After a year of ‘rampant’ cheating, elite bridge tries to clean up

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/arts/contract-bridge-cheating.html

by kwindla • 5 years ago

65 106 5 years ago

AlbertCory9• 5 years ago

(I don't play, but I did in college.)

The whole point of playing with a partner is exchanging information in legal ways (bids, the cards you play). When you're playing online, no one can tell if you're exchanging it in other ways.

Bridge tournaments should just sit the players at really big tables so they're socially distant. No online at all.

meragrin_• 5 years ago

Bridge tournaments should just sit the players at really big tables so they're socially distant.

Why? It seems people are packing large events without issue.

AlbertCory9• 5 years ago

I'm sure that's right. I just meant "you don't need to have tournaments online if covid is the only worry."

lsjvjn• 5 years ago

I'd say it's a larger concern for Bridge, since the game is (unfortunately) primarily played only by older folks who are more at-risk.

snarf213• 5 years ago

Well, you can exchange in non-legal ways even in person. A simple wink pattern could convey lots of information about your hand shape or desire for game/slam. Even with the players unable to see each other visually using cross blinders, there are timing tells or hand placement tells that you can use to indicate some information as above when laying down your bid cards. They already removed talking during bidding because it could be used the same way. If it is possible, someone will try to cheat. The more beneficial it is, the more people will try.

For in-person play, there could be a review of played hands by looking for lines or bids that seem "weird" and then going back and looking at the video for discrepancies. If caught, ban them and their partner from competitive play for life. Obviously this is cost prohibitive and could only happen for the highest level championship type events.

AlbertCory9• 5 years ago

Oh yeah, I remember all that. My partner had a joke "can I have a review of the bidding, with the original inflections?"

There was a regular game in Google Ads. No one was over 60. But I'm sure eventually no one will play anymore.

halfmatthalfcat• 5 years ago

Same with Euchre. Inflection in calling pass or pick up, even the way you breath, can lead to tipping your partner off at what you have/don’t have.

bpodgursky• 5 years ago

Here's an example of why it's still hard: you can use timing information to encode data.

Pause for 5 seconds: signal your partner should not trump. Pause for 10 seconds: signal your partner should trump.

It's almost the same as CPU timing attacks — there's always immense information leaking out if your sole focus is to capture what's going on behind the scenes.

duxup4• 5 years ago

I wonder how much cheating is fueled by folks who get upset at losing, assume that cheating "must" have been involved, and go on to cheat.

You see it in every online game, folks claim someone cheated and then try to prove it and go on to simply demonstrate that ... they're just a bad player.

Not to say I think anyone is wrong about the scale of the issue here. I just wonder how much human disappointment to a loss(es) and their assumptions just feeds the cycle.

Then there is the other confusing factor that people who cheat usually greatly over estimate the amount other people cheat.

DFHippie• 5 years ago

This is ubiquitous. Another variant: you think of a way to cheat; you assume your opponent is villainous and always cheats; so you assume your opponent was already cheating in this specific way; so you cheat in this specific way "to even the playing field". As soon as you accept it as axiomatic that the other guy cheats you are liberated from the rules yourself out of fairness. And you are still the righteous hero! How dare the other guy be so villainous, and so cunning as to hide it! He forced you to do a dastardly thing! He's ruining X for everyone!

BoiledCabbage• 5 years ago

Huh... funny how much that sounds like a current American political party.

MerelyMortal• 5 years ago

I used to play Half Life 2 online, and I developed a knack for sniping, even when people hopped, I was accused of cheating. I wasn't that good otherwise, so I can believe your proposal. People have a hard time believing there are tallented people out there, or that they might be playing against one such person.

SV_BubbleTime4• 5 years ago

I used to play Half Life 2 online

You mean counterstike? HL2 never had any deathmatch mode, there was a coop mod iirc.

1123581321• 5 years ago

In duplicate, these aren’t really factors. Once the hand is complete, the bidding and cards are known, and the limited nature of the problem means the requirement to have had information is more apparent than in other types of games.

There are also many bridge players who essentially play at the current human maximum, and are easily classified as winners, and they have spoken about the cheating.

