nige1, on 2011-March-30, 16:27, said:
IMO, claim law should
- Be short clear and simple enough for players to comply and for directors to consistently enforce.
- Encourage claims rather than deter them.
- Speed up the game, rather than slow it down.
- Rely as little as possible on communication skills and foreign language interpretation.
These aims seem easily achievable.
iviehoff, on 2011-April-05, 09:45, said:
The problem is that your list of objectives omits the important and necessary objective of an equitable result. That is why your list of aims are so easily achievable, because simple, but unfair, rules are easy to find.
Thank you, Iviehoff: for accepting that the specified goals may be achievable; and for conceding that the suggested claim-rule may meet them.
iviehoff, on 2011-April-05, 09:45, said:
People have been objecting to your proposal because it fails to meet their idea of an equitable result. You then say "where does it fall short of the objectives I set out?" The answer is, they don't agree that your list of objectives is complete.
If Iviehoff is using the word
equitable in the law-book sense of
restoring the status-quo then the suggested rule is an improvement on current claim-law. After a claim, current law stops play. Hence, an artificial result is often unavoidable. Under the suggested rule, if a claim is queried, the hand can still be played out to completion for a
table-result. If
equitable has the more sensible dictionary meaning of
fair and
even-handed then, obviously, the suggested claim-law leads to fewer
inconsistent rulings because, almost always, the result is determined by the actions of the players themselves..
iviehoff, on 2011-April-05, 09:45, said:
Is it equitable that a claimer should be allowed to take advantage of the fact of an objection to his claim to then give a line of play it seems implausible he had in mind when he felt it unnecessary to mention it earlier? No, clearly not.
If the suggested claim-rule were in force, this danger would be high-lighted. Even the veriest tyros would know that, if they want to play on, they can do so. They may continue, double-dummy, until satisfied with the claim -- without implying that the claimer has made a mistake. My on-line experience (which I admit is different from Bluejack's) is that this problem doesn't arise, in practice.
iviehoff, on 2011-April-05, 09:45, said:
Is it ever acceptable that someone committing an irregularity should gain specifically from that irregularity (and I'm not talking of rub of the green, where a penalty card you never would otherwise have played proves the only way to take a contract down). In general we would say not, but in on-line bridge they have made this trade-off. I don't think this is acceptable for top level FTF bridge.
Under the suggested claim-rule, a mistaken claim isn't an irregularity, in itself. Although, with opponents playing double-dummy, it's likely to fail.
iviehoff, on 2011-April-05, 09:45, said:
If we are to have a simplified claims process, that would deal adequately with the majority of faulty claims, I think there still needs to be a back-up to it to cover the case where the claimer takes advantage of the fact of the objection to his claim. So maybe we could have something like you suggest, but we would further state that an objection to a claim should be UI to the claimant, and claimant must not take advantage of that information to do something he did not anticipating before objection to the claim. Then at this point if there was a claim of abuse of UI, we would obtain what we have long sought, a weighted adjustment of the score, instead of an adjudication of the claim.
Iviehoff may well be right. In an earlier post I touched on the possible need for an anti-fishing rule. Iviehoff's suggestion is the kind of thing I meant when I expressed the hope that it's not beyond the wit of legislators to mitigate flaws in the suggested claim-rule. IMO, we can't expect perfect rules. But we can aspire to better rules.