Penalty cards
Generally speaking, any card illegally exposed by a defender, even accidentally,
becomes a penalty card. This is another complicated area. There are actually two
sorts of penalty cards: major penalty cards and minor penalty cards.
This has nothing to do with the suit they are in!
A minor penalty card is any single accidentally exposed card below a ten.
If you deliberately expose a card, for example by leading out of turn, or accidentally
expose an honour (10 or above), or have two or more penalty cards for any reason,
then all your penalty cards are major penalty cards.
Any penalty card must remain exposed. A major penalty card must be played at the first
legal opportunity. This means that if you end up on lead you must lead your major penalty
card. If you have two or more penalty cards which can be played, declarer can choose
which.
If you only have a minor penalty card, you may elect to play an honour (10 or above) in the
same suit instead of your penalty card. If you are on lead or discarding, you may play a
different suit. In either case, your penalty card stays down.
If you are on lead and partner has one or more major penalty cards you must ask
declarer, before you lead, if he wishes to impose a lead penalty. If you lead
without asking, your lead is illegal and it too becomes a major penalty card! Declarer has
three options:
-
He can require you to lead the suit of (any one of) your partner's major penalty
cards. If so, your partner picks up all penalty cards of the nominated suit.
They cease to be penalty cards. Note that if you don't have a card of the nominated
suit that's declarer's tough luck. Your partner still picks up any penalty cards
in that suit and you can lead what you like.
-
He can forbid you from leading one or more of the suits in which your partner has
major penalty cards. If so, your partner may pick up all penalty cards in the forbidden
suits. For as long as you remain on lead you may not lead any of the prohibited suits
(unless you only have cards in the forbidden suits, in which case you can lead what you
like).
- He can allow you to lead whatever you like, in which case all partner's penalty
cards remain down as penalty cards.
Note that these lead restrictions do not apply if partner only has a minor penalty card
but the fact that partner has the minor penalty card is Unauthorised Information.
That means you can't use it as the basis for any decisions. The subject of Unauthorised
(or Extraneous) information is discussed briefly in the section Pause
for Thought.
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Copyright © Keith Sheppard, 2001 |