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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

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.
thaumasiotes 5y ago
> Communicating entirely within the bidding system isn't cheating and isn't called so by anyone. You don't know much about tournament bridge. Communicating entirely within the bidding system is considered cheating by practically every member of the scene. You can be expelled from tournaments for it. This is so well known that the quote I pulled says basically nothing else! >> 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.
- vikingerik 5y ago
  As I'm understanding it, the cheating is to communicate within the bidding system in a way that isn't written down to be disclosed to your opponents. Is that what you're referring to and what the tournament players are doing? If so then I misunderstood, yeah. But how is it possible to avoid that? You can't possibly write down every possible bid and its meaning in relation to every possible bidding sequence (the history matters; bids have different meaning in relation to previous bids, particularly if the opponents intervened at any point.) There always has to be some amount of heuristics and intuition to determine what your partner is trying to indicate. Are the bidding conventions expected to disclose all possible heuristic paths? Like, think about a cue bid to show an ace, as an example. Are you expected to formally write down exhaustive rules saying when you treat a bid as a cue bid as opposed to trying to find a fit in that suit? Can the disclosure be more like "it's a cue bid if we think we already found our trump suit" without saying exactly what fulfills the latter condition?
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    > As I'm understanding it, the cheating is to communicate within the bidding system in a way that isn't written down to be disclosed to your opponents. Is that what you're referring to and what the tournament players are doing? Is that what I'm referring to? Yes. I have deep philosophical differences with this approach, it was specifically described in my parent comment, and I responded to that. Is that the form of cheating being described here? No. The cheating here is much, much stupider: it involves online bridge tournaments in which any random account is free to spectate live games and see all the cards. So some players created new accounts, spectated their own live games, and looked at everyone's cards. This is cheating by anyone's standard. But it's not what I was talking about or what AlbertCory was talking about.

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.

thaumasiotes 5y ago

> Communicating entirely within the bidding system isn't cheating and isn't called so by anyone. You don't know much about tournament bridge. Communicating entirely within the bidding system is considered cheating by practically every member of the scene. You can be expelled from tournaments for it. This is so well known that the quote I pulled says basically nothing else! >> 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.

vikingerik 5y ago
As I'm understanding it, the cheating is to communicate within the bidding system in a way that isn't written down to be disclosed to your opponents. Is that what you're referring to and what the tournament players are doing? If so then I misunderstood, yeah. But how is it possible to avoid that? You can't possibly write down every possible bid and its meaning in relation to every possible bidding sequence (the history matters; bids have different meaning in relation to previous bids, particularly if the opponents intervened at any point.) There always has to be some amount of heuristics and intuition to determine what your partner is trying to indicate. Are the bidding conventions expected to disclose all possible heuristic paths? Like, think about a cue bid to show an ace, as an example. Are you expected to formally write down exhaustive rules saying when you treat a bid as a cue bid as opposed to trying to find a fit in that suit? Can the disclosure be more like "it's a cue bid if we think we already found our trump suit" without saying exactly what fulfills the latter condition?
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > As I'm understanding it, the cheating is to communicate within the bidding system in a way that isn't written down to be disclosed to your opponents. Is that what you're referring to and what the tournament players are doing? Is that what I'm referring to? Yes. I have deep philosophical differences with this approach, it was specifically described in my parent comment, and I responded to that. Is that the form of cheating being described here? No. The cheating here is much, much stupider: it involves online bridge tournaments in which any random account is free to spectate live games and see all the cards. So some players created new accounts, spectated their own live games, and looked at everyone's cards. This is cheating by anyone's standard. But it's not what I was talking about or what AlbertCory was talking about.