A cheating scandal in the world of professional bridge

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/07/the-cheating-problem-in-professional-bridge

by fezz • 10 years ago

101 70 10 years ago

do New Yorker authors get paid by the word or something? Tl;dr They cheated by adjusting a tray to different positions to convey different meanings.

lumberjack• 10 years ago

It's a bad attempt at long form journalism.

ganeumann• 10 years ago

I like the longer articles in the New Yorker. The charm of articles like that is becoming familiar with a milieu, not the notional theme of the article. Learning about a small but dedicated subculture by reading an interesting story is more interesting than just knowing the facts about a professional contract bridge cheating scandal.

This tl;dr thing makes sense in articles about technical subjects when all you really want to know is the answer. It makes no sense for things you read for pleasure.

rbonvall• 10 years ago

I agree. What the actual cheating technique was is the least interesting part of the story.

Cpoll• 10 years ago

An interesting subject is what can be done to stop cheating? It seems that separators are insufficient.

Each player must be in a completely enclosed room, preferably a Faraday cage, lead box? Furthermore, all moves must be submitted digitally, with a time limit, and the actual move will only be displayed at the end of that limit.

Even then, we'll probably hear about a bug in the software used.

semi-extrinsic• 10 years ago

There was a really interesting paper in Phys. Rev. X a couple of years ago that discussed the use of quantum entanglement to create an optimal bridge bidding strategy [1]. Interestingly, since it is generally accepted that entanglement cannot be used to transfer information, this appears to be within the rules.

[1] http://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.4.0210...

mcguire2• 10 years ago

I think you're describing high-level tournament chess.

myggan• 10 years ago

However, that will render an incredibly boring game

blue12• 10 years ago

While I also prefer face-to-face playing, online playing (which is still fun) is actually not very different from the secure solution described by Cpoll

Chefkoochooloo• 10 years ago

IT sounds like a very interesting game. Have never played it, but I do agree that they should look at how they could stop the cheating in this game.

paulcole• 10 years ago

"No one would try to memorize all the percentages"

As someone who studied and memorized 20,000+ words to improve my tournament Scrabble play, this made me laugh. If knowing the numbers is truly advantageous, there's likely to be a subset of competitors willing to work to get that edge.

Maybe bridge is different, but the games I've been serious about (Scrabble and poker) both rewarded a significant amount of focused study and memorization.

aidenn03• 10 years ago

My mom was competitive at the regional level, not national nor world, and she carried around a ~10 page typewritten document with all the bidding and lead conventions she had with her current partner, and study it while I was at various after-school activities.

Because in duplicate bridge you are scored not on your absolute result, but on your result relative to people who played the same hands as you, the tinyest edge is magnified.

The basic card-splitting rules are known even to the most rank beginners in duplicate, and there are definitely players who know the percentages as well as any poker player. In a way it's actually easier, as you know where half the cards are as soon as the first lead is made.

ergothus2• 10 years ago

I'm a huge bridge fan - it's a very logical game, and the rules are simple but the implications many. It also has two parts: the bidding, in which you signal to your partner what you have as well as determine both trump and which partnership will play (The game incentives bidding as high as you can, but not bidding higher than you can achieve; and the play, which is an exercise in odds and using the information gleaned during the bidding - it is often practical to pull off bids that sound highly dubious.

Duplicate bridge, as described in this article, is one of the most satisfying ways to play - you aren't relying on the luck of the draw, you are scored how you do on this deal vs others that play WITH THE EXACT SAME DEAL. (generally you preserve your hand as you play, and pass your hands to the next group to play). So even on a terrible hand, if you can do better than others, you score points.

The problem in dealing with cheating is that any efforts to block communication or signaling first require you to have no social chatter. Boring - play Go or Chess then. (and second, they require you to signal to the other partnership if you're using non-standard signals, which gets messy but isn't boring)

For people interested in learning bridge, just recognize that the need for exactly 4 to play is one problem, and without the duplicate part (which then requires at least 8 players) luck plays a bigger part. Despite greatly enjoying the game it's been years since I played. The local bridge club at the time was hard to enter because I was a young 30-something and everyone else was a retiree.

mcguire2• 10 years ago

I was dragged to a bridge class by my girlfriend several years ago, and it was fascinating. The thing that struck me most was that you could lose the game during the play, but you could only win the game during the bidding.

