Brighton Day 1 - real friends - virtual names

Brighton is the biggest event of the domestic calendar and so you get to meet people you don't see very often: players, TDs and backroom staff. For much of the rest of the year I communicate with these people via telephone and email and rarely see them face-to-face.

A silly incident yesterday, reminded me that people's virtual personna (or at least their names) can leak into real life®. Much of my online bridge discussion takes place on BrideBase forums. Among the TD's at Brighton are a number of BrigeBase members, who I might think of as gordonTD, mamos, bluejak, and VixTD.

A player came up to me at the start of play and said his partner would be late and he would start off playing with a substitute. Later his partner turned up and was able to start playing and so I went to the TD in charge of the White section just to explain what was going on. This was fine until I wanted to refer to the player by name — all I could think of was "gnasher" — and that did not seem an appropriate form of address. After an a bit of a pause and a bit of poiting I managed to come out with "Andrew" — sorry Andy.

(Equally, "campboy" does not sound like a name I should use at the table.)

Correcting an explanation

Although I am scorer, there is some time to give rulings. I was called to a table where South had explained partner's 3♦ as something to do with the majors but as soon as the auction reached him, he thought better of it, and decided that 3♦ was probably natural and he should just bid 3NT. Later, when he thought the auction was over, he explained that what he said about 3♦ was probably wrong. I sorted this out and there was no harm done — the other side would not have done anything different with the correct explanation.

But he should have corrected the explanation as soon as he realised he was probably wrong. This is an aspect of procedure that is not obvious to players: if a you give an explanation that you later think is incorrect then the TD should be called immediately and the correction given (Law 20F4). There can be no damage in correcting as soon as possible, and damage has been done my the original misexplanation. This is in contrast to when partner gives an incorrect explanation and does not realise: you cannot correct the explanation until at least the end of the auction (as the declaring side) or the end of play (Law 20F5).

Although the difference between the two situations is logical, it is not always obvious that logic should be assumed to apply to the laws of bridge.