Posted 2010-August-03, 12:33
This thread has meandered all over the place.
It began with a barely concealed accusation of cheating. Justin says he didn't make the accusation, but it is abundantly clear that the majority of readers interpreted his words as amounting to such an accusation. I am not saying that Justin is misleading us....sometimes the words we use end up being read by others in a manner different from what we intended and I have no problem accepting that what Justin was trying to do was to argue, as he later did explicitly, that whenever someone does something truly bizarre, and it works, the directors/committees should infer UI.
I also assume that the rule change he advocates would contain a proviso that the 'deemed' illegal information part would not apply if the bidder were able to plausibly explain why he or she took the action.
Simulations have been attempted in an effort to demonstrate that the 6♦ call was statistically a reasonable, altho imaginative, effort to swing. These arguments provoked extended counter-arguments but the entire topic seems to me to be missing the point. There is no reason to think that Mr. Piltch had ever made any sort of study of this situation and I doubt that even a Rodwell could assess the odds at the table with any degree of accuracy. If Mr. Piltch were motivated by a desire to swing (and he may well have been), the fact that a simulation supports or fails to support the call on a statistical basis seems irrelevant.
In summary, what we have is evidence that a player made a bizarre call in circumstances where we cannot see any evidence suggesting that he had a wire on the board, other than the fact that the call was a success.
All of the information about dealing, and shuffling, and knowing that he had only shuffled Board 8 and this was Board 5, and so on, may strike some as suspicious but his partner offered a plausible explanation and no-one has countered it.
In the absence of evidence that the explanation was false, the only reason for rejecting it is a reluctance to accept that there could have been no wire. In other words, if one is convinced that the only explanation is cheating, in some fashion, evidence that rules out the only plausible form of cheating will run into the barrier posed by cognitive dissonance.
I think we see a lot of that in this thread.
As for the proposed rule change I and others have pointed out that this goes against the spirit of the game.
Bad players have to be allowed to have a chance that their bad plays or bids will work. Justin's rule would mean that a good team, fixed by a bad team, could ask the Director and then a committee to take away fixes by arguing that the bad call or play has to be deemed to be based on knowing use of UI (i.e. cheating)...and making the inferior player justify why they made the call or play.
And who makes the decision? Directors are not, generally, expert enough and will often be swayed by experts....who, precisely because they are experts, will argue that they would never make that play or call...that it is so bad that it has to be based on UI....just as many of us did and do here.
We tend, as humans, to assume that our personal standards are 'the' standards. In much the same way as studies have shown that for theists, they tend to base their views of God's wishes upon their own personal views....God likes what they like and disapproves of what they disapprove of...so to do bridge players reject as bizarre an action that they personally would never take.
So pity the poor (bad) player in Justin's world. Take an egregious action that generates the usual bad result, and everyone smirks at you for being so bad. Take the same action and get a good result, and see the opps howl for the director and argue that since it worked, you must be deemed to be cheating!
That is not a game I want to play. I hate getting fixed. I take a back seat to no-one in terms of hating a situation that 'smells', as this one must have done. But I don't want a cure that is infinitely worse than the disease.
Getting back to the original concern, at least as discerned by most posters....what evidence is available demonstrates no plausible mechanism by which Mr. Piltch could have had UI. What evidence there is suggests that while Mr. Piltch may be a 'pro', he is not in fact a very good player. He was on a weak team, in comparison to his opps. He was already stuck. He apparently has a track record of making bad plays or calls. He made a particularly bizarre one that had, nevertheless both a theoretical and, as it happens, real life chance of succeeding and it did.
Arguments about whether he was stuck 'enough' to warrant this call are meaningless...what matters is not whether someone else would think he was stuck enough...what matters is whether the player in question thought that his chances in the match were such that he had to go weird in an effort to shake things up.
Having shaken it up, successfully, maybe he (correctly, given that the match was tightened up considerably at the half) felt no need to go to the well again, or the hands didn't afford this type of dramatic opportunity again. It really doesn't matter. Absent the ability to read his mind, arguments that he was cheating are arguments based on a gut sense that no-one should be 'allowed' to do something that neither we nor our peers would consider reasonable.
If that is all there is to the situation, and despite the hundreds of posts, I see nothing more than that, we ought to let this thread die and ought not to allow this or any similar hand cause us to so fundamentally change the game so as to make majority views of what is 'bridge' tar imaginative bidders...or just plain bad bidders...with the brush of being cheated as well as being bad.
'one of the great markers of the advance of human kindness is the howls you will hear from the Men of God' Johann Hari
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