Unfortunately, because I'm an antisocial rat bastard, I never kept up with playing or tried to join the club.

ergothus2• 10 years ago

One of the unfortunate side effects of learning bridge is the tendency to sneer at games like Spades as being "bridge-lite"

sharkjacobs• 10 years ago

I enjoy bridge, but high level competitive bridge sounds like a nightmare.

"Expert poker players often take advantage of a skill they call table feel: an ability to read the facial expressions and other unconscious “tells” exhibited by their opponents. Bridge players rely on table feel, too, but in bridge not all tells can be exploited legally by all players. If one of my opponents hesitates during the bidding or the play, I’m allowed to draw conclusions from the hesitation—but if my partner hesitates I’m not. What’s more, if I seem to have taken advantage of information that I wasn’t authorized to know, my opponents can summon the tournament director and seek an adjusted result for the hand we just played. Principled players do their best to ignore their partner and play at a consistent tempo, in order to avoid exchanging unauthorized information—and, if they do end up noticing something they shouldn’t have noticed, they go out of their way not to exploit it."

How can you possibly play like this, and expect others to play like this, in a genuinely competitive setting?

na853• 10 years ago

You can't. It's a game that is fundamentally flawed at the base level, just like blackjack.

The fact that both these games outlaw certain thought processes, be that counting cards in your head or acting on your partner's hesitation, shows that they've been shoehorned into something they're not.

dec0dedab0de2• 10 years ago

counting cards is legal in Atlantic City, but if they suspect you of it they'll shuffle every hand or not let you change the size of your bet.

eru5• 10 years ago

It just shows that bridge can not really be played cut-throat competitively with humans face-to-face. (Social play is fine and fun.)

Adding intermediation (either other humans or computers) removes most of the problems.

wodenokoto• 10 years ago

If you don't want people counting cards, shuffle between plays. It is in no way a problem any game is faced with.

The weird thing about card counting is that casinos want the people who are bad at counting cards. So it is not a flaw in the game, but just a weird rule that in the casino world you are not allowed to win.

ath0• 10 years ago

The golf example (from later in the article) is telling: if those most looked-up-to in the profession publicly and exhaustively exhibit a dedication to fair play, and it's part of the culture down to the lowest levels, then it can work much of the time. You also have to be brutal in enforcement: golf pros who sign an incorrect card, even if they just misunderstood a local rule, are disqualified (though this is changing, see http://espn.go.com/golf/story/_/id/13975820/rules-golf-elimi...).

It's true that once people start getting away with cheating, even minor cheating, and others see it, it quickly becomes universal. Like cycling (also from later in the article).

aidenn03• 10 years ago

It's actually fairly easy for a few reasons:

1) Anybody playing at even a remotely competitive level has their bid and play conventions so well down that answering the question "what would I have played had I not seen my partner hesitate?" is not hard.

2) Varying your tempo will get the director called to the table regardless of whether or not it conveys information; playing at a steady rate is part of the game.

3) It has actually been fairly easy to identify cheaters for the past decade or so (since hand records have been computerized), they are the ones who regularly succeed when making the wrong decision (from the odds point of view). The ACBL just didn't want to run the analysis because they don't want to get sued.

tachim• 10 years ago

If the play is so standard and automatic then where does skill come in? Or just skill just correlate highly with how many situations one has observed before and potentially memorized?

laxatives• 10 years ago

Seems very arbitrary. There's a very similar card game in Spain called Truco (and in Italy called Briscola). Truco accepts communication and even bluffing as a core component. There are very standard system for hidden communication, like a wink representating a particular strong card and pursing the lips means another. Because these are so well known, its common to either wait for the right moment to share info, or intentionally share incorrect values to confuse your opponent. At the end of the round, there's an opportunity to bluff and call "BS", increasing the stakes at every hand. Its a very similar game, but accepting implicit communication changes it completely.