Played card tracking in intermediate play might fit into the pattern you describe, though. At higher levels a misplay shouldn’t be happening often enough to be worth using this kind of software.

I’m aware of the social dynamics you describe in online gaming, generally.

umvi• 5 years ago

Sometimes I wonder what a "cheating allowed, as long as you aren't caught" tournament for intellectual games would look like. Chess, Poker, etc. If you get caught you are disqualified.

If there were a monetary incentive it would probably turn into a race-to-the-bottom optimization problem where people are stuffing computers into body cavities, but still fun to think about.

duxup4• 5 years ago

How much any given situation already is your first sentence ;)

I recall a story where a person negotiated a game (I forget what game) at a casino to play for big money. They demanded someone come with them (this person was a known card cheat) specific brand of cards to be used, and some other things. Turns out they knew of a flaw in the printing of those cards.

Casino found out about the flaw after they won big and refused to pay.

The fact that they allowed a cheat and specific cards made it seem like the scenario you describe ;)

stupandaus• 5 years ago

Not sure if you are misremembering the Phil Ivey edge sorting case [1] or if you are thinking of another story. Notable in this case that the casinos won in the end.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Ivey#Edge-sorting_litigat...

josephcsible• 5 years ago

Casino found out about the flaw after they won big and refused to pay.

Did the casino also refund 100% of everyone's losses who ever played with the flawed brand of cards? If not, that seems like a horrific double standard.

koboll• 5 years ago

Isn't that every tournament? Cheating is always "allowed" if you aren't caught.

cortesoft• 5 years ago

It’s life in general.

spindle• 5 years ago

I think the idea is that you'd be considered to have played honourably but merely lost the match, whereas (at least in the case I know about, which is go/baduk) you're also shamed for life.

Sounds like a fun idea to me, not to replace the current rules but as a different game.

brianwawok5• 5 years ago

You can't really cheat in Chess. I mean you can con-man move 2 pieces, but its very very easy to detect with spectators (and impossible online)...

Vs team card games... where you have 2 players working together that aren't allowed to talk.

The only way to "fix" this is allow full communication between partners. Allow them to text during the game. Or any kind of signal. You need to level the playing field.

The honor system is fine for a fun game with friends, but not fine in anything "competitive".

Iefthandrule2• 5 years ago

There are plenty of ways to cheat at chess. Here's one: program chess pieces to make the optimal move for you. If you are not allowed to provide the pieces, find out the pieces being used ahead of time and create programmable replicas. Then swap each piece out with your programmed pieces under your sleeve.

neaden2• 5 years ago

People cheat in chess all the time, using an engine to help them out, or before that getting outside assistance. Take a look into the Korchnoi v Karpov match for world champion which had accusations of cheating involving secret messages in yogur and one player hiring a hypnotist to be in the audience and the other responding by befriending two local murderers and bringing them to the match.

More recently Anna Rudolph was accused of hiding a computer in her lip balm.

chowells• 5 years ago

Cheating in online chess is easy. You just throw the current position into stockfish (or some other software) and see what it would do. I don't know if it's common, but it certainly happens.

But you're right about bridge. The game design is utterly broken when you have people playing who care about winning more than they do the spirit of the game. There's no way to prevent cheating at all. Teams can always develop additional channels of information, even on top of the official public one, to exchange information covertly. There's just no way to prevent it.

vkou• 5 years ago

You can't really cheat in Chess.

At the top level, receiving a single bit of information from an observer is enough to turn the game.

That bit of information is "Your opponent blundered."

Modern chess engines can answer this question far faster than humans.

kwindla2• 5 years ago

I'm genuinely interested in the reasoning behind this:

The honor system is fine for a fun game with friends, but not fine in anything "competitive".

Is the honor system "not fine" in competitive situations because you have a deontological view that the only rules that matter are rules that are mechanistically enforceable, or is it not fine because you have a consequentialist view that competitive situations will usually devolve into something messy and unfair if all rules are not mechanistically enforceable?

I see the logic and appeal of both lines of reasoning, but they're quite different and people might easily disagree (for different reasons) with each.

See also my comment about ultimate frisbee, elsewhere in this discussion.

