[gordontd]

aguahombre, on 2014-September-09, 08:46, said:

And I am sure a player who made a bad 2nd overcall in the same suit might love the opportunity for a counter penalty if someone didn't alert the penalty double. You think his partner could have done something about it if he knew the double was penalty?

Your second sentence is the reason why damage is unlikely to follow from a failure to alert in this instance, but I'm afraid I have not the faintest idea what the first sentence means.

[mycroft]

Absolutely. EBU tries to make Alerting easy to follow, at the cost of "everybody" Alerts. The ACBL goes farther down the chain of "stuff *truly* everybody plays is not Alertable; sometimes that's better; sometimes it's worse.

I would suggest that the EBU may not have got Alerting of doubles "right"; "less wrong" perhaps. It's likely "less wrong" is the best we can do...

[barmar]

It's unlikely anyone will ever come up with alerting regulations that achieve the perfect balance between memorability and warning opponents of unusual agreements that they should ask about. All we can ever hope for are incremental improvements in the compromise between these goals.