[blml] Can you create your own UI?

[Eric Landau]

At 12:17 PM 3/5/07, Adam wrote:

>Ed wrote:
>
> > A question was raised on the BBO forums. Here's the scenario: You're
> > dealer. The auction goes 1S-(P)-P-(2C)-....P-(P)-2D-(3C).
> >
> > You hesitated before passing in round 2. You know your partner is an
> > ethical player, so you can expect his 2D bid to be clear cut. Is this
> > information UI to you? (A poll in the BBO thread was split 50=50).
> > Reference was made to Law 73D1, in particular the last clause
> > "inferences from such variation may apporopriately be drawn only be
> > an opponent, and at his own risk," with the claim that this "clearly"
> > shows that you *are* constrained by UI here. It ain't clear to me. :-)
>
>This is also an ongoing thread on rec.games.bridge (with the
>descriptive subject "UI?"), so you may want to check out the responses
>there.
>
>My contribution was somewhat along the same lines as Eric's:
>
># The notion that your actions may be constrained due to the fact that
># your partner is known to maintain an extremely high standard of
># ethics seems contradictory to common sense and absurd on its face.
>
>Some on r.g.b felt that partner's ethical reputation was in fact UI
>that you have to take into account; that didn't make any sense to me
>either.  My feeling was that you should be entitled to assume
>partner's actions are legal, regardless of his reputation.  The
>question in my mind was similar to yours: if you assume that partner's
>actions are legal, and that therefore his 2D will not be borderline,
>is this an inference drawn from the UI that you created, and is it
>therefore one that you must bend over backwards not to take advantage
>of?  Barry Margolin didn't think so, because otherwise it would lead
>to a cascade of Nth-order inferences from UI that would be impossible
>to adjudicate, and that the line has to be drawn somewhere.

Consider the opposite case, in which your partner's dubious ethical 
reputation suggests to you that his 2D bid may have been based largely 
on your huddle.  *That* would be a far clearer case for "bending over 
backwards" to avoid letting your knowledge of partner's ethics 
influence your call!  But if you "bend over backwards" when you know 
partner's ethics are dubious, and do the same when you know partner's 
ethics are unimpeachable, wouldn't you similarly need to avoid taking 
advantage of the knowledge that his ethics were, well, typical or 
ordinary?  It wouldn't matter; whatever they were would be functional 
UI (as the term is apparently being misused here);  long-time BLMLers 
will recognize that situation as yet another variation on the "illegal 
to huddle" theme.

So Adam's feeling "that you should be entitled to assume partner's 
actions are legal" is not only right, but, I submit, doesn't go far 
enough; you should be *required* to presume that partner's actions are 
legal!  Not only *may* you use the assumption that partner is acting in 
an entirely ethical manner, but you *must*, and must do so even 
(especially!) when you know or suspect it not to be true.


Eric Landau                     ehaa at starpower.net
1107 Dale Drive                 (301) 608-0347
Silver Spring MD 20910-1607