To alert, or not to alert?

Some observations and a possibly incoherent proposal.

So you sit down at the bridge table to start the evening and you look up find your normal partner opposite. You open 1, LHO overcalls 1NT and partner bids 2. RHO pauses for a while and then passes, you have happily pass with:

K Q J 3

Q

A 5 3

Q T 9 8 2

RHO now calls the director and objects that he thought 2 was forcing. We can all agree in this case that RHO has no argument, I hazard a guess that none of you play 2 as forcing so he has no case. (In the UK this sequence is explicitly described in the Orange Book as one which you should not alert 2)

But what if LHO has overcalled 1, and partner had bid 2, would RHO have a case now?

What about all these three...

1 x 2

1 1 2

1 x 2

What I'm trying to highlight is that there are many situations where it is just assumed bridge knowledge when bids are forcing or non-forcing. Unfortunately this bridge knowledge is quite often rather situation dependent. By situation I mean which country you're from, and which systems you are used to playing and facing. If you happen to be the one pair not playing ACOL at your club and play 1 (1) 2 as non-forcing then I suggest you should alert 2, and all bids like it, but that starts to put a rather large burden on you to learn where your standard agreements are different to those of your opponents.

There's not much we can do about this situation, other than to encourage people to alert more. If you think there's a chance there's some aspect of the meaning of partner's bid which the opponents aren't expecting then alert. The Laws should not be penalizing you if it then transpires that the opponents had that expectation all along.

As I go about life alerting things very conservatively I occasionally come across opponents who will look a bit surprised by my description of a bid because they felt it didn't need alerting if that was the description, but I don't think this is ever a problem. My partners quickly notice that I've alerted things they wouldn't have alerted had they been in my shoes, but they're not meant to be reacting to my alerts anyway so what's it to them?

I was particularly prompted to write this article in the hope of now explaining my position on the more tricky issue of misinformation, failure to alert, and system forgetting.

I'll try and illustrate it with a fairly simple and typical example: an example where no-one has done something crazy, like to fail to notice an opening bid, which only they at the table haven't noticed; but for simplicity I'm going to make the problems arise early in the bidding (this isn't realistic if the pair have what I would call a correctly completed convention card -- in which case all of opponents questions can be answered with a sentence beginning with "the meaning is clearly explained on my convention card...") so for this example you can assume the N/S convention card just says only "Ghestem" and nothing more (if you hate this, just imagine I've been more inventive and thought up a situation not covered on a standard convention card).

The example

West North East South 1 2 Pass 3

2 was alerted by South, East asked the meaning and South [mistakenly] said it shows Spades and a minor. South then bid 3... and here I pause the auction. Let's assume North is very confident about the system and knows the agreement is that 2 actually showed Spades and Diamonds, that the partnership play 2NT as strong, and 3 as natural, weak, and to play. What should North do in response to 3? South is expecting an alert as they think 3 was 'Pass or Correct'.

Option 1:

North doesn't alert 3, so partner who was expecting an alert is potentially woken to the misunderstanding. East/West think that South’s not done anything wrong. They might check the system card and see it’s natural. South now (along with North) has UI which he may not act on (he either might realise what 2 was in which case I think he should tell the opponents immediately via a TD, but in many cases he just thinks North's forgotten to alert 3 -- or maybe he just isn't sure). So East/West likely stay in the dark. North has to carry on ignoring the UI as usual.

Option 2a:

North does alert 3, and the opponents don’t ask. South carries on as normal, can’t be accused of using UI since he doesn’t have any. North has to avoid using it as usual. Opponents are no worse off than in Option 1, except in this scenario they might read the system card and discover that 3 is natural and thus are alerted to the fact that North or South has forgotten the system.

Option 2b:

North does alert 3, and the opponents do ask the meaning. (Perhaps North calls a TD, or tries to send partner away from the table at this point, we'll assume something bad like they don't) In this scenario South finds out about a misunderstanding (much like in Option 1: he doesn't necessarily know the answer as that requires trusting North!). The opponents find out the real system if you pointed them to the card, if it's not there then they at least get to find out what North believes 3 is in the system (he thinks it's natural). In particular the opponents are woken up to the misexplanation given by South if it's on the card, or without the card they at least discover they've had a misexplanation.

I feel like Option 2 seems preferable to Option 1, but I'm happy to be persuaded otherwise. Option 1 ends with East/West likely in the dark, and both North and South proceeding with UI.

On a final point, I have a question for you: Is the partnership knowledge of 'who remembers the system better' information to which the opponents are entitled? Is North's faultless knowledge of the alerting procedures information which should be disclosed to East/West? If the answer is yes then this likely affects the above scenarios perhaps the answer is no because it otherwise tips the scales too far in the direction of East/West since they now have a good idea of who has forgotten the system whilst North and South may be fairly sure too but not allowed to use such information?

Apologies in advance that there are probably a few vital typos somewhere which make the whole post incomprehensible.