[jillybean]

Surprisingly, today I am playing in an ACBL sanctioned club game.

I am declarer, playing a contract. RHO is quitting his tricks and placing them in 2 loosely arranged piles, apparently tricks won on his right, tricks lost on his left.
I'm finding this annoying but ignoring it, concentrating on playing the hand. I then notice he puts a trick in the right hand pile then sweeps it out and adjacent to the pile when I ruff. Next hand , I ask him to arrange his tricks properly. He grunts and carries on doing what he is doing.

Experienced player, frequent partnership, apparently this is his style. Has anyone else seen this before, other than the infamous highest level cheating cases?

No, I didn't bother calling the Director, it's just a club game.

[mycroft]

I'm not sure that, short of a director call, you can do anything.

Are you thinking he's passing information by how he does this?

I think, were I to be devious and want to cause problems, I'd deliberately mispoint my cards (I do that regularly accidentally, I'm sure it's accidental this time), and claim that I made one more trick than I did, because that's what my cards say. When the director comes over and tries to recreate the play...?

But I've seen several like this before. And really, as long as the cards are in order (even in two piles in order) so that the play can be recreated, and as long as it isn't passing information to partner, I don't really see the hazard.

But I agree it is irritating. Especially if the cards get played with after put in the piles, or just swept into them, or...

[jillybean]

I don't know why he was doing it, it could be used as a memory aid. Conveying information to partner was by way of reaction to leads, no need for cards, but that's another story.

The way the cards were placed and subsequently moved,it would be difficult to recreate the play.

[paulg]

I've seen a lot of professional players place their cards incorrectly, play with their quitted tricks, do other things that are not lawful with their cards. I think these were unacceptable given how some known cheating pairs behave. In particular, playing with quitted cards when playing with screens and the screen is open.

I've never thought that they were cheating, but I did not understand why they would put their job and reputation at risk by playing in a way that was so open to a cheating allegation.

It is a very bad habit that they've had for decades.

[sanst]

It's definitely not correct. Law 65 describes clearly how you should arrange the played cards, overlapping row in the order of play, pointing upward if won, sideways if lost. Since you find it annoying, not unreasonable in my opinion, it's also a violation of Law 74A if the player continues with it after you've asked not to do this. And it can cause problems if the order in which the cards were played has to be reconstructed. It might even be used to hide a revoke.

[pescetom]

I fully agree with paulg and am always at a loss to understand why opponents and Directors put up with players fooling with the quitted tricks.
I ask them politely to stop and I call the Director if they do not.

The disturbing thing is that the higher the level I play at, the more likely I am to encounter such nonsense.

[mycroft]

My opinion hasn't changed. Ignore the disagreement (on both sides), please.

Basically, agreeing hard with PaulG; these kinds of "not following stupid Laws", when innocent, provide cover for those who are doing something, and in these days when everybody tells me (usually "online") "there's too much c-wording", there should be a strong incentive to not just be honest, but look honest, especially at the "top players in the club" level and the "make a living playing bridge" level.

[mycroft]

My opinion hasn't changed from the last time we had this discussion - not linking to it because frankly, there was a lot of misunderstanding of motives on both sides, and there's no need to rehash it.

It's basically PaulG's - there are people who make their living based partially on their reputation for winning cleanly, and especially now they should look at unLawful bad habits they have and try to break them. Partially to protect that reputation, and partially because it provides cover for those less honest who just "do what we all do". There are also people that are highly regarded in their area, and if they have any of these habits that "look odd", they should break them just so they don't get emulated by newer players who don't realize it's wrong.

But I also reiterate what I said above: if someone has an issue with something the opponents do, call the Director and leave it in their hands or treat it as not anything to mention. The third path (which I don't think is going on here - OP is very carefully anonymizing) of getting just irritated enough to make it clear to everybody on the gossip circuit how wrong [player] is, but not enough to call the Director; well, it leads to those "we're all nice here" clubs that are full of unwritten rules and ticking time bombs.

And for the times I have taken the third path (outside "the directors' grapevine"(1) and One Specific Partner(2)), mea culpa, and try to do better.

(1) After all, that is the whole point behind the directors' grapevine - to make sure that suspicions about players that can't be corroborated are Known To All in case next time they do it it's at That Other Director's game.
(2), who knows the rules about Living With Directors. Thankfully, directing doesn't require a TS/SCI clearance.

[jillybean]

Mycroft, you know me well enough to know that I called the Director every time there was an infraction at my table. In Club games, I found that calling the Director for anything other than mechanical errors led to animosity from players who were accustomed to using that Old Black Magic and equated my calling the Director as an accusation of cheating or simply not being "nice".

I vent on forums. I spoke to my co-Director about this during a phone call later in the day. Apparently "they" do this all the time, "they" make other players very uncomfortable. No one does or says anything. You can be sure I'm not going to drop into a game and call the Director
I hope that we can run our game a little differently.

[mycroft]

First, I'm sure of that, that's why I made it clear that you weren't playing that game here.

I am hearing a lot of my rules being bounced back at me - which is a good thing (in my humble opinion. Okay, maybe not so humble; I wouldn't repeat them as often as I do if I wasn't confident in my opinions and in "the world"'s opinion of me.)

It's fun to watch as a newer director learns how the world looks from the other side.

I'm very glad you seem to be putting the players and the game first (even if you have your opinions - not wrong - about what "putting the game first" means. If you didn't have opinions, you wouldn't make a good director; if the game didn't need some changing, you wouldn't have got frustrated enough to put yourself forward in the first place; if the club didn't agree with you (or willing to try), they wouldn't have accepted.)

But we all need to vent occasionally - to other directors or The World. In my case, it is possible a reread the previous footnote 2 will be enlightening...