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

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I haven&#x27;t seen anyone mention this yet, so:<p>I&#x27;ve played a teensy amount of duplicate bridge. That&#x27;s where the hands are kept together, so you can give the same hands to another table and compare scores. (I don&#x27;t play anymore.)<p>Bidding conventions are supposed to be fully disclosed, so if you have some special signals with your partner, they&#x27;re written right on your card and the other team can see them. If they&#x27;re not sure what you&#x27;re doing, they can ask &quot;what does your partner&#x27;s bid mean?&quot; and you have to say something (of course, they can&#x27;t ask YOU what your own bid meant).<p>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&#x27;s errand.

There are both &quot;norms&quot; and &quot;rules&quot; 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.<p>I mostly watched this happen on usenet, and I haven&#x27;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.<p>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.

Sometimes I wonder what a &quot;cheating allowed, as long as you aren&#x27;t caught&quot; tournament for intellectual games would look like. Chess, Poker, etc. If you get caught you are disqualified.<p>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 wonder how much cheating is fueled by folks who get upset at losing, assume that cheating &quot;must&quot; have been involved, and go on to cheat.<p>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&#x27;re just a bad player.<p>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.<p>Then there is the other confusing factor that people who cheat usually greatly over estimate the amount other people cheat.

(I don&#x27;t play, but I did in college.)<p>The whole point of playing with a partner is exchanging information in legal ways (bids, the cards you play). When you&#x27;re playing online, no one can tell if you&#x27;re exchanging it in <i>other</i> ways.<p>Bridge tournaments should just sit the players at really big tables so they&#x27;re socially distant. No online at all.

I found it interesting that, Jimmy Cayne, ex head of Bear Sterns, is caught up in this scandal too:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;09&#x2F;23&#x2F;former-bear-ceo-jimmy-cayne-at-center-of-bridge-scandal.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;09&#x2F;23&#x2F;former-bear-ceo-jimmy-cayne-...</a>

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&#x27;s probably a very fun memory game.

Never played bridge myself, but I learnt a lot about the game and the world of competitive bridge from Louis Sachar&#x27;s wonderful novel &quot;The Cardturner&quot;. Highly recommended.

I don&#x27;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?

Poker players can have tells (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tell_(poker)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tell_(poker)</a> ) that unknowingly to them give their opponents information.<p>I wonder whether bridge players similarly may have tells that their partners, by playing a lot with them, subconsciously learn about.<p>If so, bridge may have accidental cheaters.

This article is paywalled but here are the articles from Bridge Winners that it references:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bridgewinners.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;view&#x2F;confession-of-a-self-kibitzer&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bridgewinners.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;view&#x2F;confession-of-a-self-...</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bridgewinners.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;view&#x2F;confession-of-a-self-kibitzer-pt-2&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bridgewinners.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;view&#x2F;confession-of-a-self-...</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bridgewinners.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;view&#x2F;a-chance-to-clear-the-air-and-start-over&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bridgewinners.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;view&#x2F;a-chance-to-clear-the...</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bridgewinners.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;view&#x2F;curtis-cheek-suspended-by-usbf&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bridgewinners.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;view&#x2F;curtis-cheek-suspende...</a><p>The problem is real and the national organization (ACBL), run by seventy and eighty year-olds, has not found the courage to address it.<p>There is no way to <i>prevent</i> 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 <i>detect</i> cheating with a high degree of statistical confidence, indeed overwhelming after hundreds of hands. This is entirely practical. It&#x27;s not even &quot;big data&quot;. A 16-core desktop should suffice to process a day&#x27;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&#x27;m confident it works, because I can see step by step how I would replicate his work, well enough to verify.<p>But nothing is ever easy... There is bad blood between Nicolas Hammond and the ACBL. To the ACBL&#x27;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.<p>Nine years ago, the ACBL tried to replace ACBLscore. Mr. Hammond&#x27;s software company was hired to do the work. It didn&#x27;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&#x27;m sure there was shared responsibility on a project chock full of weird legacy issues. But it&#x27;s impossible to apportion the blame.<p>From a programming view point, Mr. Hammond&#x27;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&#x27;t want cheating investigated too carefully.<p>So a great intellectual game is dying. The ACBL brings more nails for the coffin. They deserve the bad publicity.