[Rossoneri]

pran, on 2011-August-22, 07:43, said:

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.

You really want to know?

Ok, 3 of them did.

[bluejak]

pran, on 2011-August-22, 02:40, said:

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"?

No, and that is not what people have said. In some cases, especially ones where your trust or expect partner to work it out, you may have an implicit agreement. But you may also make such a call merely hoping that partner will work it out. This happens with reasonable frequency in clubs where people often change partners.

pran, on 2011-August-22, 02:40, said:

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.

Again, you saying something that has not been said. If a player has no expectation of it being understood, of course he does not make it. But if he thinks there is a chance partner might guess it, or deduce it from general bridge logic, especially if there is no alternative call that describes his hand adequately, he might try it.

I dislike your comment about "Ladies and Gentlemen" [that is the correct expression]. You want people who have no agreement to tell deliberate lies. Ladies and Gentlemen do not tell deliberate lies.

pran, on 2011-August-22, 02:40, said:

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?

Because neither Laws nor personal ethics require him to disclose the basis for a call based on no partnership understanding. To do so is unnecessary, illegal and confusing.

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?

Of course not. Why should anyone do so "often"? It is only when there is no obvious call for your hand for which you do have an agreement.

[peachy]

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.

The guess may be wrong for many reasons. Maybe partner knows "I" am from a certain region/country and is bidding the way he thinks "I" would bid... Or maybe my assumptions about the style in partner's country/region are incorrect or outdated. David is absolutely right. Further - it would also be MI to pass on a guess as an agreement.

[pran]

peachy, on 2011-August-24, 00:54, said:

The guess may be wrong for many reasons. Maybe partner knows "I" am from a certain region/country and is bidding the way he thinks "I" would bid... Or maybe my assumptions about the style in partner's country/region are incorrect or outdated. David is absolutely right. Further - it would also be MI to pass on a guess as an agreement.

Sorry, I can't help one more comment:

If I guess how my partner intended his call you flatly state that I am infracting the law when I tell opponents my assumption; it doesn't matter whether my estimate of making a correct guess is 90%, 10% or any grade between?

In either case my explanation is still just a guess so the only correct explanation should be that I don't know (no agreement)??

To me this sounds ridiculous, particularly when I know that the purpose of disclosure is to protect opponents.

[bluejak]

You think telling opponents the wrong thing and lying about your agreements protects opponents?

[blackshoe]

Quote

Law 40B6a: When explaining the significance of partner’s call or play in reply to an opponent’s inquiry (see Law 20), a player shall disclose all special information conveyed to him through partnership agreement or partnership experience, but he need not disclose inferences drawn from his knowledge and experience of matters generally known to bridge players.

If you have no agreement about a particular call, you must tell your opponents that. If you are going to base an assumption as to partner's intended meaning on general bridge knowledge, as ill-defined as that may be, you are not required to tell opponents that. Doesn't mean you can't. If you are going to base an assumption on other things, such as knowledge of what partner plays with others, or knowledge that he knows how you play it with others, or your partnership's meaning in other similar auctions, or your partner's general style, or his knowledge of yours, you should give that information to opponents. If you aren't sure which of these governs his intended meaning, you should tell them all of it. You should never tell them what you "assume" the call means. Give them the actual information you have and let them draw their own conclusions.

Some will argue that this takes too much time, or is too hard, or whatever. Tough. Do it anyway.

[pran]

bluejak, on 2011-August-24, 06:36, said:

You think telling opponents the wrong thing and lying about your agreements protects opponents?

No, I think that opponents shall have at least the same information as you possess. So when you conceal your qualified guess from opponents you actually conceal such information to which they are entitled.

The clause about general bridge knowledge is there to avoid forcing players to waste time by giving information that must be expected already known by opponents, not to allow players to conceal information which is "general knowledge" to them but not necessarily to opponents. (Hence my statement that knowledge is not "general" unless it is generally known to all four players at the table)

I notice with interest that nobody so far has commented on whether a guess with 90% confidence is an agreement or still just a guess, or for that sake at what confidence level a guess becomes a partnership understanding.

[blackshoe]

The opponents are not entitled to your guess. They are entitled to the basis for your guess, to the extent that basis is a matter of partnership understanding or experience.

A guess is a guess. The numbers game you propose is a red herring.

