[jillybean]

Surprisingly, today I am playing in an ACBL sanctioned club game.

I am declarer, playing a contract. RHO is quitting his tricks and placing them in 2 loosely arranged piles, apparently tricks won on his right, tricks lost on his left.
I'm finding this annoying but ignoring it, concentrating on playing the hand. I then notice he puts a trick in the right hand pile then sweeps it out and adjacent to the pile when I ruff. Next hand , I ask him to arrange his tricks properly. He grunts and carries on doing what he is doing.

Experienced player, frequent partnership, apparently this is his style. Has anyone else seen this before, other than the infamous highest level cheating cases?

No, I didn't bother calling the Director, it's just a club game.

[mycroft]

I'm not sure that, short of a director call, you can do anything.

Are you thinking he's passing information by how he does this?

I think, were I to be devious and want to cause problems, I'd deliberately mispoint my cards (I do that regularly accidentally, I'm sure it's accidental this time), and claim that I made one more trick than I did, because that's what my cards say. When the director comes over and tries to recreate the play...?

But I've seen several like this before. And really, as long as the cards are in order (even in two piles in order) so that the play can be recreated, and as long as it isn't passing information to partner, I don't really see the hazard.

But I agree it is irritating. Especially if the cards get played with after put in the piles, or just swept into them, or...

[jillybean]

I don't know why he was doing it, it could be used as a memory aid. Conveying information to partner was by way of reaction to leads, no need for cards, but that's another story.

The way the cards were placed and subsequently moved,it would be difficult to recreate the play.

[paulg]

I've seen a lot of professional players place their cards incorrectly, play with their quitted tricks, do other things that are not lawful with their cards. I think these were unacceptable given how some known cheating pairs behave. In particular, playing with quitted cards when playing with screens and the screen is open.

I've never thought that they were cheating, but I did not understand why they would put their job and reputation at risk by playing in a way that was so open to a cheating allegation.

It is a very bad habit that they've had for decades.

[sanst]

It's definitely not correct. Law 65 describes clearly how you should arrange the played cards, overlapping row in the order of play, pointing upward if won, sideways if lost. Since you find it annoying, not unreasonable in my opinion, it's also a violation of Law 74A if the player continues with it after you've asked not to do this. And it can cause problems if the order in which the cards were played has to be reconstructed. It might even be used to hide a revoke.

[pescetom]

I fully agree with paulg and am always at a loss to understand why opponents and Directors put up with players fooling with the quitted tricks.
I ask them politely to stop and I call the Director if they do not.

The disturbing thing is that the higher the level I play at, the more likely I am to encounter such nonsense.

[mycroft]

My opinion hasn't changed from the last time we had this discussion - not linking to it because frankly, there was a lot of misunderstanding of motives on both sides, and there's no need to rehash it.

It's basically PaulG's - there are people who make their living based partially on their reputation for winning cleanly, and especially now they should look at unLawful bad habits they have and try to break them. Partially to protect that reputation, and partially because it provides cover for those less honest who just "do what we all do". There are also people that are highly regarded in their area, and if they have any of these habits that "look odd", they should break them just so they don't get emulated by newer players who don't realize it's wrong.

But I also reiterate what I said above: if someone has an issue with something the opponents do, call the Director and leave it in their hands or treat it as not anything to mention. The third path (which I don't think is going on here - OP is very carefully anonymizing) of getting just irritated enough to make it clear to everybody on the gossip circuit how wrong [player] is, but not enough to call the Director; well, it leads to those "we're all nice here" clubs that are full of unwritten rules and ticking time bombs.

And for the times I have taken the third path (outside "the directors' grapevine"(1) and One Specific Partner(2)), mea culpa, and try to do better.

(1) After all, that is the whole point behind the directors' grapevine - to make sure that suspicions about players that can't be corroborated are Known To All in case next time they do it it's at That Other Director's game.
(2), who knows the rules about Living With Directors. Thankfully, directing doesn't require a TS/SCI clearance.

[jillybean]

Mycroft, you know me well enough to know that I called the Director every time there was an infraction at my table. In Club games, I found that calling the Director for anything other than mechanical errors led to animosity from players who were accustomed to using that Old Black Magic and equated my calling the Director as an accusation of cheating or simply not being "nice".

I vent on forums. I spoke to my co-Director about this during a phone call later in the day. Apparently "they" do this all the time, "they" make other players very uncomfortable. No one does or says anything. You can be sure I'm not going to drop into a game and call the Director
I hope that we can run our game a little differently.

[mycroft]

First, I'm sure of that, that's why I made it clear that you weren't playing that game here.

