28 ms·

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

65 points by kwindla 5y ago

AlbertCory 5y 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_ 5y 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.
  - AlbertCory 5y 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 5y 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.
- snarf21 5y 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.
  - AlbertCory 5y 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.
    - handrous 5y ago
      I played casually for a while, but I'm convinced it's just too broken a game to endure much longer. Besides, my favorite idea from it is secret coded bidding, but the game doesn't really support actual secret codes without falling apart past low-level play (they'd quickly become entirely opaque and extremely specific, making the whole thing kinda pointless), so they're not allowed, and leagues often outlaw most of the interesting things you could do with bidding (heavy jump-bidding bid systems, for instance) in order to keep the game from collapsing and/or to keep the people who want it to run just a certain way without any surprises or hiccups happy. I eagerly await my discovery of a card game that keeps the parts of bridge I want to like, without requiring a ton of extra restrictions that suck the fun (for me) out of it in order to keep the game working properly. It may be that no such game is possible, but I hope it is.
- halfmatthalfcat 5y 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 5y 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.
duxup 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
    Huh... funny how much that sounds like a current American political party.
- MerelyMortal 5y 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_BubbleTime 5y ago
    > I used to play Half Life 2 online You mean counterstike? HL2 never had any deathmatch mode, there was a coop mod iirc.
umvi 5y 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.
- duxup 5y 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 5y 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_litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Ivey#Edge-sorting_litigat...
    - duxup 5y ago
      That's not the one I'm thinking of but his history is amusing.
    - citizenpaul 5y ago
      Ive seen enough f these such cases that i cannot believe that anyone spends money in a casino anymore. If the casino can claw back winnings even if the person did in fact "exploit" the game they can do it for any outsize win. Basically nullifying the reason anyone plays games of chance.
  - 5y ago
mandevil 5y 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 5y ago
  Why not get someone from the opposing partnership to read them out?
  - oh_sigh 5y 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).
    - SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
      FWIW, Braille doesn’t have a super high literacy rate among the blind. It depends on the age, education history, economic status, etc.
      - Traster 5y ago
        You would have thought Braille for cards is pretty trivial to learn - there's only 13 values and 4 suits.
        SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
        I understand what a couple Braille symbols mean, and I for the life of me can not feel them out of a line of other shapes. It’s more than knowing the translation. You are calibrating your finger, memorizing and translating, and developing that focus.
  - 5y ago
kwindla 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
  Honest question - if it was just one guy, why didn't he get banned instead of changing the rules for everyone?
mkidd 5y 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-kibitzer/ https://bridgewinners.com/article/view/confession-of-a-self-... https://bridgewinners.com/article/view/confession-of-a-self-kibitzer-pt-2/ https://bridgewinners.com/article/view/confession-of-a-self-... https://bridgewinners.com/article/view/a-chance-to-clear-the-air-and-start-over/ https://bridgewinners.com/article/view/a-chance-to-clear-the... https://bridgewinners.com/article/view/curtis-cheek-suspended-by-usbf/ 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.
- snarf21 5y ago
misiti3780 5y 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-at-center-of-bridge-scandal.html https://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/23/former-bear-ceo-jimmy-cayne-...
neonate 5y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20211027170733/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/arts/contract-bridge-cheating.html http://web.archive.org/web/20211027170733/https://www.nytime... https://archive.md/SjbkD https://archive.md/SjbkD
AlbertCory 5y 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.
- thaumasiotes 5y 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".
  - vikingerik 5y 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.
    - AlbertCory 5y ago
      I don't know what you think you're arguing with. I know perfectly well who's calling what "cheating." I'm providing some background information for people not familiar with it. Nobody is conflating anything with legitimate bidding systems.
Dumblydorr 5y 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 5y ago
Poker players can have tells (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tell_(poker) 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.
- pmyteh 5y 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 5y 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.

65 points by kwindla 5y 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_ 5y 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.
- AlbertCory 5y 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 5y 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.
snarf21 5y 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.
- AlbertCory 5y 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.
  - handrous 5y ago
    I played casually for a while, but I'm convinced it's just too broken a game to endure much longer. Besides, my favorite idea from it is secret coded bidding, but the game doesn't really support actual secret codes without falling apart past low-level play (they'd quickly become entirely opaque and extremely specific, making the whole thing kinda pointless), so they're not allowed, and leagues often outlaw most of the interesting things you could do with bidding (heavy jump-bidding bid systems, for instance) in order to keep the game from collapsing and/or to keep the people who want it to run just a certain way without any surprises or hiccups happy. I eagerly await my discovery of a card game that keeps the parts of bridge I want to like, without requiring a ton of extra restrictions that suck the fun (for me) out of it in order to keep the game working properly. It may be that no such game is possible, but I hope it is.
halfmatthalfcat 5y 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 5y 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.

duxup 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
  Huh... funny how much that sounds like a current American political party.
MerelyMortal 5y 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_BubbleTime 5y ago
  > I used to play Half Life 2 online You mean counterstike? HL2 never had any deathmatch mode, there was a coop mod iirc.

umvi 5y 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.

duxup 5y 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 5y 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_litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Ivey#Edge-sorting_litigat...
  - duxup 5y ago
    That's not the one I'm thinking of but his history is amusing.
  - citizenpaul 5y ago
    Ive seen enough f these such cases that i cannot believe that anyone spends money in a casino anymore. If the casino can claw back winnings even if the person did in fact "exploit" the game they can do it for any outsize win. Basically nullifying the reason anyone plays games of chance.
- 5y ago

mandevil 5y 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 5y ago
Why not get someone from the opposing partnership to read them out?
- oh_sigh 5y 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).
  - SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
    FWIW, Braille doesn’t have a super high literacy rate among the blind. It depends on the age, education history, economic status, etc.
    - Traster 5y ago
      You would have thought Braille for cards is pretty trivial to learn - there's only 13 values and 4 suits.
      - SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
        I understand what a couple Braille symbols mean, and I for the life of me can not feel them out of a line of other shapes. It’s more than knowing the translation. You are calibrating your finger, memorizing and translating, and developing that focus.
- 5y ago

kwindla 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
Honest question - if it was just one guy, why didn't he get banned instead of changing the rules for everyone?

mkidd 5y 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-kibitzer/ https://bridgewinners.com/article/view/confession-of-a-self-... https://bridgewinners.com/article/view/confession-of-a-self-kibitzer-pt-2/ https://bridgewinners.com/article/view/confession-of-a-self-... https://bridgewinners.com/article/view/a-chance-to-clear-the-air-and-start-over/ https://bridgewinners.com/article/view/a-chance-to-clear-the... https://bridgewinners.com/article/view/curtis-cheek-suspended-by-usbf/ 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.

snarf21 5y ago

misiti3780 5y 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-at-center-of-bridge-scandal.html https://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/23/former-bear-ceo-jimmy-cayne-...

neonate 5y ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20211027170733/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/arts/contract-bridge-cheating.html http://web.archive.org/web/20211027170733/https://www.nytime... https://archive.md/SjbkD https://archive.md/SjbkD

AlbertCory 5y 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.

thaumasiotes 5y 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".
- vikingerik 5y 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.
  - AlbertCory 5y ago
    I don't know what you think you're arguing with. I know perfectly well who's calling what "cheating." I'm providing some background information for people not familiar with it. Nobody is conflating anything with legitimate bidding systems.

Dumblydorr 5y 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 5y ago

Poker players can have tells (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tell_(poker) 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.

pmyteh 5y 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 5y 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.