toyg• 10 years ago

In a similar way, another Italian card game, "tressette", has a set of formalized signals which you are forced to use (and are limited to) when opening a round, without lying - "i have other cards of this type", "this is my last card of this type" and "I want your strongest card" (I know them as striscio/volo/busso, but they change regionally). So you have a situation where card and signal technically mean one thing everybody knows, but might ask different strategies of the partner depending on his interpretation of the matter, the sequence of calls, and his tactical skills.

Obviously it later generates untold amounts of discussion and fighting over such interpretation, which is what us Southerners fundamentally crave ;)

I have to say, I miss card games. They used to be a fundamental part of Italian education, a social icebreaker and a great generational bridge. Electronic entertainment completely obliterated them, and unsavory vices like slot machines and drugs have now replaced them in public spaces. There are less fights and loud arguments, sure, but it's all very sad.

epx• 10 years ago

In some Brazilian variants of Truco, the communication must not be noted. If the adversary can tell that gesture X means Y, you lose a point.

z3t4• 10 years ago

"gentleman sport", while cheating might be simple and undetectable, you simply do not do it as it would take out the fun and challenge.

Money seem to corrupt many such sports though.

hackuser• 10 years ago

How can you possibly play like this, and expect others to play like this, in a genuinely competitive setting?

Honesty is not as hard or unusual as people think. There is a notion that people will do anything to win but if you look at humanity, most people are honest, follow the rules (and laws), and have little interest in cheating. Not everybody feels and acts that way, and nobody does it all the time, but it's hardly uncommon.

olympus• 10 years ago

This reminds me of a family card game we played when I was younger called Rook. It was very similar to bridge in that you played with a partner, bid for a contract/trump, and table talk was not allowed. We did allow non-verbal forms of communication and that became a large part of a winning strategy. We mixed up partners and the escalation became so great that we had a different form of communication for each of the different partners. Then a scheme would be figured out and we would have to rotate our codes to something else. It was like a family game of thermonuclear war by the time us kids moved out. Just like I think they should have a legal doping class in cycling where it is okay to take performance enhancing drugs, we should just make an open class of bridge where non-verbal communication is allowed and the schemes are not shared with the opposing pair. I'll bet we would observe some interesting behavior emerge between partners.

And I have to hand it to the New Yorker for this one. Longform journalism is hit or miss for me, but I really enjoyed reading about this game that I've never played before. I guess the author did a good enough job explaining the game that I figured out that it was similar to Spades, Hearts, Euchre, and Rook in some ways that I stuck with it until the end.

eru5• 10 years ago

I'll bet we would observe some interesting behavior emerge between partners.

Just have a different scheme for each hand, and describe your whole hand with hand signs. (Since you don't have more information than your whole hand, this is as bad as it'll get.)

k_sze• 10 years ago

I have never played bridge so my opinion is of a complete outsider's. You can also see me as the devil's advocate.

What if we just accepted "cheating" to be part of the game? Such that every team is allowed to devise their own way to communicate in subtle manners (barring the use of electronic devices). And so part of the game would be to figure out the opposing team's code. There is really no way to prevent communication when you have physical presence. If you really want to prevent communications, sit them in separate rooms and make them play through computer terminals.

Catcher signals are used in baseball, we don't call that cheating.

And to bring up another analogy. Remember how in the anime Naruto, the kids have to take a paper exam to advance? The questions in that paper were hopelessly difficult for the candidates, and it turned out that the real exam was for them to attempt cheating without being obvious.

