36 English Bridge December 2016 www.ebu.co.uk
Y
ou are doing well in the final of the World
Pairs Championship in Wroclaw. You score a
complete top on board 3 of the seventh
session. How bad can that be?
Board 3 itself, though it is of no particular
importance, was:
South at this table, but the Director instructs them
to sit East-West and you North-South for this one
board.
They bid and make 4™ with an overtrick. You are
North-South, so one of you (South) picks up the
Bridgemate to enter the score. Believing however
that you are still East-West, you (West) enter the
score as 4™ making 11 tricks by your right-hand
opponent (who is East but whom you believe to be
South).
Got all that? Good, because now you will see how
you came to score a top for your plus 450 in a line
of game contracts the other way. (For theoreticians,
it is not believed possible for both sides to be able to
make five of the same suit against best defence - the
record currently stands at three.)
As luck would have it, this is the session before the
lunch break. It is not all that easy for players to
check their scores at the best of times, and this is not
the best of times - the schedule is fairly intense
anyway and you have about half an hour to get
some food and prepare yourselves for the final 30
boards of the tournament. So, you do not check the
results and neither do your opponents.
The scoring system should of course flag a result
of 4™ making 11 tricks by both sides. There may
have been a problem either with the system itself or
with the supervision thereof; at any rate, even if the
system did sound an alarm it went unheard.
The error remains in the system until after you
have been awarded the gold medal. One of your
opponents on board three of session seven then
publishes some of the details on social media, and
the solids collide with the air conditioning because
if the error had been detected and corrected when it
'should have been', you would have finished second.
There is what is called a correction period during
which scoring errors can be undone. Once that has
expired, the results are final. By the time this error
came to light, the correction period had long
expired. So it was that Sabine Auken and Roy
Welland found themselves in a horrible position:
E/W Game. Dealer South
´ A J 10
™ J 10
t Q 8 7 4 2
® K J 7
´ K Q 8 6 ´ 9 2
™ A 9 2 ™ Q 8 7 5 4 3
t A 3 t K 9 6 5
® A Q 10 8 ® 3
´ 7 5 4 3
™ K 6
t J 10
® 9 6 5 4 2
N
W E
S
Pick up on scoring errorsby David Burn
Great Bridge Disasters
Great Bridge Disasters
click
link
As North-South, you defended a contract of 4™
which made 11 tricks. This was as well as declarer
could do on the board, and there were many who
did not manage so well - someone actually went
down, and someone else went three down in
Blackwood.
For those who have been following this account
closely I assure you that there is no error in the facts
as I have recounted them. How, then, did you score
a complete top for minus 650?
It's a long story, but to summarise the main
episodes of it:
You spend a while waiting for your opponents to
arrive at the start of the round, because they have
gone to the wrong table.
While at the wrong table, they have taken the
East-West cards out of the board and started
bidding the hands. They are supposed to be North-