CalChris• 5 years ago

You can agree to an outcome (win, lose, draw) ahead of time.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/13/sports/chess-karjakin-mis...

AlbertCory9• 5 years ago

Sure you can. Did you watch "Queen's Gambit"?

I consider it cheating to recess for the day, then have your team game out all the alternatives for you. It's supposed to be you against your opponent, period.

I don't think bridge would really work if you allowed open communication. I take it you've never played?

CydeWeys• 5 years ago

You can't really cheat in Chess.

You certainly can cheat in Chess. Cheating in Chess has been a problem (or a perceived problem) for a long time, both online and in person, and the in person cheating long pre-dates computers even being able to play Chess. It's even the same kind of cheating as used in Bridge, namely, another party uses hidden signals to communicate to you. E.g. you have a better player (or a team of players that collectively are better) in the audience that surreptitiously signal moves to you.

And in the modern era of course there are endless ways to use computers to cheat at Chess, similar to what cheating in casinos can look like.

LanceH2• 5 years ago

It would depend on how cheating is defined.

Take chess for example. Online it is considered enough that you've played too consistently beyond human capability in order to be deemed a cheater. This isn't proof, though, it just that it defies astronomical odds. In over the board play, it is required that the mechanism be discovered -- you have to catch them with an app on their phone for example. Or that they break tournament rules by not showing you what's on their phone.

The point above being that cheating would likely (eventually) elevate to the point of building the ruleset such that one's particular method of "cheating" is allowed, or can't be discovered.

I think with a lot of things we're already there now. F1 has people clearly "cheating" every intention of the rules, but if it's not in the rulebook it is legal until the rulebook is changed. Players in a variety of sporting leagues are only drug tested with urine samples that have been beatable for decades -- they're effectively not actually testing these players -- cheating has effectively been negotiated into the rulebook.

gpm• 5 years ago

Cheating isn't defined in online chess as that, it's defined as using outside help. That's just a description of the (flawed) detection mechanism.

I think it's an incomplete description to, I'm pretty sure move times are also taken into account, and lichess apparently uses some client side behavioral signals too (and doesn't let you play via API in the fast time formats where those signals help).

It's still cheating even if you aren't caught.

ALittleLight• 5 years ago

This could be the premise of a reality TV show. Five professional poker players. Five slight of hand / card magicians. One poker tournament.

mandevil• 5 years ago

I don't play, but before we got married, my wife used to play with her blind father as a partner. Whenever she played, she would out of necessity read out the cards that had been played to her blind father. When they were losing, the other partners apparently always complained that there must have been some cheating because of that (though no complaints came from winners, apparently). So a lot of this sounds like sour grapes, honestly?

omnicognate• 5 years ago

Why not get someone from the opposing partnership to read them out?

oh_sigh• 5 years ago

Or just buy a set of playing cards with braille on them (even if he didn't read braille, it would be easy enough to learn 4 suits and 13 ranks).

snarf213• 5 years ago

Exactly. Having the opposing team read out the cards prevents information transfer. Bridge has controls like this already. You aren't allowed to lie about what your bid means, for example. If a player is confused about a bid from the player on their right, they are allowed to ask the player on the left what it means and they have to honestly answer.

gostsamo• 5 years ago

well, when I play cards, everyone is announcing what they are putting on the table.

kwindla2• 5 years ago

There are both "norms" and "rules" at play, here. Reading this article made me think about watching high-level ultimate frisbee transition from everybody calling their own fouls to having referees.

I mostly watched this happen on usenet, and I haven't paid any attention to this in years, so I may be getting some of this wrong. But my understanding is that for a long time everybody was (mostly) happy with the honor system of players calling fouls. Then one guy forced that to change by aggressively abusing the honor system, with the explicit goal of making everyone else to decide that adding referees to the game would be the best solution to him being a jerk.

In the case of Bridge, it sounds like a really interesting case of an extensive system of rules, with a complicated and somewhat opaque system of norms overlaying that. So, sort of like real life.

burnished• 5 years ago

Huh. Wonder why the solution wasn't deemed to be getting rid of the problem person, if it was mostly isolated like that?

lotsofpulp• 5 years ago

Because he has plausible deniability, and then you have to address exactly where the line is. And then you end up with bureaucracy. From every organization or tribe I have seen, it is basically inevitable.

