After a year of ‘rampant’ cheating, elite bridge tries to clean up
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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.
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".
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.
Nobody is conflating anything with legitimate bidding systems.
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.
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?
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.
I think that would make it pretty much impossible to cheat assuming the tournament organizers don't collude with players.
While the described setup is expensive, just playing naked with a metal detector check in a physically isolated place through the described computer system is probably enough and reasonably cheap.
[edited]
Cricket Night in America
(this is not because the actor who played him is in the news, at all.)
Anyhow, I think Cricket Night in America would outdraw Bridge Night in America. As would Paint Drying.
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.
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.
Fouls happen, and sometimes the guilty party fails to call their foul. Without a disinterested observer---i.e. a referee---no one is in a position to call it.
We frequently had to call for someone to ref (an option then) when we played the ECU (p)Irates.
They frequently pushed the limits of rules honor system. They seemed to be proud of it. I thought it was sad.
To be fair, many of the players on their team were willing to take their own medicine. I think most of them were alright, but as in any group, it just took a few folks to fuck it up for the whole team.
Once a fight broke out when one of our guys played rough back at them (hacking, aggressive follow throughs, etc.). He was strong and also knew how to fight.
Once the captains got together and had a frank discussion about how to move forward (it worked that game).
Once we got the ref, we just told the other team that we would require a ref in all future meetings. Their captain understood.
The rules of bridge aren't very complex.
That said, if you include partnership bidding systems within the local 'rules' for a particular hand, the complexity explodes. And, particularly at a high level, most of the difficulty in being a tournament director is in making judgement rulings where the partnership's conventions and players' mental states are relevant to whether an infraction has even likely occurred, still less how it might be 'correctly' resolved.
That's true, but there's no way to include bidding conventions within the rules at the same time you're saying "bridge sounds like a really interesting case of an extensive system of rules, with a complicated and somewhat opaque system of norms overlaying that". If we're distinguishing the rules of the game from the set of social norms around the game, the rules are simple.
> most of the difficulty in being a tournament director is in making judgement rulings where the partnership's conventions and players' mental states are relevant to whether an infraction has even likely occurred
And this is the aspect of tournament bridge that I don't get. It seems like the most obviously stupid idea in the world to say that whether an action is legal in your game depends on whether the player was thinking good thoughts or evil thoughts when he took it.
It can actually be worse than this: some rulings depend on what might be the range of reasonable actions for players similar to the players in front of you. So your ruling can be different depending not only on the partnership's methods but also their general level of skill, and your judgement about whether they might or might not be expected to be aware of some subtle inference that could be made about the board situation.
Although the tournament director's immediate disciplinary authority is plenary and unreviewable (so they can penalise or expel from the tournament players they consider to be cheating, or excessively rude, without comeback) judgement rulings are subject to appeal. So the final decision might (in particularly serious and important cases) be made weeks after the event by a panel of directors who have never even met the players involved. On the basis of sometimes sophisticated/arcane reasoning. See the commentary for appeal 16.012 in https://www.ebu.co.uk/documents/laws-and-ethics/appeals/EBU-... for example.
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.
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 ;)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Ivey#Edge-sorting_litigat...
Did the casino also refund 100% of everyone's losses who ever played with the flawed brand of cards? If not, that seems like a horrific double standard.
Sounds like a fun idea to me, not to replace the current rules but as a different game.
Vs team card games... where you have 2 players working together that aren't allowed to talk.
The only way to "fix" this is allow full communication between partners. Allow them to text during the game. Or any kind of signal. You need to level the playing field.
The honor system is fine for a fun game with friends, but not fine in anything "competitive".
More recently Anna Rudolph was accused of hiding a computer in her lip balm.
What level of sophistication would be required to get an edge from a 1cm by 3-4cm cylinder of computing and batteries?
At first I thought "yogur" was a word from a different language, but after trying and failing to find it when searching, I have to ask: did you mean...yogurt? How does one leave a secret message in yogurt?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Chess_Championship_1978
> On the 25th move of game 2, a waiter delivered a tray with a glass of violet colored yogurt to Karpov. After the game Leeuwerik sent a letter to Schmid protesting the yogurt. 'It is clear that a cunningly arranged distribution of edible items to one player during the game, emanating from one delegation or the other, could convey a kind of code message'. Although the letter was almost certainly tongue-in-cheek, Baturinsky took it seriously and suggested that the binoculars Leeuwerik used during the game might also convey a coded message to Korchnoi.
https://www.mark-weeks.com/chess/78kk$$01.htm
It's also used a plot point in the musical Chess - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_(musical)
A better example is Rausis from a couple of years ago — https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2019/jul/13/igors-rausis-c...
Cheating over the board happens frequently enough that tournaments are held with very tight controls, but monitoring is off in places like the bathroom.
