A friend asked me recently whether there are any rules against ‘unethical hesitations’ in bridge: one of his opponents had paused before following low in a suit; as a result, my friend had assumed he held the ace, and put up dummy’s king …whereupon the other opponent won the trick.
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It’s a murky area: a pronounced hesitation, for no good reason, is clearly unethical. But many hesitations are ambiguous, or hard to prove. In my view, if you accidentally fumble for even a moment, you should declare that you have ‘nothing to think about’.
One of my favourite stories about unethical behaviour concerns the late American player Alvin Roth (who invented weak twos and the unusual no trump). ‘Al’ couldn’t abide any form of cheating. Once, during a game of high-stake rubber bridge, he found himself defending 7NT.
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