I know this is a year later since the last posting in this thead … but we encountered basically the same situation this past weekend. In this case, P1, P2 had poor first balls, P3 had a very good first ball. P4 average ball. On ball 2, P1 and P2 both have poor balls again, but P4 plays ball of P3 and nobody notices … P4 has a good ball that nearly doubles score for P3. Obviously P4 is DQ’d. But then the question is what to do with P3’s score, as it is a “tainted” score. Usually when I’ve encountered this in the past, the number of points added by player playing out of turn were negligible. This time, however, it was significant.
This was the one ruling all weekend that we went to the IFPAPA rule book for guidance, but could not find anything explicitly stated. We weren’t in a position to search tilt forums to see this thread, so had to make a judgment call. We went with basically what Bowen said, those points stand. P3 was clearly winning the game even without the help of P4, it would have been unfair to have him play a new game from scratch (which is what other players recommended, stating it was a corrupted score).
It would be really nice if there was a sentence added to the IFPAPA rule set about what to do with the player who has a significant increase in score due to another player playing out of turn. I.e. state explicitly that any points earned, the player will keep, no matter how many or how few points (and maybe a note that other players are also responsible for stopping a player out of turn to reduce the impact on another person’s score). Right now it only states that the player could take over the ball, or treat as a major malfunction (which means get additional balls). But this is more of a “beneficial malfunction”. The other two players were clearly not happy about the fact that P3’s score had doubled, and P3 still gets two more balls. At least if this was explicit in the rules, then we can just show the players “that’s the rule” rather than it being a judgment call.