game.

[pran]

blackshoe, on 2011-August-22, 03:03, said:

It occurs to me that riding into town on your white horse, slinging hot lead at the bad guys, is probably not a good way to direct a bridge game.

In my part of the world "no agreement" is extremely seldom used as explanation on calls that apparently are made with some hope that they will be correctly understood.

And if the agreement question cannot be resolved to the Director's satisfaction he will normally use Law 75C: the Director is to presume Mistaken Explanation, rather than Mistaken Call, in the absence of evidence to the contrary.

After all the obvious purpose of Laws 20F, 40 and 75 is to protect opponents from damage caused by concealed knowledge (of any kind).

[campboy]

pran, on 2011-August-22, 02:45, said:

Yes, and this is just another example of disclosable implied partnership understandings.

There is a big difference between implicit agreements (such as mgoetze's examples) and general bridge knowledge (such as the original case).

[mgoetze]

I think we should all just accept that pran has an extreme minority position on this issue and move on.

[pran]

campboy, on 2011-August-22, 04:56, said:

There is a big difference between implicit agreements (such as mgoetze's examples) and general bridge knowledge (such as the original case).

Knowledge is not general unless it is general knowledge to all four players around the table.

Did all four players have the same understanding of the disputed call(s) in the original case?

However, I quit, I believe I have made my point.

[CSGibson]

pran, on 2011-August-22, 02:43, said:

Do you often make calls for which you have no agreement unless you feel some confidence that they will be correctly understood by your partner?

Actually, especially in serious partnerships where I am playing at the club, I do try to make calls for which we have no agreement, as the post-mortem on the call often allows us to make relevant agreements covering those previously undiscussed situations. My partner views club games the same way - as a way to experiment with putting partner in unfamiliar situations to see what comes of it.

[barmar]

pran, on 2011-August-22, 02:43, said:

Do you often make calls for which you have no agreement unless you feel some confidence that they will be correctly understood by your partner?

Not often, but occasionally. Sometimes it works out, other times you get to play in a cue bid, splinter, unusual NT, etc.

[aguahombre]

"Knowledge is not general unless it is general knowledge to all four players around the table."

I don't think this is correct, nor would it be correct if GBR were replaced by "common sense".


"Did all four players have the same understanding of the disputed call(s) in the original case?"

No, though I suspect three of them had an understanding of South's 2NT.


"However, I quit"

Probably best for this subject.


"I believe I have made my point."

I don't believe the point made was what was intended.

[barmar]

aguahombre, on 2011-August-22, 10:50, said:

"Knowledge is not general unless it is general knowledge to all four players around the table."

I don't think this is correct, nor would it be correct if GBR were replaced by "common sense".

I agree. If that were the standard, there would be hardly any GBK other than the basic rules of the game, and it would be a pretty useless concept.

Yes, there can be a problem when you invoke GBK. Players with lots of experience have picked up lots of common understandings, sometimes dubbed "expert bridge standard". If beginners are playing against them, it's not a level playing field. They don't know the general treatment "no trump bids that don't seem like they could be natural can be used to show two-suiters", for instance.

But does that make this experience fall into the category of "special partnership understanding", which is what the Laws require us to disclose? It's not really special to this particular partnership, although that's true of most common conventions (that's what makes them "common"). But more to the point, when a player relies on this experience, the only partnership-specific knowledge he has is that his partner also has many years of experience, and is likely to have picked up on these common treatments as well. Does this make everything either partner has learned over their years of playing and watching bridge into an implicit agreement?

And don't forger, in f2f bridge it's usually the partner of the bidder who is required to alert and explain the bids. But we've been told many times that "I take it as ..." is not an appropriate answer to a request for explanation -- you're supposed to explain your agreements, not how you guess he means it. But if you haven't actually discussed it, and he's just hoping that you have the same understanding of expert bridge standard as he has, the best you can do is say how you take it. And then if it turns out you're wrong, we're back to trying to decide between misbid and misexplanation, because someone thinks "no agreement" is a cop-out.

What you've got is two ways to view the evidence:

1) Use of a convention is prima facie evidence that there's a (possibly implicit) agreement. "No agreement" is a mistaken explanation.

2) Since the other player didn't interpret the bid the way the bidder intended, i.e. they didn't agree on what his bid meant, this is by definition a lack of agreement.

Where things get confusing is if one player improvises a bid and his partner interprets it correctly -- now you no longer have #2. But this seems to be a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation: if partner guesses right, you can get your good result reversed by a ruling of misinformation; if he guesses wrong, the wheels will come off and you'll get a bad result.