A cheating scandal in the world of professional bridge
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
"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?
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.
The fact that there's something to "suspect you of" is the whole problem. Doing the same (counting cards) in poker is explicitly encouraged, and the ability to know what cards remain in the deck is highly prized.
Blackjack is just not a very well-designed game.
Unless you're referring to the basic skill of determining odds to make a certain hand based on your hole cards and the common cards?
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).
Adding intermediation (either other humans or computers) removes most of the problems.
Perhaps, but that just reinforces the notion that the game is fundamentally broken. If a card game works better on computers, then it's not really much of a card game, is it?
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.
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).
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.
The bidding is a game that you can describe something like:
"Using an open channel, and an open communication protocol, communicate hidden resources in a precise enough way to mutually agree on what can be accomplished with you and your partner's resources combined".
The playing is a game of "Given a set of resources, maximize your results" (if you won the bid) or "Communicate with your partner and together maximize your results given your resources" if you did not win the bid.
Vague as hell, but sure.
The difficulty in the bidding process is based on incomplete information understanding what resources you have combined. There are a number of edge cases that can't be expressed well, so you need to have a collective thought processes to understand where you're going (and your opponents can also disrupt your bidding, so its not a clear channel either).
The challenge in the play is understanding what combination of playing orders will give you the highest odds. There is some amount of memorization (there are some squeeze plays that aren't obvious unless you learn them) but mostly it is pattern recognition, improvisation and odds calculation on the fly.
I'm underselling it - bridge played against relatively equally good opponents and with a good partner that you have played with for some time is imo one of the best games there are.
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.
Money seem to corrupt many such sports though.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Unfortunately, because I'm an antisocial rat bastard, I never kept up with playing or tried to join the club.
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.
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)
* If you're not cheating, you're not trying
* It's not cheating if you don't get caughtOf 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.
> 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.
In this particular case, the incentive seemed to be that better performance resulted in recruitment to higher-compensated teams.
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.)
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.
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.
[1] http://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.4.0210...
It's artificial and ridiculous. Given how easy it is to secretly communicate you're basically trusting people not to cheat.
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.
[Edit: fixed OBOB on the reference to a higher level post]