
A cheating scandal in the world of professional bridge - fezz
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/07/the-cheating-problem-in-professional-bridge
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sharkjacobs
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?

~~~
na85
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.

~~~
dec0dedab0de
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.

~~~
eric_h
I may be picking a nit, but counting cards is legal in all casinos in the US.
You are not breaking a law by counting cards, but the the casino has the right
to stop providing you its service if you are, or if they even think you are
(right up there with "No shirt, no shoes, no service").

Perhaps you mean that casinos in Atlantic City actually will not kick you out
if they suspect you're counting cards, or they're bound by some law to allow
you to keep playing?

If counting cards were actually illegal, we'd be a lot further along on our
way to Orwell's 1984. You can't outlaw thought (yet).

~~~
dec0dedab0de
Yes, you are correct. What I meant is that the casinos are forbidden from
asking you to stop playing or to leave the casino based on counting cards.
It's really in the casino's best interest though, because there are more
people who _think_ they can count cards than there are people who can do it
effectively.

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olympus
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.

~~~
eru
> 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.)

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k_sze
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.

~~~
cbd1984
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
Something race leagues know all about.

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paulcole
"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.

~~~
aidenn0
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.

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ergothus
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.

~~~
mcguire
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.

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

~~~
eru
Try Mü. It's a German style trick taking game, somewhat comparable to Bridge,
but can be enjoyed at a more casual level, too.

~~~
anamexis
I am a huge fan of Tichu, which is also a more casual Bridge-like game.

~~~
eru
Tichu is fun, too. I managed to convert some Singaporeans from Big-Two to
Tichu.

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eric_h
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.

~~~
RickHull
> _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_h
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.

~~~
RickHull
Regarding hustle, I see:

> late 17th century (originally in the sense ‘shake, toss’): from Middle Dutch
> hutselen

So I think it splits into the dice and gambling sense, where deception becomes
a valuable skill. And also the "hustle and bustle" sense, as in a football
coach yelling at his player to hustle.

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hexwab
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.)

~~~
jib
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.

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Cpoll
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.

~~~
myggan
However, that will render an incredibly boring game

~~~
blue1
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

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

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IshKebab
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.

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timwaagh
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.

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griffinmahon
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.

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matt_wulfeck
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.

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

~~~
eric_h
I disagree - I think the variety of cheating techniques (not covered by GGP's
tl;dr) was interesting, especially given the monikers. I found the Coughing
Doctors and the Italian Foot Soldiers to be quite amusing

[Edit: fixed OBOB on the reference to a higher level post]

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Chefkoochooloo
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.

