A Gentle Introduction

We talked about Dummy — dummy’s rights and what dummy is not allowed to do, such as suggest a line of play to declarer. In a way, what dummy is doing if he reaches for a card in dummy before declarer has called for it, is to tell declarer something declarer should not be privy to — what he, dummy thinks is the right play.

That brings me to an area of The Laws, the bain of a director’s life and one of the main reasons for this series of chats… Unauthorized Information (often referred to as simply “UI”). Perhaps the easiest way to think about unauthorized information is to look at Authorized Information.

Read more…“Unauthorized Information” — What Is It?

The most important thing to remember is that the Director is there to help. His (or her) job is to run the game in such a way that everyone has a pleasant experience — very few of us set out to have an unpleasant time.

Pleasing everyone is, of course, difficult or even impossible, but if we do a good job, there won’t be any fistfights or shouting matches.

Read more…Calling the Director

“The Laws” sounds awfully intimidating, but all games have laws, though they usually call them “Rules” or “The Official Rules” — Scrabble, chess, golf, football…, they all have rules.

There is a little book called the “Laws of Duplicate Bridge” which is our rule book. We often just refer to it as “The Laws”. It was first published in 1928 as “The Laws of Duplicate Contract Bridge”. It gets revised every few years. For the last few editions, that has been about every 10 years.

Read more…The Laws — What?