If they are lucky, the members of the organization continue to put the needs of all and long term interests over their own, and there are less resources needed to be spent on keeping people in line. Once a sufficient number of people decide to put their own needs and short term interests ahead of the others, then it becomes a never-ending game of whack a mole and politics and parties and all that fun stuff emerges.

This happens on nation state levels, company level, small business, for fun sports organizations, and even family. It is a never-ending battle to keep the order and keep out/expel the entropy.

ulnarkressty• 5 years ago

Honest question - if it was just one guy, why didn't he get banned instead of changing the rules for everyone?

mcguire2• 5 years ago

Who would make the decision to ban him, and why?

Fouls happen, and sometimes the guilty party fails to call their foul. Without a disinterested observer---i.e. a referee---no one is in a position to call it.

csa2• 5 years ago

I played ultimate with my nationally competitive college club team.

We frequently had to call for someone to ref (an option then) when we played the ECU (p)Irates.

They frequently pushed the limits of rules honor system. They seemed to be proud of it. I thought it was sad.

pwthornton• 5 years ago

The solution to someone abusing a foul system like that is to make them earn the fouls.

thaumasiotes5• 5 years ago

In the case of Bridge, it sounds like a really interesting case of an extensive system of rules, with a complicated and somewhat opaque system of norms overlaying that.

The rules of bridge aren't very complex.

pmyteh3• 5 years ago

You're right that the rules are only modestly complicated: although they do run to dozens of pages most of the complexities are in trying to unpick and rectify situations where something has gone wrong (unauthorised information being accidentally given, somebody leading out of turn, whatever).

That said, if you include partnership bidding systems within the local 'rules' for a particular hand, the complexity explodes. And, particularly at a high level, most of the difficulty in being a tournament director is in making judgement rulings where the partnership's conventions and players' mental states are relevant to whether an infraction has even likely occurred, still less how it might be 'correctly' resolved.

mkidd• 5 years ago

This article is paywalled but here are the articles from Bridge Winners that it references:

https://bridgewinners.com/article/view/confession-of-a-self-... https://bridgewinners.com/article/view/confession-of-a-self-... https://bridgewinners.com/article/view/a-chance-to-clear-the... https://bridgewinners.com/article/view/curtis-cheek-suspende...

The problem is real and the national organization (ACBL), run by seventy and eighty year-olds, has not found the courage to address it.

There is no way to prevent the exchange of unauthorized information (i.e. not conveyed by a bid or a card played) online, but the full record of the play makes it easy to detect cheating with a high degree of statistical confidence, indeed overwhelming after hundreds of hands. This is entirely practical. It's not even "big data". A 16-core desktop should suffice to process a day's worth of data from Bridge Base Online (BBO) in under 15 minutes, and update statistics in a database. Nicolas Hammond, cited in the article, has done the analysis. I'm confident it works, because I can see step by step how I would replicate his work, well enough to verify.

But nothing is ever easy... There is bad blood between Nicolas Hammond and the ACBL. To the ACBL's credit, they moved quickly to develop a computer based scoring program at the dawn of the PC era. And 30+ years later, they are still using the same ACBLscore program written in Pascal by a single smart self-taught (now retired) programmer, without so far as I can ascertain the benefit of revision control.

Nine years ago, the ACBL tried to replace ACBLscore. Mr. Hammond's software company was hired to do the work. It didn't go well. The ACBL has never given an honest accounting of the failure to its membership. Mr. Hammond hides behind the NDA he signed with the ACBL. From experience, I'm sure there was shared responsibility on a project chock full of weird legacy issues. But it's impossible to apportion the blame.

From a programming view point, Mr. Hammond's cheating detection pipeline is simple and clean, and free of legacy issues, a whole different world from ACBLscore+. But the ACBL does not understand this, will not bury the hatchet, fears lawsuits, and has insiders and sponsors who don't want cheating investigated too carefully.