And please don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that what Fisher and Schwartz did was ok. They were clearly violating the existing rules. What I'm saying that trying to enforce a rule forbidding communications when you have physical presence is an exercise in futility. It's just that maybe we should consider changing the rules or how the game is played.

cbd19843• 10 years ago

If you take that to a logical extreme (and humans do take things to logical extremes... ) it becomes a game more about electronics intelligence (jamming, jam evasion, cryptography, steganography... ) which, don't get me wrong, would be amazingly amusing to watch if you even could watch it, but would devalue the relative contributions of the card players and would put more emphasis on having money for equipment and the salaries of specialists.

You could fix that by making sure every team has the same budget and watching the financials closely to ensure nobody goes even one cent over, which should once again move the competition into the realm of being mind against mind instead of checkbook against checkbook. For added fun, make all purchases and hiring decisions (and make sure all team members are hired and salaried out of the total budget) public information, so each team can fret about what every other team just spent money on and why and how all those things can be used and which are decoys and which decoys are actually useful and we should buy that decoy and...

fapjacks• 10 years ago

Something race leagues know all about.

analog31• 10 years ago

I don't know about bridge either, but I think that all rules of sports and games are conventions, which I suspect evolve to optimize enjoyment for players and fans.

In a sport with "offensive" and "defensive" sides, a poorly thought out set of rules could give a compelling advantage to one side or the other, making the sport un-interesting to watch. Rules will evolve over time as new techniques are developed, that give a particular style of play too much of an advantage.

If you don't know what's actually occurring in the game, because it's happening in a trailer next to the arena, then your interest in watching the game may wane.

In some sports, the suspicion of widespread cheating (such as doping and financial shenanigans) at the elite level dampens public enthusiasm, which becomes a marketing issue.

jib3• 10 years ago

Like the article mentioned, this is how (some) bridge tournaments have been played for a long time for what its worth.

Not in separate rooms, but with a screen in the middle hiding your partner.

http://www.bridgehands.com/S/Screen_Bridge.jpg

Maybe its hard to get if you're not used to the game, but cheating like that is amazingly offensive.

Screens aren't used very often though - I wasnt a great player, but I played in the youth championships in Sweden a few times, and we didnt use screens, and I never once felt like it was needed - it's just not the done thing to cheat.

paulclinger• 10 years ago

The problem with this suggestion is that your opponents need to have exactly the same information about your bid as your partner does. In fact, at any point during bidding (when it's your turn to bid) you can ask the partner of the person who made a bid to explain the meaning of the bid and they need to answer to the best of their knowledge (or you can consult their bidding card).

Using any "subtle" ways to communicate provides additional information to your partner that is not available to your opponents, and that's why it's cheating. If this is allowed, then the main effort would go into devising ways to clandestinely pass that information and since knowing your partner's hand gives your huge advantage, it would significantly change the game.

eric_h4• 10 years ago

I really have never understood the cheater's mentality, at least when it comes to these silly, artificial games we play.

Yes, at the highest level of professional sports, etc. I see a clear financial motive to cheat (cue reference to the amorality of corporations), but some subset of people cheat all the way down that hierarchy in sports/cards/etc.

/slightly OT, but thematically in line, I think:

I'm a rather avid amateur billiards player (there's no money in pool in the US anymore, not that I can even compete with the pros - I'm better at making money with a keyboard) and I routinely see a (admittedly small, probably around 1%, but unchanging as players come and go) percentage of amateur players that clearly, actively want to cheat as long as they can get away with it.

The actual expected value for their cheating is terrible. I play in a couple of leagues where, if, by chance, you get first place, you'll get ~$1000, having paid ~$256 in table time (and 16 weeks of play) to get to that last match.

It's just a game! Isn't the whole point, and fun, and glory of winning a game actually winning by the restrictions placed on you by the rules? I can beat Tiger Woods by hitting him in the temple with an icepick, but why? The rules are what make the game challenging.

I guess I just don't get it, if I foul in a pool game I'll call myself on it, because if I didn't I wouldn't walk away from it thinking I won. I'd think I cheated and I would feel terrible about it.

Reiterating my opening sentence, I just do not understand people who cheat on games.

RickHull2• 10 years ago

I just do not understand people who cheat on games.

