As was to be expected, the story about scoring gate continued over the last weeks. Besides a lot of discussion on social media, there was an important press released from the WBF, published on their site worldbridge.org. The bulk of the press release was (If you want to see the headers and footers, go to worldbridge.org, but those do not matter for the message):
Having read the reports from the Head Tournament Director and the Championship Operations Director, the [WBF Executive] Council has become apprised of the unusual situation whereby the players and supposed winners recognize themselves that they failed to adequately check the scores obtained within the time scale provided for within the Conditions of Contest. Those players, rather than raise the issues through official channels, chose to air their grievances via social network sites.
Human errors, whether by competitors, referees, judges or otherwise are an integral part of any sport competition. In all sporting contests it is important to have certainty of the result that has been obtained according to the respective rules & regulations that are applied and cannot be modified despite, unfortunately, that they may have influenced the result. Dura lex sed lex - the law is harsh but it is the law.
However, the Executive Council has considered the peculiarity of the circumstances and facts of these particular cases and has expressed its view that the truth cannot and should not be ignored.
Consequent upon the advice received from the High Level Players Commission, the Executive Council has exceptionally resolved to award the titles, the gold medals and the master-points ex aequo to Auken-Welland (Germany) & Bach-Cornell (New Zealand) in the Open and to Levi-Asulin (Israel) & Pilipov-Sver (Croatia) in the Women, without further alteration of the ranking lists.
This looks like a statement written by lawyers. And, for what it is worth, WBF chair Rona is a high-paid lawyer. A number of things immediately spring to mind:
- There is no rule in the laws that says that players have to check their own scores. There is a rule that one is not supposed to accept a wrong score once one is aware of it, but that is something different. And even if there was such rule, nothing says that one would have found the error.
- There were no full frequency charts published, thus the number 2 pairs never had a chance to catch the error. A single +450 on a chart with -650 for all other pairs sticks out like e sour thumb.
- The players did not start a discussion on social media. It is true that one of the opponents used social media (the bridgewinners.com site) to contact one of the pairs, but isn’t that a normal thing to do in 2016 when you do not have contact details for somebody?
- In the women’s pairs, the winners did in fact try to contact the TD when they discovered the error but where told that nothing could be done as the correction period had expired.
- Nothing is said about the failures from the TD who initiated the arrow-switch or the official scorer who was supposed to eye-ball the scores from unusual results but failed to do so. Also, nothing is said about the software that was used.
- Adjusting the overall results to make it a tie, in fact means that one acknowledges that the correction period expired but that score adjustments are still possible after that. But why not take the full step and make the full adjustment. Alternatively, if one considers that it is too late, leave the scores as is.
The bottom line of all this, is that we now have a result where 2 pairs seem to have won a title, but in fact didn’t. 2 other pairs are joint winners, though at the table they were the best. The players are silent about this, and that is a good thing (tm), but I’m still to sure who I should congratulate if I ever run across them. “Congratultions on winning in Wroclaw, even though you didn’t” does sound a bit strange.
And whatever you think about this, wait until part 3 of scoringgate.