[blackshoe]

A psych is a departure from partnership agreement. If there is no agreement, there can be no psych.

[nigel_k]

 blackshoe, on 2010-December-30, 13:08, said:

What makes it a psych is (1) there is a partnership agreement, (2) the bidder has grossly deviated from the agreement in his call, (3) his partner will not have expected it, and (4) he did it on purpose.

I didn't know about part (3) and it seems kind of implied by (1) and (2) anyway. But I think there is an implicit agreement to bid somewhat normally when the partnership has discussed nothing, otherwise banning psyches would not really ban anything by a scratch partnership. So I would say that (1) and (3) are satisfied in Jillybean's example. Probably (4) is too, though maybe South is enough of an idiot to think this kind of action is normal. It comes down to whether the 2♠ bid is a gross deviation from what is normal, and I think reasonable people could disagree about that.

[blackshoe]

And how do you define "somewhat normally"? I doubt you can come up with a definition with which everyone (or even most everyone) will agree.

Even if we accept that you can, a player whose call is "a gross deviation from what is normal" has not necessarily psyched. For him to have psyched, he must be aware "what is normal", and have deviated from it deliberately. Players do make unwise or even stupid bids. To hold that they have psyched when they only made a mistake is just wrong.

[blackshoe]

If the "psycher's" partner expects that he might make this call in this situation, then it isn't a psych, it's a concealed partnership understanding (CPU) (unless the call is alerted and properly explained). CPUs are illegal (and even if it's properly explained, it may turn out to be an illegal agreement, depending on the regulations in force).

[1eyedjack]

Agree with all of the above, but there are three other reasons so far not mentioned (unless I have missed them in the thread) in favour of allowing psychs.

1) The sort of TD who is inclined to ban psychs tends to be a player of caliber who is not particularly adept at judging whether an actual sequence falls within the definition. Frequently they will rule a minor and fairly innocuous departure from agreements as falling into this category, such as an occasional opening of a weak 2 on a 5 card suit. To be a psych it should be a deliberate and *gross* distortion of distribution or strength. It is of course possible (although perhaps not legal) for a TD also to ban minor deviations from system, but strictly he should not be calling it a ban on psychs.

2) Connected in some respects to item 1 above, TDs are inconsistent regarding what they regard as a borderline psych. Indeed some TDs are individually inconsistent from one day to the next, but more significantly one TD may differ dramatically from another TD in his opinion as regards what constitutes a psych, and yet both will simply put in the tourney description nothing more detailed than that psychs are banned. This leads to confusion among players as regards just what rules apply to them.

3) Personally I may have no intention of psyching and yet I believe that I stand to gain more than I lose by the act of opponents psyching against me, so I would prefer it if my opponents had the freedom to hoist themselves on their petards.

Actually I think that a few TDs ban psychs because they have a personal animosity against psychs rather than because of any independent or impartial assessment of what would be good for the game, for the tournament or for the players in their tournies, and I have never yet seen any evidence of a TD polling regular players for their preferences.

[Bbradley62]

I frequently play in a daily no-psyches tournament. The director has consistently explained that a one-cad deviation from what is expected is not considerd a psyche. This sensible rule-of-thumb would suffice for Jilly's example.

Would it be a psyche if bidder had AQx instead of AQxx?

[jillybean]

 Bbradley62, on 2010-December-31, 14:08, said:

I frequently play in a daily no-psyches tournament. The director has consistently explained that a one-cad deviation from what is expected is not considerd a psyche. This sensible rule-of-thumb would suffice for Jilly's example.

Would it be a psyche if bidder had AQx instead of AQxx?

Sorry, I don't understand this. Are you saying it should be ok to make a lead directing call (edited, not double) on AQx but not AQxx? I hope not, I don't see anything sensible in this "rule".

[blackshoe]

Anyone who claims a lead directing double with AQ, or AQx, or AQxx, or AQxxx, is a psych has no clue what a psych is.

[barmar]

What do lead-directing doubles have to do with this? In Jilly's example it was a supposedly natural 2-level overcall.

[blackshoe]

<shrug> Somebody brought them up.

