Answers for the 'Laws of Bridge'

Ton Kooijman's invitation to an open discussion about the new laws was a very welcome sight. However, players and officials here at these championships naturally concentrate on the play and hence there has not been that much discussion.

I would like to describe how we in Sweden recently tackled a similar situation. A couple of years ago the Swedish federation decided that a new set of rules for what systems and conventions you were allowed to play should be constructed. A committee was appointed but, and this is the important thing, the proposal the committee put together was presented to all our members at the official bulletin board of our federation. Numerous discussions and new proposals came to light and the final set of rules was quite different from the original proposal. And this final set was also of much higher quality. What had happened was that most of the best (bridge) brains of Sweden had put their wise heads together instead of just a committee. In every federation, especially in an intellectual sport as ours, there is bound to be a lot of very good brains, the trick is how to get them involved in the process of legislation.

Now that Ton has showed us all that this new edition of the laws will be made by means of a more open process than has previously been the case I strongly recommend that we take one further step and try to involve "all" members by using a solution similar to the one referred to above.

We could e.g. use the newsgroup for bridge, RGB, where there are many intelligent people regularly contributing their views. Another idea is to open up a bulletin board at the WBF site. This is my favourite since the moderator of such a site would have free hands to adjust it in whatever way he or she wanted to and we would keep all the discussions together.

On this bulletin board the moderator could start a so called discussion thread on every proposed change of the laws. A thread is a series of "posts" made by different persons, presented to the viewer in a way that means he or she can easily follow the discussion as it evolves. New threads could of course also be started by other people.

I believe this would be a great success, just as it was for us in Sweden, and would hugely enhance the quality of the revision of the laws.

Further more, the same concept could be used by the WBF System regulations group. As an example of mistakes that can be made by learned people that have to work without sufficient support we can take the present regulation which

· defines a partnership agreement that allows overcalls in three-card suits (when you do not promise four cards in any other suit) as a Brown Sticker convention
· and then proceeds to regulate the use of Brown Sticker conventions in certain tournaments

This kind of agreement is not a convention and thus any regulation that limits the right to use it is illegal - see a) law 40 which states that only the use of conventions may be regulated , and b) the definition of the concept of convention which can be found at the beginning of the lawbok. But when the rule was constructed no one noticed it was illegal. But I assure you, the number of legal eagles all over the world is so huge there would be no chance at all of this kind of mistake being made if we had an open discussion as suggested.

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Firstly I wrote this article in Swedish and intended to publish it in that language as an argument against the present trend of publishing articles in more and more different languages. The official language of bridge is English, that is our lingua franca, that is the one language most of us understand, indeed that is the language all of us must master to some degree if we are going to be able to compete in tournaments arranged by organisations such as the EBL. The present trend means that large parts of the bulletin become unintelligible for many people. However, since this article aims at more people than those mastering Swedish I finally decided to write it in English and because of this you are able to read and understand it.
Isn't that nice J

Daniel Auby