Laws of bridge (5)

An issue which causes discussions for a long time already is the penalty for a revoke. It happens quite often that two tricks have to be transferred where the revoke itself doesn't win even one trick. This certainly is a severe penalty.

There are some suggestions to make the penalty more equity oriented. Sweden for example would like not to have a trick transferred if the offending side did win this trick with the ace of trumps, being a trick you can't loose. But this approach opens a can of worms as the English so nicely express. With KQJ in trumps this means that you always should win 2 tricks if they are in one hand. But what with KQ in one hand and J76 in the other? It is possible to win only one trick with this combined holding. And this is just the beginning of an endless row of examples.

We also could make the standard penalty a one trick transfer, which is much easier to understand for both players and TD's. In that case the law which says to give an adjusted score when the damage caused by the revoke is more than one trick becomes more important. Or, the most liberal approach, we don't give any penalty but just restore damage with doubtful situations decided in favour of the non offending side. Especially those of you who liked the suggestion not to penalise infractions any more, a proposal in my first article, might welcome this approach. And it fits well with the Swedish idea, but goes one step further. Each TD needs a laptop and Deep Finesse and rulings become easy.

What is your idea about dealing with revokes?

Ton Kooijman