Fiona T wrote: ↑Wed Jan 25, 2023 5:43 pm
Hypothetical situation -
You're entering tournament scores into atropine in a Lincoln style tournament
The selection and declarations have been recorded on the score sheet.
The R2 selection was FRIGLITES
c1 declared girliest x
c2 declared GRISTLE
You notice that GIRLIEST had been incorrectly allowed, and the 8 points awarded to C1, who had gone on to win the game by 10 points.
What would you do? Believing they were ahead may have affected the choice of numbers and safety of declarations for remaining rounds. Do you reverse the score (a 15 points net swing) and award C2 the win, or decide that a submitted scoresheet is the score agreed by all players and the error stands?
Something similar has been discussed in this thread before. In chess and Scrabble, submitting the scoresheet is (sort of) a point of no return - if the result has been agreed by both players,
it can't be changed after that unless the tournament director agrees.
This just raises another question:
when should the tournament director agree to change it?
In the case you describe, where C2 didn't challenge GIRLIEST^, I would let the submitted result stand. If you correct it, reversing the win, C1 has a good reason to feel hard done by because the rest of the game might have gone differently. C2 could easily have asked to look up the word but didn't.
Other situations, with my attempt at an opinion:
- Any mistake which is the organiser/director's fault (they misread or mistyped the score), should obviously be corrected.
- If the mistake is something minor like an illegal number of vowels in a round or three sixes in a numbers game because one of the cards was upside down, let the result stand. Any complaint along these lines is almost certainly the loser of the game trying their luck after the fact.
- If the mistake is something which benefits both players, such as the accidental allowing of a word they both gave, correct it.
- On the same lines, if they've done something obviously absurd to try to gain an advantage, correct it.
- If the problem is with the conundrum, it's easier to correct it, especially as the mistake couldn't have affected any later rounds unless you're playing the weird 14R format with the conundrum in the middle. This covers things like the scramble not being an anagram of the solution, a disallowed solution turning out to be a valid alternative, or the solution not being a valid word*. (Declaration of interest: at events I have benefited from corrections to the first two of these mistakes.)
I guess it's difficult to come up with a definitive set of rulings as to when it should or shouldn't be corrected. Whatever rules you write, someone will find a loophole to exploit. So that might be why Scrabble and chess leave it up to the director to decide what's fairest.
* Not the mere presence of an alternative solution, though. Some people will tell you that if there was a second correct answer nobody spotted, then the conundrum was invalid and you have to replay it. This is not a thing. It sounds more like a made-up rule invented by someone who lost.