Pause for Thought

[Wingman]

I'm looking for assistance when applying Law 25A-Unintended Call. Can you offer any guidelines/help in determining when 'w/o pause for thought' has become 'change of mind'? It's especially difficult for me to accept unintended after LHO has made a call or some other delay has occured.

[Chris]

Some of these unintended (used to be called inadvertent) calls are fairly obvious e.g. bidding 1H with 5 spades and 1 heart in hand and so long as the bidder wakes up to what he has done before partner bids there is not much problem with that.

Where it gets a bit more tricky in my opinion, is where the bidder's hand supports the bid he has made, but now he wants to change it to something else. He would have to be fairly persuasive to convince me that it wasn't simply a change of mind - no matter how quickly he tried to make the change!

Rightly or wrongly, I tend to put a little more weight on the "unintend-ness" of the call, rather than the "pause for thought" - and as long as the player wants to make the change before partner has bid, I am willing to consider the request.

[Chris]

I was just reading through some interpretations of the Laws at this site
http://www.abf.com.au/events/tournre...Laws080508.pdf
It goes into some detail about Law 25A

[Ed Reppert]

First off, what he has in his hand is of little relevance, particularly if there isn't a clear cut call*. The question is whether there was a pause for thought between the instant he realized the call he made was not the one he intended, and the instant he changed or tried to change it. That latter includes calling the director, by the way, if it went something like "oh, that's not what I wanted to bid. Director, please!"

Secondly, while a little skepticism on the part of a director is a good thing, we do not want to take, or even appear to take, the position that players will lie to us. Some will, of course, and it can be hard to ferret those out the first time or two, but most will tell the truth, so if a player says he didn't intend to make the call he made, then he probably didn't. OTOH, players can sometimes convince themselves that a call was unintended when it really wasn't. So if it seems fishy, ask more questions.

I would think 25A cases would be more rare using written bidding, but I dunno. I have no experience to back up that supposition. If they are, I suppose that might make them harder to deal with.

*For example, a player may have been thinking about whether to bid 3NT or 4S, decided to bid one of them, and then bid the other. His hand will most likely support either call. To rule 25A inapplicable in that circumstance, solely because some players (his peers presumably) might have made the call that he actually put down, or wrote down, or whatever, is IMO poor TDing.

[Ed Reppert]

I had not read the Zone Seven interpretation before I posted that last. Now that I have, I think it's too restrictive. The word "incontrovertible" is used in only two places in the laws, and 25A is neither of them. Also, using bidding boxes at least, it is quite common for a player to intend to make a transfer, and inadvertently (or unintentionally, take your pick) pull for example the heart card instead of the diamond card. And it is most certainly ruled here as an unintended call. Using written bidding, calling it "not 25A" might be reasonable. Or perhaps not so much — at least considering how frequently I proofread something I wrote online and discover that what I actually wrote is not what I thought I wrote. Of course, if your Zonal Authority says "do it this way", you're kind of stuck with that.

[Nick Whitten]

Yes players do write the wrong thing on the bidding pad perhaps more often that one might imagine.
And often it can be hard to ascertain whether it was a “change of mind” or writing down something which was “never in ones mind”.

[bluejak]

We seem to have moved away from the original question in this thread, which is about the pause for thought. The pause for thought applies from the realisation of the mistake: in practice it is very rare to rule Law 25A out of time. For example, you write something on the pad, you look vaguely around the room wondering whether that girl with the legs would accept a drink, LHO writes a call down, you decide she would not and look down - and you see what you have written was not what you intended. If you say "Omigod I did not mean that" you are in time so long as partner has not called: there was no pause for thought between realisation and an attempted change. Note that saying anything to indicate it was wrong is also considered an attempted change.

I am not happy with this idea of what the hand contains: I stick to my view that you do not look in the hand. Suppose someone writes 1C down, says he does not mean that, you are called, and look in his hand. He has five spades and five clubs. What do you do?

While I believe you should never look in the player's hand, I have to accept that certain authorities disagree. Earlier this year I took the European Bridge League TD exam. I think there is not much doubt this is the toughest TD exam in the world today. I had to rule a simulation where someone had opened 1C using bidding boxes and wanted to change that to pass. Because it was so unusual to allow a change to a different part of the bidding box the official answer did recommend looking at the player's hand, while accepting it was a very rare exception to the general principle of never doing so.