[dickiegera]

After the bidding is over and partner made her lead and dummy is placed on table I noted that dummy had 14 cards.

Declarer said to redeal however I called director and director not trying to see whom held only 12 cards said redeal and left.
Declarer gathered cards and started to redeal.

I had only 13 cards and partner said she had 13 cards.

What should have been the proper procedure. Team game, first time played

[RunemPard]

I don't see the problem if this is a team match and nobody has played the board yet...shuffle and play it?

[ahydra]

The correct procedure is to award an adjusted score (L13B). The practical procedure is to redeal the board.

ahydra

[ddrankin]

Assuming shuffle and deal was in effect, Law 6B has been violated. (Of course, so has Law 7B2.) Law 6D1 states that any illegally dealt board is a fouled board, which doesn't seem to help here. Law 6D3 says "Subject to Law 22A, there must be a new shuffle and a redeal when required by the Director for any reason compatible with the Laws (but see Law 86C). Neither 22A nor 86C apply here, so I always have the players redeal, since it seems compatible with the laws. I don't worry about 7B2, because no apparent damage has been incurred by a contestant.

I would really like to know what the reference to a fouled board is supposed to mean, though.

[Bbradley62]

Shuffle and redeal seems completely practical to me. However, the 14/12 pair should also incur a procedural penalty for not confirming their card counts before looking at their hands (Law 7B2).

[blackshoe]

An illegally dealt board is one which was not dealt IAW Laws 6A, 6B, and 6C. This applies to, among other things, boards which are dealt IAW 6A and 6B, but not 6C (where there was not a member of each side present for the deal). So a "deal" could be perfectly okay in terms of each hand having 13 cards, the hands having been dealt sequentially, and so on, but still have been illegally dealt.

A fouled board is defined in Law 87A as one in which "the Director determines that a card (or more than one) was displaced in the board or if he determines that the dealer or vulnerability differed between copies of the same board, and the contestants who should have had a score comparison did not play the board in identical form for such reason". Note the "and": it means that if the board was not played, Law 87B does not apply - which makes sense, since that law deals with scoring.

Taking these two things together, an illegally dealt board may be considered "fouled" if and only if it was played. If it wasn't played (because the problem was discovered before the play was completed) then some other law beside 87B applies.

Law 86C prohibits the director from ordering a redeal when the outcome of a match in team play without that board could be known to a contestant. AFAIK, there is only one other restriction on redeals: a hand which has been passed out cannot be redealt (Law 22A1) (that includes, btw, the first time it's played). In any other reasonable case, it seems to me, the reason for ordering a redeal would be "compatible with the Laws".

The conclusion seems to be that in a teams match, unless a contestant might know the result of the match without the board in question, or in any case in a pairs or individual match the TD may order a redeal.

One might think that Law 13 would override this, since it specifies a rectification not involving a redeal, but in the case of hand-dealt boards with no hand records, the normal case in the ACBL, the TD is not going to be able to identify which card of 14 belongs in the other hand, and there is no provision in law allowing him to pick one arbitrarily. So there's no way to get a correct board out of this situation other than redealing.

Since a redeal is required, and since NS clearly both violated Law 7B2, I agree they should be awarded a PP (not just a warning).

[Zelandakh]

blackshoe, on 2013-October-27, 22:52, said:

Law 86C prohibits the director from ordering a redeal when the outcome of a match in team play without that board could be known to a contestant.

It may be clear after the auction what the result is likely to be. If dummy had 12 cards rather than 14 for example, a card could have been palmed and subsequently returned for the redeal. It certainly seems to me that the TD should have checked who had 12 cards, not only for assessing a potential PP but also to rule out the deck having 53 cards with a further issue on the redeal.

[pran]

ahydra, on 2013-October-27, 19:06, said:

The correct procedure is to award an adjusted score (L13B). The practical procedure is to redeal the board.

ahydra

Ahydra seems to be the only one who looked up the correct Law. And even he failed to mention Law 13F which should be checked first for applicability.

If 13F is not applicable (the deck contained exactly 52 cards) then much depends on who had only 12 cards and whether the cards were shuffled and dealt at this table, but Law 13B is clear that the deal may not just be corrected and played out however insignificant the irregularity may seem.

[Bbradley62]

ahydra, on 2013-October-27, 19:06, said:

The correct procedure is to award an adjusted score (L13B).

How is the director supposed to come up with that adjusted score? Likely, the number of takable tricks will depend on which card from dummy gets placed with declarer, and the auction may have been very different if it's an honor that gets relocated. (We certainly would have to relocate a card in order for the hand to be played at the other table.) OP specified that this was ACBL, so we can't assign a weighted average to account for those different possibilities.

[pran]

Bbradley62, on 2013-November-02, 20:48, said:

ahydra, on 2013-October-27, 19:06, said:

The correct procedure is to award an adjusted score (L13B).

How is the director supposed to come up with that adjusted score? Likely, the number of takable tricks will depend on which card from dummy gets placed with declarer, and the auction may have been very different if it's an honor that gets relocated. (We certainly would have to relocate a card in order for the hand to be played at the other table.) OP specified that this was ACBL, so we can't assign a weighted average to account for those different possibilities.

Have you by any chance noticed

Law 12A2 said:

The Director awards an artificial adjusted score if no rectification can be made that will permit normal play of the board (see C2 below).

which applies for instance when the director is unable to assume a likely result absent the irregularity.

[Bbradley62]

So, does that mean he simply states something like "3 IMPs to NOS"? And what if one pair had 14+13 cards and the other pair had 13+12 cards, meaning both pairs were equally culpable? I'm not trying to be argumentative; I'm trying to understand.

