[blml] Clubbed Queen

[Adam Beneschan]

Andre wrote:
 
> Dummy north has:
> B85
> -
> -
> 98

I assume dummy's high spade was the Jack.  Please use A, K, Q, J to
denote the honors on this list, especially since there are some
letters that have *different* meanings in two different non-English
languages (V=queen in Dutch, V=jack in French comes to mind).

  
> Declarer asks for the five of clubs, to which east contributes the Queen.
> Declarer now discovers his error and remarks that he meant to play the five
> of spades. TD!

[Dummy had not placed any card in the played position.]

> What fate befalls the Queen?
> (Crossposted from the dutch forum, where this case elicited disappointingly
> few comments)

A couple of Laws that seem relevant that haven't been mentioned in
this thread:

(1) Law 47E1: "A lead out of turn may be retracted without penalty if
the leader was mistakenly informed by an opponent that it was his turn
to lead...".  

Now, isn't the *exact* case we're facing.  Instead, we have a lead out
of turn that was made because an opponent mistakenly informed him that
a card was played from dummy and it was his turn to *play*.  (This may
be a bit of a stretch; but when declarer calls a card from dummy, even
a card that doesn't exist, I think it's reasonable to rule that this
tells declarer's RHO that dummy has played and thus it's now RHO's
turn to play.)

Anyway, if you accept this small stretch, then it would seem that it
would seem odd to treat the situations so differently---someone who is
misinformed that it's his turn to lead can take the card back without
penalty, someone who is misinformed that it's his turn to play gets
stuck with a MPC.  Of course, in *both* cases the one who played out
of turn should have been paying attention.  But why so much moreso in
the above case than in the lead-out-of-turn case?  Is there really a
reason to penalize one error more heavily than the other?  So this
seems like an omission from the Laws (to add to the list of
3,728,331,965,307,325 existing omissions, all of which I hope get
addressed in the next edition of the Laws).  But we do have a way to
deal with such omissions, specifically with infractions that carry no
penalty but damage the opponents ...

(2) Law 84E.  Using this, we could make the CQ a penalty card, but (if
it's not waived) adjust the score afterwards if this damages
East-West.

                                -- Adam