Revokes

You can correct it!

First and foremost, if you realise it in time, you must correct a revoke. You are duty bound to do this but it's to your advantage anyway. By correcting the revoke you may avoid having to give away any penalty tricks.

For the first eleven tricks, you can correct a revoke provided neither you, nor your partner, have played to the next trick (or made a claim). A revoke occurring on trick 12 can be corrected any time, even after play of the hand is completed.

Also, with the new 2007 laws defenders can once again ask partner "Having none" if he fails to follow suit. If you always do that you should be able to make revokes a thing of the past.

To correct a revoke, you simply substitute a legal card for the illegal one. If you are a defender, your illegally played card must stay down as a Major Penalty card but there's no further penalty. You don't have to give away any tricks.

If you do rectify a revoke, any opponent who played to that trick after your revoke card can change the card they played without penalty. If an opponent changes a card they played then any card subsequently played by your side (eg. by partner or dummy) can also be changed but in this case, if it's the defending side that revoked, then the originally played card becomes a Major Penalty card

The penalty isn't always 2 tricks.

Indeed, since the 2007 rule change, a two trick penalty is quite rare.

It's only if a revoke is discovered too late to correct it, ie. after it is established, that a penalty is incurred. You should play the hand to completion and apply the penalty at the end. The rules for determining the penalty used to be extremely complicated - more complicated than many players (me included before I checked!) believed. Fortunately they were simplified (and made less Draconian) in the 2007 rules but it's still not completely straight forward.

First and foremost, you never have to give up tricks made before the offence occurred. It's only the revoke trick and the subsequent ones which are up for grabs. Here are the (new for 2007) rules:

1. If the offending side lost the revoke trick and all subsequent ones, there's no penalty.
2. If the revoke card actually won the trick and the offending side also won a subsquent trick, a minimum of two tricks are transferred to the opposition.
3. In all other cases, the offenders only have to give away one trick.

Note specifically that it's only two tricks if the revoke card won the trick. If it was won by the revoking player's partner then the standard penalty is just one trick. In practice, a revoke card can only win a trick if it's a trump so the penalty can only be two tricks if you trump when you should have followed suit.