I think they have a fundamentally different personality type: sportsman vs. gamesman. Sportsmanship values honor and conduct; gamesmanship values winning.

It seems that the highest levels of competition reward gamesmanship over sportsmanship, perhaps unsurprisingly. There is a culture of gamesmanship, and gamesmen have better outcomes. Competitions where this seems to be the case include:

    * auto racing
    * football (world)
    * football (american)
    * cycling
    * fighting (MMA, boxing)

And I'm sure plenty of others. These mottos are prevalent:

    * If you're not cheating, you're not trying
    * It's not cheating if you don't get caught

eric_h4• 10 years ago

That's a fair point. In the game of pool gamesmanship has a long history, though in that context it's called hustling.

Of course, the game of pool has always had a history of gambling; the fact that we even call it pool is a reference to the betting pool. Still, even when I play a set for money I won't cheat because it makes me feel dirty. I guess I just can't reconcile the fact that when I win without cheating, I feel great as though I accomplished something (although obviously it's just a game). When I win by luck I don't get the same satisfaction as when I win by perfectly executing whatever plan I was trying to accomplish.

I guess I'll just never understand the hustler's mindset; I'll never be a conman.

As an aside, I think it's amusing that the term "hustle" means "do whatever it takes to get by", or just "give it all you've got" when it's meant, roughly, "undersell your actual skill level to fleece someone out of their money" for many decades in the pool world.

DrScump• 10 years ago

In this particular case, the incentive seemed to be that better performance resulted in recruitment to higher-compensated teams.

cdr• 10 years ago

There's as many motivations for cheating as there are for anything, though they do tend to fall in broad categories. Some enjoy the thrill of seeing how much they can get away with, some just want to win. Some like to feel smarter than everyone else in the room. Many repeat cheaters are habitual, they have a compulsion and couldn't stop no matter what the consequences were.

aidenn03• 10 years ago

What surprises me is how prevalent their cheating was; most of the cheaters described in this article are quite good even without cheating; if they cheated on say a single hand per round, they might easily get away with it while still getting a significant competitive advantage (in particular if they randomly arranged things some of the time that they weren't signaling), but this sounds like they cheated every single time they were North/South and the opponent was Declarer.

hexwab• 10 years ago

So here's an idea for a game. Let's call it "inductive bridge".

1) Rules of play are as for standard contract bridge.

2) You may use whatever conventions you like. There is no obligation to tell anybody what they are.

3) Have fun figuring out the opposing partnership's conventions!

Yes, it'd be a whole different ball game. But would it be worse?

Discuss.

(Full disclosure: I played bridge competitively at university.)

(Update: seems k_sze was ahead of me.)

jib3• 10 years ago

I think it would be a worse game. :)

I used to play an ok amount of bridge.

I enjoyed trying unusual systems, but playing against them were less fun. Sure you can play some advanced relay system, but even with open information about the system needing to figure out exactly how your relay system is built takes away the focus from the core of the game that is enjoyable: Finding the right bid, and then meeting it in play.

blue12• 10 years ago

It would probably be a nightmare. Just try playing with an abundance of "psychic bids", and the game becomes more or less random guessing

schakraberty• 10 years ago

Great example of explanatory writing that makes an article interesting even for a reader who's never played bridge.

griffinmahon• 10 years ago

This reminds me of the Fleming Bond novel Moonraker, in which a whole chapter is devoted to the idiosyncrasies of the villain who is being challenged by Bond via bridge.

IshKebab• 10 years ago

This is why bridge always seemed stupid to me: You're not allowed to communicate with your partner, but you are allowed to communicate through card plays, but then you aren't allowed to have secret communication through card plays (you have to tell your opponants your communication system)...

It's artificial and ridiculous. Given how easy it is to secretly communicate you're basically trusting people not to cheat.

timwaagh• 10 years ago

if anything this is good for the game. games where there is possibility for cheating & scandals when getting caught are much more interesting. i always though bridge was dull, but i might be more interested now.

A cheating scandal in the world of professional bridge

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