lamford, on 2015-August-25, 09:27, said:
This particular South, a County Tollemache player, stated he would have led a club but for the MI. He is the non-offender, so we should believe him.
?!? Non-offenders are always completely objective and never make self-serving statements? We shouldn't believe the non-offender, just because he is a non-offender. We should believe him because his statement makes sense.
In this case, his story about how the MI misled him doesn't make any sense. So, we don't take his word and we think for ourselves.
lamford, on 2015-August-25, 09:27, said:
Dummy did not correct the MI before the opening lead, and he would have known that the explanation was wrong.
That is a second infraction, in my book good for a PP. But an infraction only leads to an AS if there is a causal relation between the infraction and the poor result for the NOS. This causal relation is missing. (In fact, the MI should have led to a better result!) Therefore, there is no justification for an AS.
lamford, on 2015-August-25, 09:27, said:
The TD did not rule that South would not have led the jack of clubs. She ruled, quite wrongly in my view, that the contract would still have made. The TD is responsible for the finding of fact based on the balance of probabilities. She agreed that, without MI, the JC would have been led. So, we do not need to determine anything about the lead without MI. The TD has already done that for us.
And she did that just as wrongly.
If I understand the way this forum works correctly, in these cases the OP (in this case: you) asks us to take the position of the TD and rule on the entire case based on the facts in the OP. In this case, my ruling, and campboy's, is that the MI did not suggest the lead of the
♦7 over the potentially winning club lead. In fact, the MI strongly suggested the potentially winning club lead over the
♦7. Even with the help of the MI, South wasn't able to find the club lead. Without the help of the MI, he would have never found the club lead.
After that simple conclusion, it is irrelevant how many tricks declarer would have made on a club lead, because South would have never led a club. He was not misled in his choice of the lead by the MI.
And now, instead of letting us rule on the entire case, you state that we are only allowed to second guess the TD on the amount of tricks that East was going to take, and that we are not allowed to rule whether South's choice of lead was influenced by the MI... because this TD -who was silly enough to wrongly decide how many tricks East would take- has already decided that the MI influenced the choice of leads ... and now the TD is suddenly perfect.
You get my opinion on the entire case as presented in the OP, not on "what if we ignore one part of the TD decision, but accept the other part without criticism?".
Rik
I want my opponents to leave my table with a smile on their face and without matchpoints on their score card - in that order.
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