[chrism]

In a KO, if both sides are equally at fault then no net adjustment. In a Swiss team or similar event, -3 Imps to each team; each team scores the result separately and the net Victory Points will no longer add up to 20, 30 or whatever the applicable VP scale is.

[blackshoe]

TDs don't, but IMO best practice when making a ruling should be to state the governing law or regulation (I don't mean necessarily reading the entire law, but stating the law number(s) that pertain) in the course of giving the impact of the rule(s). Something like: "both sides have failed to count their cards as required by Law 7B2, therefore both sides are directly at fault. The board cannot be played normally so I'm awarding an artificial adjusted score (Law 12A2) of nominally -3 IMPs to both sides (Law 12C2{b}." I'm not sure how 12C2{c} would be applied in this case (does "session" mean "match" for teams, or should we be ruling in VPs?) but that should be handled by the scoring program, I think.

Of course, there are those who think the extra 14 milliseconds it takes to state law numbers is a waste of time.

[pran]

blackshoe, on 2013-November-03, 14:48, said:

TDs don't, but IMO best practice when making a ruling should be to state the governing law or regulation (I don't mean necessarily reading the entire law, but stating the law number(s) that pertain) in the course of giving the impact of the rule(s). Something like: "both sides have failed to count their cards as required by Law 7B2, therefore both sides are directly at fault. The board cannot be played normally so I'm awarding an artificial adjusted score (Law 12A2) of nominally -3 IMPs to both sides (Law 12C2{b}." I'm not sure how 12C2{c} would be applied in this case (does "session" mean "match" for teams, or should we be ruling in VPs?) but that should be handled by the scoring program, I think.

Of course, there are those who think the extra 14 milliseconds it takes to state law numbers is a waste of time.

Any decent scoring program should be able to handle penalties directly imposed in VP as is used for PP and DP not directly associated with a particular board.
TD can always convert a 3IMP adjustment to VP and impose/award that directly in case the scoring program fails to support IMP adjustments.
The exact meaning of "session" must be for the regulating authority and sponsoring organisation to decide as the laws are silent on the question whether a break between matches is sufficient to also be a break between sessions. (I would expect a session break to be at least 15 minutes, preferably 30 or more minutes.)

[lamford]

dickiegera, on 2013-October-27, 17:48, said:

director not trying to see whom held only 12 cards said redeal and left.

I would have thought the director should have established whether the pack had 53 cards, when a redeal would not solve the problem, particularly as this is the most likely scenario. Let us say that players normally count their cards (accurately) 90% of the time. If the pack has 52 cards, then two players must have the wrong number, and both did not count correctly. This is around a 1% chance. However if the pack has 53 cards, then only one player did not count correctly, a chance of around 10% or ten times as great. So, a poor effort by the TD.

[Trinidad]

lamford, on 2013-November-05, 08:26, said:

I would have thought the director should have established whether the pack had 53 cards, when a redeal would not solve the problem, particularly as this is the most likely scenario. Let us say that players normally count their cards (accurately) 90% of the time. If the pack has 52 cards, then two players must have the wrong number, and both did not count correctly. This is around a 1% chance. However if the pack has 53 cards, then only one player did not count correctly, a chance of around 10% or ten times as great. So, a poor effort by the TD.

This calculation doesn't correspond with the observation from experience that we are almost always dealing with a 12-13-13-14 case and practically never with a 13-13-13-14 case. The reason is that we also need to accomodate for the respective probabilities that a card changes hands from one player to another and the probability that a card is moved from one deck to another.

Let's take Lamford's number that 90% of players count their cards accurately. Then indeed 99% of those cases where a card was moved from one player to another will be caught, with 1% slipping through. And indeed 90% of those cases where a card is moved from one deck to another will be caught, with 10% slipping through.

But the two cases that I have highlighted are obviously not occuring equally often. It is fairly easy to get a card moved from one hand to another (e.g. East to South) by mistake and, hence, this occurs relatively often. You need to do something really silly to move a card from one board to another. And on top of that the cards must have the same back too. (Good TDs make sure that two subsequent boards will not have the same color for the backs of the cards.) This occurs rarely, far more than 10 times rarer than cards moving from one player to another.

1% is less than 10%. But 1% of a likely occurence is more than 10% of an unlikely occurence. Or, to put it graphically, I would gladly give 10% of a kg of apples (about 1 apple) for 1% of a ton of apples (about 100 apples).

Fortunately, mathematics is still somewhat capable of describing reality.

This does obviously not imply that the TD shouldn't investigate. The TD was still wrong.

Rik

[campboy]

FWIW the first director call I ever got was for a 53-card deck. Well, investigation revealed it was actually a 54-card deck, but one of the players had dropped a card on the floor

[Trinidad]

campboy, on 2013-November-05, 10:06, said:

FWIW the first director call I ever got was for a 53-card deck. Well, investigation revealed it was actually a 54-card deck, but one of the players had dropped a card on the floor

Are you sure that there were not two jokers in the pack instead of at the table?

Rik

[iviehoff]

Trinidad, on 2013-November-05, 09:44, said:

And on top of that the cards must have the same back too.

This is not a necessary condition. I've come across a few cases of a player having lifted up a hand with a card with a different coloured back - and in such cases it is not necessarily the case that there is a 53 card deck.

[pran]

Almost every event I direct is played barometer style, i.e. we use predealt boards with several (identical) copies of each board.

The players at a table had discovered a stray card on the floor and assumed they had dropped it from the board they had just played, so they carefully restored it to the correct pocket in that board before returning the board to the exchange table.

Of course the next thing to happen was a call from one table: "I have only 12 cards", and from another table: "I have 14 cards".