Mr Grumpy

Brighton - Day 9

At the beginning of the congress, or even at some earlier event, a grumpy bridge personality was addressed simply as "Grumpy", "That's Mr Grumpy to you" came the response.

I'm afraid after nine days, a certain amount of grumpiness is setting in. In the first session today, the players were hopeless at passing on the boards: either not passing them on at all or passing them in the wrong direction. I kept having to go round moving boards to the right place and answering questions about where to pass the boards; despite telling every table where to move the boards at the beginning of each round. "They didn't tell us where to move the boards" says one table: ugh! At some stage my frustration became obvious to some of the players.

There were several rulings today where members of a partnership had disagreed on the meaning of the a bid. When the bid was explained differently from the way the bid was intended, the bidder has unauthorised information which they can not legally use to get the auction back on track. Nevertheless the bidder did use the unauthorised information to arrive at a reasonable contract.

When it becomes obvious what has happened, the opponents ask for an adjusted score. Sometimes the bids that are misunderstood are ones from which it almost impossible to recover from legally. One auction featured a splinter bid that partner thought was natural, and another a control asking bid that again parther did not recognise and did not alert. The more extreme examples were transfer opening or transfer overcalls: once partner forgets the bid is a transfer the auction will spiral out of control as one player supports the transfer bid suit and the other tries to play in the suit shown by the transfer. When the opponents have misinformation and the offenders use unauthorised information, the offending side manages to avoid playing in silly contracts.

But the offenders try to wriggle out of the consequences of their misunderstanding and subsequent actions: finding specious excuses why their actions were justified. This just makes the TD more grumpy, the players should recognise that they have made an expensive mistake and the adjustment is only an inevitable consequnce.