English Bridge Union
When I first started playing at my club, they used to put the travellers in a brown envelope and pin it to the notice board. Several players would come early to their next game and carefully go through all the results board by board. Mostly they wanted to see where they (or their partner!) had gone wrong, but sometimes they would unearth a scoring error and rush off to the director to have it corrected. Of course, unless the score had simply been incorrectly entered into the computer, it needed the agreement of their opponents, but the TD usually succeeded in resolving these matters and correcting the results.
Nowadays most bridge clubs display their results on the internet, often with a great deal of detail for interested players, but whether your club does this or you still stick to paper travellers, it’s important to have an agreed procedure for when there are mistakes in the scoring – and those happen just as often with wireless scoring as they did with pencil & paper!
The EBU publishes the White Book, which can be downloaded from this page.
The White Book supplies regulations for all sorts of situations that might arise (#79 & #146 are about correction periods), and it applies to EBU events but can usefully be adopted by a club to cover any gaps in its own regulations – my own club has the regulation that the White Book will apply whenever we don’t have another regulation for a situation.
However, correction periods are one time when you might well want to make your own regulation as allowed under Law 79C, rather than relying on the EBU defaults, for the simple reason that EBU events need to be finalised promptly so that prizes and Master Points can be awarded and cups presented, whereas club duplicates have less urgency to finalise results, and some players may well not have had the opportunity to see their scores until the next week. One of the things that hasn’t changed is that many players have a regular day of the week when they play, even if they play at a club that has several weekly games. For those players who don’t have access to scores on the Internet, their next weekly game will often be the first time they can check their scores.
So, my suggestion for clubs would be to allow scoring corrections until the end of the game on the following week; but whether or not you decide to do that, the most important thing you need is to have a regulation and to let the players know what it is. (For special events, where you need to issue prizes or present cups, you can always vary this regulation by putting in a special condition of contest).
When there’s a scoring query, you will also usually need to verify it with the other pair involved. This can generally be done by going through the play with those concerned, but in situations where people can’t remember and can’t agree, you’ll probably have to stick with the result that was scored and agreed at the time. If at all possible though, it would be best to get an accurate score agreed by everyone.
