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Comment by huhtenberg | Hacker News Reader

> the game also involves a large part of chance

I can't find the source right now, but I remember reading about a court case centered around whether Bridge (the card game) is gambling or not due to the influence of chance on its outcome. It was settled by holding a string of games that pitched players with varying experience against each other and the outcome was that better skilled ones _always_ prevailed. And so the Bridge was ruled to be a game of skill.

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Bridge is unfortunately rife with cheating at the highest levels. It's simply too easy to communicate information with your partner that you're not allowed to through subtle signals, and this is very hard to police except at the macro level using a statistical analysis of many games to determine if it seems like players are acting on more information than they should have. The only way to play Bridge without cheating is to isolate each player in a separate room, confiscate all electronics, and have them play on provided computers running electronic Bridge that only transmits bids and cards played. So never bet on Bridge.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/07/the-cheating-p...

I guess bridge is a game where having a poker face is a disadvantage.

No, you want the poker face; you don't want your opponents to be able to discern anything, and if it seems to a judge that you might be communicating information based on your reactions to certain plays then you could be disqualifed.

So you need the poker face, and you need a surreptitious system to exchange information out of band.

> The only way to play Bridge without cheating is to isolate each player in a separate room, confiscate all electronics, and have them play on provided computers running electronic Bridge that only transmits bids and cards played.

You'll still have "cheating" in this scenario. The rules of bridge consider it to be cheating if partners have a bidding convention that they don't explain to the other team. It's stupid, but those are the official rules.

Oof. The game itself just doesn't lend itself to fair competitive play owing to its very nature. It's like how the overhead press was removed as a powerlifting lift in competition: It's just not possible to judge fairly (too easy to cheat using your legs).

This I don’t agree with: they should have left it as leg-assisted overhead press. So what that you helped with your back and legs? It’s a full-body activity anyway.

There already is a "leg-assisted overhead press" widely seen in competition -- the jerk. Except you see it in Olympic lifting, not powerlifting, and it's generally not done on its own, but as part of the clean and jerk. The snatch is another form of leg-assisted overhead press.

So if that's what you're into ... take up Olympic lifting!

There is no element of overhead press in snatch. In jerk feet are moving. I think it would be beneficial to have third exercise where the final motion is overhead press after pause and feet are not allowed to move.

Neither a bridge or poker player, but these games that have both a huge mathematical and psychological component to their strategy seem to be obvious games of skill. Even blackjack with much stricter (loosing) probabilities IMO is a game of skill because "good" players will lose at a slower rate than bad ones (even without card counting).

Rock-paper-scissors just seems too simple to allow for any performance improvements that don't involve luck or cheating. For a judge to highlight "speed of execution" or "the sense of observation" doesn't make sense; this sounds like bridge players using secret signals, or a roulette player trying to squeeze their bet onto the board after the wheel has slowed - skill should be related to performance within the parameters of the game, not waiting for your opponent to throw scissors and changing to rock...

One theory I have with RPS is if you say right before the game “I’m gonna play rock”, it may change the odds slightly to non-random. I’m not sure any sort of speech is within the bounds of a fair game though.

The only way I'd play Bridge with anything serious on the line would be to generate a long truly random string of moves beforehand, and then memorize them and play them.

Then, you can analyze your performance afterwards and if you're statistically losing more than you should be, you know you're giving tells.

Fwiw when playing my wife at rock paper scissors I once won over 20 times in a row. The odds against this happening randomly are pretty extreme - but I know her very well and can read her well enough that it was possible. I think it's fair enough to say that there might be a psychological element there that could pull the game out of straight random chance.

I will give you 100-1 odds you could not beat me in rock-paper-scissors 20 times in a row.

I would never take that bet, obviously. I haven't known you for 16 years, and I can't read you like a book ;-)

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