[jillybean]

 barmar, on 2011-January-01, 03:20, said:

What do lead-directing doubles have to do with this? In Jilly's example it was a supposedly natural 2-level overcall.

Sorry, that was me. It should have read lead directing bid, not double. It doesn't change the fact that a lead directing bid or double made on AQxx is considered a psyche but when made on AQx is not, is nonsense.

[Bbradley62]

 jillybean, on 2011-January-01, 08:49, said:

Sorry, that was me. It should have read lead directing bid, not double. It doesn't change the fact that a lead directing bid or double made on AQxx is considered a psyche but when made on AQx is not, is nonsense.

My question was actually exactly the opposite. My question is: what is expected in the auction (1N)-p-(2D)-2S? Is the spade bid expected to simply be lead directing, or is it expected to show length (and, therefore, a suggestion of a suit for declaring)?

[the_dude]

 nige1, on 2010-December-27, 16:49, said:

Psychs are a legitimate element of normal bridge. IMO, however, it makes sense to ban psychs from some BBO tournaments:

• Many of competitors are beginners. Psychs may confuse their learning.
• As a BBO player, you alert and explain your own calls. Opponents are prone to cry foul if your explanation bears no relationship to your hand.
• It is easy to cheat on-line, so the fielding of psychs becomes more suspicious and generates more bad feeling than it would at face-to-face bridge.
• Many on-line tournaments are free. Some competitors are not the full shilling. Many have a low attention-span. In the past, when such players were doing badly, they would quit. Now runners are discouraged. So there is a strong temptation for such players to psych and fool around. This tendency must be discouraged because it can detract from the enjoyment of others.
• Some players try to get round system-restrictions by spurious claims that their banned conventional call is a "psych". (Personally, I don't approve of system restrictions but if we must have them, then I think that they should be enforced).
• Psychs attract director calls. On-line, few experienced directors are available.

These reasons enough would be more than enough for me to ban psyches.

By agreeing to play on a Free, anonymous, or extremely low cost site .. aren't you implicitly agreeing to a less-serious game with a lower standard of play. Such a game would need certain rules to combat things like "runners", cheaters, and other mayhem seekers.

I would think that players insistent on a serious game would play somewhere that requires a real membership and identity, with real consequences for misbehavior. Then I would feel better about complaining if the venue did not allow the full array of competition.

[Echognome]

Although I would personally not prefer to play in a "No Psych" tournament, I don't have a problem if other people want to. Say that certain people really enjoy playing a game that is not bridge, but is very similar to bridge. If that game happens to catch on and become more popular than bridge, who are we to say that they shouldn't be allowed to play it? That's like saying that a Whist website should not allow bridge. Why not? What does it harm us if people are allowed to play Canasta or Gin or whatever? Are we offended because it is on a bridge website?

I personally think it has to be tough to figure out what's a psych and what's a misbid. When does the partnership have an agreement (explicit or implicit) and when do they not? But it's not for me to judge whether it's workable and I certainly don't want to tell other people it's wrong to play a game they enjoy, even if it's a game I wouldn't enjoy.

[barmar]

There are lots of games on BBO that aren't "real bridge" according to the Laws. Someone already mentioned Goulash tourneys, which people have been running for years. And now we have all the "best hand" tourneys, where the robots are guaranteed not to have more HCP than the human. IMHO, games that deliberately cook the deals are further from the spirit of the bridge laws than disallowing psyches. But we play them because they're fun. And as long as all the players are aware of what's going on, it's fair; no harm, no foul.

The main problem with the no-psyche tourneys, though, is that the TD's tend to be willing to treat almost any deviation, misbid, or temporizing bid as a psyche. So people who never truly psyche sometimes get labeled as such, because they decide to open a 4-card major or bid a weak 2 with only 5 cards in the suit. Real players know that this is "just bridge", but the players who want these no-psyche tourneys are apparently looking for protection from any type of surprise.

[1eyedjack]

I have known of regular tournaments that ban psychs with the stated motives of protecting beginners or inexperienced players who make up the larger part of the entry field in those particular tourneys. Assuming that there are not also some unpublished motives, this is not an evil motive although it is arguably misguided.

