[kb49]

EBU

Had an interesting problem recently in our club. A ruling was made but we are not sure that it was correct. At the beginning of an auction East started to remove a bid from the bidding box. He did not actually take the card out but he was just about to do so when West told him that it was not his turn to bid. The Director was called and he ruled that West was allowed to prevent an infraction. The bidding reverted to the correct bidder and West was warned that he had unauthorised information. He knew that his partner had an opening hand. The score would be adjusted if West took advantage of this information. We are not sure whether it was too late to stop East making the bid because he had shown intent. Therefore it should have been a bid out of turn that the Director had to deal with. What is the correct ruling in this case?

[Lanor Fow]

From the white book:

"1.6.2 Bidding boxes
The EBU has adopted the following procedures based on recommendations by the WBF.
... A call is considered to have been made when the call is removed from the bidding box with apparent intent (but the TD may apply Law 25)."

So if the bid had not been removed from the box, it's not considered made in the EBU, whatever the intent. It sounds like the director rules correctly (though given your doubts at the table should have made it clearer why he/she wasn't considering the bid mde)

[blackshoe]

Based on the regulation Lanor quoted, the operative phrase here is "removed from the box". Since it never came out of the box, the "with intent" part is irrelevant. That leaves us with:

Quote

Law 9A3, second sentence: Any player, however, including dummy, may attempt to prevent another player’s committing an irregularity (but for dummy subject to Laws 42 and 43).

People often use "opening hand" to mean "a hand suitable to open at the one level" so East may in fact not have had "an opening hand". Or perhaps it was clear that it was a one level bid. Hard to tell from the OP and I don't suppose it really matters, unless the TD specified that the UI was "your partner has an opening hand". Other than that minor nit, I'd say the director made a good ruling. I agree that if doubt was expressed at the table, he should have explained all the above more thoroughly. Oh, and the "you have UI" bit comes from Law 16, so he should explain that too.

[VixTD]

blackshoe, on 2014-September-19, 07:11, said:

People often use "opening hand" to mean "a hand suitable to open at the one level" so East may in fact not have had "an opening hand". Or perhaps it was clear that it was a one level bid. Hard to tell from the OP....

If it was clear that the offender took hold of some bidding cards, this could only have been a one-level bid, otherwise it would have been preceeded by a "STOP" card from the other section of the box.

[blackshoe]

VixTD, on 2014-September-19, 07:33, said:

If it was clear that the offender took hold of some bidding cards, this could only have been a one-level bid, otherwise it would have been preceeded by a "STOP" card from the other section of the box.

Good point, since this is an EBU situation.