A guess becomes an agreement when both players agree to it.

[aguahombre]

pran, on 2011-August-24, 15:54, said:

The clause about general bridge knowledge is there to avoid forcing players to waste time by giving information that must be expected already known by opponents, not to allow players to conceal information which is "general knowledge" to them but not necessarily to opponents. (Hence my statement that knowledge is not "general" unless it is generally known to all four players at the table)

I don't think that is true. Information which is already known by the opponents is not usually asked. So, we give information on agreements, according to the rules; we educate the opponents about things we can figure out because of our general experience at our own discretion (and peril if we end up giving misinformation when what we figured out is not what partner intended).

It is inferences based on GBK that we are talking about, not agreements which we may assume everyone knows. Agreements, whether obvious to the planet or not, must be disclosed when asked.

[barmar]

blackshoe, on 2011-August-24, 16:34, said:

The opponents are not entitled to your guess. They are entitled to the basis for your guess, to the extent that basis is a matter of partnership understanding or experience.

Are you saying that it would be appropriate to answer with something like, "We haven't discussed it, but he's from XXX, and I know it's common in that country for it to mean YYY"?

[mjj29]

barmar, on 2011-August-24, 16:55, said:

Are you saying that it would be appropriate to answer with something like, "We haven't discussed it, but he's from XXX, and I know it's common in that country for it to mean YYY"?

Yes. Replies to questions I've given in the past also include "We've not discussed this sequence, but this other sequence would show X" or "... but everyone plays it as Y"

[blackshoe]

barmar, on 2011-August-24, 16:55, said:

Are you saying that it would be appropriate to answer with something like, "We haven't discussed it, but he's from XXX, and I know it's common in that country for it to mean YYY"?

Certainly.

[barmar]

mjj29, on 2011-August-25, 01:54, said:

Yes. Replies to questions I've given in the past also include "We've not discussed this sequence, but this other sequence would show X" or "... but everyone plays it as Y"

I think it's the "everyone plays it as Y" type of answer that some think constitutes GBK. What could be more "general" than something "everyone" does?

But I'm not sure that's what the lawgivers meant in that clause, anyway. I think they may have meant that you're not required to give bridge lessons. For instance, if you describe a bid as invitational, and the opponent asks "how many points is he showing?", is that a question you have to answer? It's a matter of judgement, not an agreed point range.

[blackshoe]

In such a case, I would give a rough range, with the caveat "more or less" or something similar.

[mycroft]

Well, if I'm playing with my old buddies from Waterloo in Calgary, there are calls that we will have no agreement (we can remember) on, but I can still say "well, everybody out there plays it as XXX" even if everybody here plays it as YYY. Toronto-style 2/1 is subtly, but significantly, different from Calgary 2/1, and it does come up.

Also, things like "everybody at our club" or the like. At Our Club, that's GBK (to regulars); at the tournament, not so much.

[barmar]

Are there really clubs that are so in-bred that you can make generalizations like that? Don't people come to clubs with all sorts of different history and experience?

[bluejak]

Not really. I could play with the poorer players in a lot of English clubs and expect to have a pretty good idea of what they played.

From what I have heard, read, understood and experienced I really think the same applies to American clubs.

[barmar]

I admit that I haven't played in many different clubs here in America, but most of the ones I've played in have a good mix of 2/1 GF and SA, and I wouldn't be surprised to find one or two Precision pairs in any particular game.

[aguahombre]

bluejak, on 2011-August-26, 10:53, said:

Not really. I could play with the poorer players in a lot of English clubs and expect to have a pretty good idea of what they played.

From what I have heard, read, understood and experienced I really think the same applies to American clubs.

Yes, and the reason for this might be largely that the B/I players at the club had the same teacher and you know he/she is teaching something offbeat from the GBK of the general population. This would seem to be disclosable to a visitor.

[StevenG]

aguahombre, on 2011-August-26, 11:04, said:

Yes, and the reason for this might be largely that the B/I players at the club had the same teacher

No. It's because they all learn from each other. (In my area of England, I'm aware of very few B/I players who have taken formal lessons. They come into the game having played socially with, at best, some bastardised form of stone-age Acol - then their first regular partner makes them play weak 2s and Reverse Benji. This equips them to play at weak clubs for the rest of their life with no interest in improvement.)