I am hearing a lot of my rules being bounced back at me - which is a good thing (in my humble opinion. Okay, maybe not so humble; I wouldn't repeat them as often as I do if I wasn't confident in my opinions and in "the world"'s opinion of me.)

It's fun to watch as a newer director learns how the world looks from the other side.

I'm very glad you seem to be putting the players and the game first (even if you have your opinions - not wrong - about what "putting the game first" means. If you didn't have opinions, you wouldn't make a good director; if the game didn't need some changing, you wouldn't have got frustrated enough to put yourself forward in the first place; if the club didn't agree with you (or willing to try), they wouldn't have accepted.)

But we all need to vent occasionally - to other directors or The World. In my case, it is possible a reread the previous footnote 2 will be enlightening...

[barmar]

It may be naive, but I like to live by Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which canbe adequately explained by stupidity.

Many players don't realize that a number of bridge norms are explicit Laws, not just traditions. Examples are putting trumps on declarer's left, and ordering the cards in each suit in descending order towards declarer; when I've told people that these are rules of the game, they're usually surprised. And I'll bet many people have the same misunderstanding about the way we quit tricks.

I don't know whether this player is aware that the proper procedure is a Law, but it can't hurt to explain this to him. If he doesn't care, it's not clear what can be done about it. You could let the director know, but I'd be surprised if any club were willing to sanction a player and risk losing their regular attendance over something like this.

[jillybean]

barmar, on 2025-January-30, 18:07, said:

It may be naive, but I like to live by Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which canbe adequately explained by stupidity.

Many players don't realize that a number of bridge norms are explicit Laws, not just traditions. Examples are putting trumps on declarer's left, and ordering the cards in each suit in descending order towards declarer; when I've told people that these are rules of the game, they're usually surprised. And I'll bet many people have the same misunderstanding about the way we quit tricks.

I don't know whether this player is aware that the proper procedure is a Law, but it can't hurt to explain this to him. If he doesn't care, it's not clear what can be done about it. You could let the director know, but I'd be surprised if any club were willing to sanction a player and risk losing their regular attendance over something like this.

It's not a player's job to explain the Laws to their opponents.

Many Clubs are not willing to enforce the Laws, lest they lose the law breaker.
So the other, law abiding players leave the game.

jillybean, on 2025-January-28, 15:20, said:

Apparently "they" do this all the time, "they" make other players very uncomfortable. No one does or says anything.

[mycroft]

For me this fits into one of my other common lines: "Yes, it's not usually a problem, but it is against the Law. There's no penalty for not doing it right unless it causes a problem; but the one time in a thousand it does, 'you didn't do the right thing, you get ruled against'."

Eventually this person is going to have a revoke claimed against them or their claim that involves knowledge of the hand gleaned from previous tricks or a disagreement about how the play went and how many/which tricks were taken, and the fact that they don't have the tricks in the proper order will "make it hard" to support their claim. And just possibly it'll be one of the directors who isn't good enough, or careful enough, or has the time, to work it all out and will just say "they say it's this way, you can't show your evidence of your side of the story because you don't keep your tricks right; here's the result, next hand." And they'll change or they won't.

A suitably annoyed director (or one who is faced with a choice of which player(s) to lose out of their game) will tell this person that the Law says *this*, and you will follow it in my game, even if everywhere else doesn't care. And then it's 90B8 territory. It may be petty - frankly it is petty - but enough complaints about it, and enough rulings that would have just been obvious if they'd DTRT in the first place but now take minutes to resolve, and it's a balance of pettiness.

[pescetom]

I don't find 90B8 petty if they were advised not to repeat an infraction and did so all the same. It's what the referee will do in any sport: "I told you to stop that and you didn't, now take this".

As for Hanlon's razor, it gets blunter over time. The people spinning the quitted tricks are not hapless beginners, most of them have been playing for decades and with success. Such people often know the Laws better than many Directors, in which case they will not contest a claim or revoke until Jillybean no longer has her Law 65 conformant discards on the table.

[pilowsky]

It's completely reasonable to assume that if someone is playing a game, but not following the clearly stated rules the they are cheating.
Unfortunately Bridge is a game where the rules are so opaque that every player needs to bring a lawyer to the table.

[sanst]

 pilowsky, on 2025-January-31, 14:28, said:

Unfortunately Bridge is a game where the rules are so opaque that every player needs to bring a lawyer to the table.

What's opaque about Law 65 or 74? Actually,most Laws aren't opaque, although there are a few that are difficult to understand or to apply, like 16 on UI, the Laws about irregularities during the auction and about claims. It's the TD's that should be able to use and explain these.
Most sports and games have laws that can cause endless discussions, 'offside' and 'hands' at soccer are examples. At bridge at least it's possible to redress director's mistakes.