> hiring a hypnotist to be in the audience
> hiding a computer in her lip balm
This is the kind of thing I'd support as far as cheating being allowed. Lots of intrigue, weird custom devices, etc. Maybe someone in the audience could get one of those hyper-directional speakers going to whisper in the ear of the player. Then there becomes a second layer to the game of figuring out how the other person is cheating.
I'd add the rule that the winning player must give a bond-villain style monologue about how they did it, so that we all get to enjoy it afterwards of course.
But you're right about bridge. The game design is utterly broken when you have people playing who care about winning more than they do the spirit of the game. There's no way to prevent cheating at all. Teams can always develop additional channels of information, even on top of the official public one, to exchange information covertly. There's just no way to prevent it.
[1] https://www.chess.com/news/view/igors-rausis-58-under-invest...
At the top level, receiving a single bit of information from an observer is enough to turn the game.
That bit of information is "Your opponent blundered."
Modern chess engines can answer this question far faster than humans.
Vishy Anand had mentioned in an interview that he would be virtually unbeatable if he received a simple signal from an observer indicating that the current position is a critical position in the game.
> The honor system is fine for a fun game with friends, but not fine in anything "competitive".
Is the honor system "not fine" in competitive situations because you have a deontological view that the only rules that matter are rules that are mechanistically enforceable, or is it not fine because you have a consequentialist view that competitive situations will usually devolve into something messy and unfair if all rules are not mechanistically enforceable?
I see the logic and appeal of both lines of reasoning, but they're quite different and people might easily disagree (for different reasons) with each.
See also my comment about ultimate frisbee, elsewhere in this discussion.
It is not. But it doesn't take many cheaters to ruin a game for everyone.
In competitive online games, I'd estimate that less than 5% of all players in my games are behaving dishonorably in some way. And that is even though aimbots, AI assistants etc. are readily available to those who seek them out.
If they weren't online games, the number would probably be even lower.
In any case, those numbers would be far away from the point where you could make statements like "the nature of man is to cheat". That feels a bit like saying "in stories most people identify with villains". They obviously don't - most people don't want to be that kind of person. Though obviously some have given up on themselves.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/13/sports/chess-karjakin-mis...
I consider it cheating to recess for the day, then have your team game out all the alternatives for you. It's supposed to be you against your opponent, period.
I don't think bridge would really work if you allowed open communication. I take it you've never played?
FWIW adjournment never really happens anymore, largely because computers just make the analysis too easy and time controls are shorter. And I do agree that it does ruin a certain aspect of the game, but I don't think that makes it cheating, it was just a different time.
Adjournments used to be an accepted standard of high-level match play. If both sides agreed to a rule, are aware of it, and if the rule wasn't set up so one side has an inherent advantage, is it cheating?
You certainly can cheat in Chess. Cheating in Chess has been a problem (or a perceived problem) for a long time, both online and in person, and the in person cheating long pre-dates computers even being able to play Chess. It's even the same kind of cheating as used in Bridge, namely, another party uses hidden signals to communicate to you. E.g. you have a better player (or a team of players that collectively are better) in the audience that surreptitiously signal moves to you.
And in the modern era of course there are endless ways to use computers to cheat at Chess, similar to what cheating in casinos can look like.
Take chess for example. Online it is considered enough that you've played too consistently beyond human capability in order to be deemed a cheater. This isn't proof, though, it just that it defies astronomical odds. In over the board play, it is required that the mechanism be discovered -- you have to catch them with an app on their phone for example. Or that they break tournament rules by not showing you what's on their phone.
The point above being that cheating would likely (eventually) elevate to the point of building the ruleset such that one's particular method of "cheating" is allowed, or can't be discovered.
I think with a lot of things we're already there now. F1 has people clearly "cheating" every intention of the rules, but if it's not in the rulebook it is legal until the rulebook is changed. Players in a variety of sporting leagues are only drug tested with urine samples that have been beatable for decades -- they're effectively not actually testing these players -- cheating has effectively been negotiated into the rulebook.
I think it's an incomplete description to, I'm pretty sure move times are also taken into account, and lichess apparently uses some client side behavioral signals too (and doesn't let you play via API in the fast time formats where those signals help).
It's still cheating even if you aren't caught.
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.
You mean counterstike? HL2 never had any deathmatch mode, there was a coop mod iirc.
There are also many bridge players who essentially play at the current human maximum, and are easily classified as winners, and they have spoken about the cheating.
Played card tracking in intermediate play might fit into the pattern you describe, though. At higher levels a misplay shouldn’t be happening often enough to be worth using this kind of software.
I’m aware of the social dynamics you describe in online gaming, generally.
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.
Why? It seems people are packing large events without issue.
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.
There was a regular game in Google Ads. No one was over 60. But I'm sure eventually no one will play anymore.
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.
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.
https://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/23/former-bear-ceo-jimmy-cayne-...
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.
https://bridgewinners.com/article/view/confession-of-a-self-... https://bridgewinners.com/article/view/confession-of-a-self-... https://bridgewinners.com/article/view/a-chance-to-clear-the... 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.