The Laws of Duplicate Bridge

Hi everyone,
as I have already indicated, I think it would be good to examine the Laws of Bridge so over the next wee while I will have a go at doing just that. If nothing else it will help me study for my Directors exam.
There are 93 Laws in total, some of these are very detailed and some tell us things we already know well so I will focus on the complicated ones more. So here we go:

Law 1
Law 1 explains the pack of cards, the rank of cards and suits. Hopefully we all know this!

Law 2
Law 2 explains the layout of the Boards. You might not know that both Vulnerability and the Dealer are defined by this Law and are based on a sequence of 16 combinations. Once you pass Board 16, the sequence starts again. If a Board does not conform to this sequence it should not be used.

Law 3
Law 3 defines the arrangement of tables which we are all familiar with. Interestingly the Director decides where North is!

Law 4
Law 4 is about partnerships - nothing notable here.

Law 5
Law 5 explains the assignment of seats. What should me noted here is that, within the confines of the particular player movement being used e.g. Howell, Mitchell, players must remain in the same relationship to each other (unless by prior agreement with the Director). For example, in a Howell Movement people move around a lot but if you started playing as South, you must always be South when your partnership is sitting North / South; and if the first time you play in the East / West direction you sit West, you must always be West when in that orientation. Hope this makes sense!

Law 6
Law 6 is about shuffling and dealing - since we use pre-dealt boards this is not an issue, but some points of interest are:
A representative of each side should be present during shuffling and dealing.
While everyone tends to deal cards in the same way: one at a time in a clockwise direction, there is nothing in the rules to say that you MUST do it this way - you must deal one at a time but you could deal them anticlockwise if you wanted to!

That will do for this week - next week we start to get into some meatier topics!

Ross