Some heated discussions do flare up every now and then, about whether to adopt WESPA rules in totality or to keep on patching up our Aussie rules. We have borrowed the "open hand rule", from WESPA, in order to make sure that a hand heading off to the bag is not carrying any unwanted baggage.
Unlike WESPA rules, our Aussie rules kept on rephrasing the simple rule of how high the top of the bag should be in relation to players' eyes. Instead, we related that height of the bag to players' shoulders, then later on to table tops, regardless of the fact that all players use their eyes to see, not their shoulders or table tops.
The funny aspect is that I cannot recall any time tournament directors started by pointing out a summary of essential practical rules, in order to save new players the embarrassment of being requested to observe some rules.
Anyway, my contribution here is:
A new rule should be devised that would make counting the scores, and confirming aggregates, take place outside play time. Personally, I make this happen, under the present imperfect rules, by disputing score counts in order to stop the clock for the sake of relaxed accurate counting.
I admired the contribution of Adam Kretschmer when he chipped in, to resolve a slinging rules match, with his precise-concise quip, " Even if we assume that Aussie rules are somewhat imperfect and that WESPA rules are somewhat imperfect, surely it's better to be playing under and working from a single somewhat imperfect set of rules that we can work towards fine-tuning as a Scrabble community? Having a long discussion every few months to on-board WESPA rules one-by-one doesn't seem like a good use of anyone's time."
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