[blml] Revoke established?

[Adam Beneschan]

> > Sven: 
> > Good point, but Dummy did not "play" his single club; he "placed" his
> single 
> > club in a played position. That is an essential and important
> difference.
> 
> Play :
> 1. The contribution of a card from one's hand to a trick, including the
> first card, which is the lead.
> 
> So, to 'place' a card is not an (illegal) play?

When I looked over the Laws to try to answer the question, "Does dummy
play the cards in the dummy?", I found, much to my surprise, that
there is an ambiguity in the Laws.

Laws 41D, 45B, and 45D seem to indicate that the answer is "no".
Dummy does not play the cards; declarer plays the cards, and dummy
just moves them around at declarer's command.

41D: ...Declarer plays both his hand and that of dummy.

45B: Declarer plays a card from dummy by naming the card, after which
dummy picks up the card and faces it on the table. In playing from
dummy's hand declarer may, if necessary, pick up the desired card
himself.

45D: If dummy places in the played position a card that declarer did not
name ...


Laws 42A3 and 44B, however, seem to indicate that the answer is
"yes". 

42A3: [Dummy] plays the cards of the dummy as declarer's agent as
directed...

44B: After the lead, each other player in turn plays a card...


Quite conceivably, nobody who worked on the Laws thought that it
really mattered whether dummy or declarer was considered to play the
cards from dummy.  But now we've found a case where it does matter.
(Really, someone should be tasked with studying carefully every
possible combination of two or more Laws to make sure there are no
such problems when several Laws are combined.  My calculations show
that there are only 9903520314283042199192993698 such combinations, so
it shouldn't be a problem for someone to accomplish this in a few
weeks.)

Anyway, after looking at the above Law snippets, I think the answer to
"Does dummy play his own cards?", at least for the purposes of
applying the revoke laws, is "no".  To me, the effect would be the
same as if a kibitzer had placed dummy's singleton in the played
position.  Perhaps I could live with a ruling that since dummy
violated Law 45F by placing a card in the played position without
instruction, even though it was a singleton, it should be OK to
penalize the partnership by making the revoke an established one.  But
my general feeling here is that declarer didn't play a card, and dummy
doesn't participate in the play at all, therefore declarer gets to
correct his previous revoke.  Then both opponents get to take back
their plays to the next trick, and the cards they played are AI for
each other and UI for declarer (Law 16C).

                                -- Adam