So a great intellectual game is dying. The ACBL brings more nails for the coffin. They deserve the bad publicity.

snarf213• 5 years ago

Well said. I agree with everything you said. Anomalies in play should be super easy to detect both during bidding and the play. It is just a matter of collecting the data and running it. They are already trying to do this with poker sites. They are trying to detect people running solvers to determine the right frequency of bluffing. If people start getting too close to exactly 37% across X hands, they are obviously using some kind of solver and data tracker. That makes it easy to ban these players and confiscate their winnings as ill-gotten gains.

misiti3780• 5 years ago

I found it interesting that, Jimmy Cayne, ex head of Bear Sterns, is caught up in this scandal too:

https://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/23/former-bear-ceo-jimmy-cayne-...

neonate• 5 years ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20211027170733/https://www.nytime...

https://archive.md/SjbkD

AlbertCory9• 5 years ago

I haven't seen anyone mention this yet, so:

I've played a teensy amount of duplicate bridge. That's where the hands are kept together, so you can give the same hands to another table and compare scores. (I don't play anymore.)

Bidding conventions are supposed to be fully disclosed, so if you have some special signals with your partner, they're written right on your card and the other team can see them. If they're not sure what you're doing, they can ask "what does your partner's bid mean?" and you have to say something (of course, they can't ask YOU what your own bid meant).

But there was cheating even before computers, as others have pointed out. Bridge might last as a social game, where no money or reputation is involved, but making it cheat-proof is probably a fool's errand.

thaumasiotes5• 5 years ago

Bidding conventions are supposed to be fully disclosed, so if you have some special signals with your partner, they're written right on your card and the other team can see them. If they're not sure what you're doing, they can ask "what does your partner's bid mean?" and you have to say something (of course, they can't ask YOU what your own bid meant).

But this is a rule of the tournament, not a rule of the game. The game already imposes severe restrictions on partner communication; I've never understood why playing within those restrictions is so widely viewed as "cheating".

vikingerik2• 5 years ago

The cheating referred to here isn't anything to do with the bidding system - it's communication outside the game entirely, which is trivially easy to do with a partner when playing online. There's also the possibility of tracking what cards have been played, which is supposed to be up to your memory, not a computer.

Communicating entirely within the bidding system isn't cheating and isn't called so by anyone. But that's getting conflated with using a (possibly deliberately) imperfectly specified bidding system as plausible deniability to cover up out-of-band communication.

devit• 5 years ago

Well, you can have the competitors play naked in a physically isolated and sound/vibration/light/radiation insulated faraday cage, with a metal detector and whole-body MRI scan applied upon entrance, competing through a computer system with fixed clock time for each action that only reveals the action once the clock expires.

I think that would make it pretty much impossible to cheat assuming the tournament organizers don't collude with players.

While the described setup is expensive, just playing naked with a metal detector check in a physically isolated place through the described computer system is probably enough and reasonably cheap.

AlbertCory9• 5 years ago

A great sci-fi movie, anyway. Except no one wants to see really old people naked.

Dumblydorr• 5 years ago

Bridge was a pretty fun game, however the card counting was what turned me off. For those who love tracking where every card has been and could be, it's probably a very fun memory game.

Someone• 5 years ago

Poker players can have tells (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tell_(poker) ) that unknowingly to them give their opponents information.

I wonder whether bridge players similarly may have tells that their partners, by playing a lot with them, subconsciously learn about.

If so, bridge may have accidental cheaters.

pmyteh3• 5 years ago

They do, though it's not cheating as such if you're not doing it knowingly. The more general problem is one of 'unauthorised information', and it's not entirely avoidable. Sometimes a position requires an unexpected length of time to analyse, because of the cards you're holding. You're expressly allowed that, but the break in regular tempo leaks information (that you have a decision which is salient) to the other players. That's authorised for opponents to know, but not for partner. The rules provide various restrictions on the partner of someone passing UI to try to prevent advantage being taken, but it's not an easy problem to solve in general.

zem• 5 years ago

Never played bridge myself, but I learnt a lot about the game and the world of competitive bridge from Louis Sachar's wonderful novel "The Cardturner". Highly recommended.

After a year of ‘rampant’ cheating, elite bridge tries to clean up

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