One possibly unintended consequence of that policy is that it serves to perpetuate the mediocrity of the field attending that particular regular event. That said, if it is the intention of the organisers that the field should for ever and a day remain one which is targeted at beginners and inexperienced players, then this consequence may be intended and actually further their aims, as better players stay away and the captured market of inexperienced players remain in permanent ignorance of a potentially enriching element of the game.

What I find personally a little disappointing is that these organisers do not have the imagination to mix it up a bit, and allow psychs in a selection of their tourneys albeit perhaps not all. Sure, as a player you can hunt around for other tourneys where the psych isn't banned, but it remains a restriction of choice.

[wank]

a new low for me this week. i play in these wanky bbo tournies sometimes, and though i consider it ridiculous i do respect the no-psyching rules some of them have.

on this occasion the tournament wasn't advertised as a no-psyche tournament, including on the rules page which noone normally reads. lo and behold i picked up a hand where i thought the best approach was a psyche. it worked - we went for 250 against the opps' slam. a few minutes later without warning the score is changed, i'm kicked from the tournament and the director won't respond to my surprisingly politely worded enquiries as to why this had occurred.

the director then refused to let partner leave, forcing him to close BBO to escape 5 boards with a random.

[helene_t]

Having played some 10,000 hands online (I think) I have only once been psyched against as far as I know (there may have been some weird calls that were intended as psychs but I don't think so).

Those who ban psyches must be of the impression that psychs are more common than they are in my experience. Probably because some people consider many minor deviations, unintentional deviations or non-deviations from weird (possible ill-disclosed) agreements, to be "psychs".

I can understand the desire to ban "sabotage bids", as Duke of York calls them (like bidding 7NT and redoubling on random hands), but this can be done without creating uncertainty about which minor deviations and misbids might get punished.

The idea that psyches should be banned to protect beginners may have some merit if we were really talking about psyches. But we aren't. Most perceived psyches are either ill-disclosed methods or misbids. Beginners are much more prone to make misbids so they are more at risk of getting hit by the TD's abuse of an no-psyche rule. And ill-disclosed methods are already infractions regardless of the "psyche" restrictions.

In short, I think psyche-bans have no merit whatsoever, beyond maybe being a clumsy way of describing a policy against sabotage bids.

[hotShot]

If a regular partnership meets another regular partnership at a f2f tournament, we know our agreements and we are confident that opps know their agreements too.
Psyches are rare since partnerships are not allowed to repeat the same psyche often.
Without screens we expect bidders partner to alert and explain their agreements, this way we can be quite sure that the explanations we get are correct.

Since our side has an established partnership trust, we can usually deal with psyches sometimes we win sometimes we lose and everything is fine.

Playing online things change quite a bit. People who like to psyche, can do it very often, because the will usually have a different partner or TD and most TD's don't keep records about psyching.
Since you often play with an unknown partner and since you don't have many agreements, you don't have any partnership experience and therefore no partnership trust.
This makes it much harder to expose a psyche.
Online, if I explain my own bid, my explanation is invisible to my partner, so he does not know if my explanation fits our agreements. There is high potential for abuse.
People feel cheated if people explain their own bids and have a different hand than they disclosed.

Online I don't care to much about cheating, cheating opps provide you with a similar kind of competition than a regular expert/ world class partnership.

[pooltuna]

 wank, on 2011-January-05, 08:26, said:

a new low for me this week. i play in these wanky bbo tournies sometimes, and though i consider it ridiculous i do respect the no-psyching rules some of them have.

on this occasion the tournament wasn't advertised as a no-psyche tournament, including on the rules page which noone normally reads. lo and behold i picked up a hand where i thought the best approach was a psyche. it worked - we went for 250 against the opps' slam. a few minutes later without warning the score is changed, i'm kicked from the tournament and the director won't respond to my surprisingly politely worded enquiries as to why this had occurred.

the director then refused to let partner leave, forcing him to close BBO to escape 5 boards with a random.

IMO this needs to be reported to BBO as abuse of the TD rights and permissions. Clearly the TD has no clue about the rules of bridge and BBO needs to inform him of same and warn him that TD rights are revokeable.