[HN Gopher] After a year of 'rampant' cheating, elite bridge tri...
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After a year of 'rampant' cheating, elite bridge tries to clean up
Author : kwindla
Score : 53 points
Date : 2021-10-27 15:18 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| kwindla wrote:
| There are both "norms" and "rules" 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.
|
| 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.
| csa wrote:
| I played ultimate with my nationally competitive college club
| team.
|
| 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.
| pwthornton wrote:
| The solution to someone abusing a foul system like that is to
| make them earn the fouls.
| csa wrote:
| This happened.
|
| 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.
| burnished wrote:
| Huh. Wonder why the solution wasn't deemed to be getting rid of
| the problem person, if it was mostly isolated like that?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Because he has plausible deniability, and then you have to
| address exactly where the line is. And then you end up with
| bureaucracy. From every organization or tribe I have seen, it
| is basically inevitable.
|
| 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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.
|
| The rules of bridge aren't very complex.
| pmyteh wrote:
| You're right that the rules are only modestly complicated:
| although they do run to dozens of pages _most_ of the
| complexities are in trying to unpick and rectify situations
| where something has gone wrong (unauthorised information
| being accidentally given, somebody leading out of turn,
| whatever).
|
| 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.
| ulnarkressty wrote:
| Honest question - if it was just one guy, why didn't he get
| banned instead of changing the rules for everyone?
| mcguire wrote:
| Who would make the decision to ban him, and why?
|
| 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.
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| 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's probably a very fun memory game.
| mkidd wrote:
| This article is paywalled but here are the articles from Bridge
| Winners that it references:
|
| 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.
| snarf21 wrote:
| Well said. I agree with everything you said. Anomalies in play
| should be super easy to detect both during bidding and the
| play. It is just a matter of collecting the data and running
| it. They are already trying to do this with poker sites. They
| are trying to detect people running solvers to determine the
| right frequency of bluffing. If people start getting too close
| to exactly 37% across X hands, they are obviously using some
| kind of solver and data tracker. That makes it easy to ban
| these players and confiscate their winnings as ill-gotten
| gains.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| (I don't play, but I did in college.)
|
| 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.
| snarf21 wrote:
| Well, you can exchange in non-legal ways even in person. A
| simple wink pattern could convey lots of information about your
| hand shape or desire for game/slam. Even with the players
| unable to see each other visually using cross blinders, there
| are timing tells or hand placement tells that you can use to
| indicate some information as above when laying down your bid
| cards. They already removed talking during bidding because it
| could be used the same way. If it is possible, someone will try
| to cheat. The more beneficial it is, the more people will try.
|
| 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.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Oh yeah, I remember all that. My partner had a joke "can I
| have a review of the bidding, with the original inflections?"
|
| There was a regular game in Google Ads. No one was over 60.
| But I'm sure eventually no one will play anymore.
| handrous wrote:
| I played casually for a while, but I'm convinced it's just
| too broken a game to endure much longer.
|
| 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.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Here's an example of why it's still hard: you can use timing
| information to encode data.
|
| 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.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| Same with Euchre. Inflection in calling pass or pick up, even
| the way you breath, can lead to tipping your partner off at
| what you have/don't have.
| meragrin_ wrote:
| > Bridge tournaments should just sit the players at really big
| tables so they're socially distant.
|
| Why? It seems people are packing large events without issue.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I'm sure that's right. I just meant "you don't need to have
| tournaments online if covid is the only worry."
| lsjvjn wrote:
| I'd say it's a larger concern for Bridge, since the game is
| (unfortunately) primarily played only by older folks who are
| more at-risk.
| umvi wrote:
| Sometimes I wonder what a "cheating allowed, as long as you
| aren't caught" tournament for intellectual games would look like.
| Chess, Poker, etc. If you get caught you are disqualified.
|
| 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.
| LanceH wrote:
| It would depend on how cheating is defined.
|
| 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.
| gpm wrote:
| Cheating isn't defined in online chess as that, it's defined
| as using outside help. That's just a description of the
| (flawed) detection mechanism.
|
| 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.
| koboll wrote:
| Isn't that every tournament? Cheating is always "allowed" if
| you aren't caught.
| spindle wrote:
| I think the idea is that you'd be considered to have played
| honourably but merely lost the match, whereas (at least in
| the case I know about, which is go/baduk) you're also shamed
| for life.
|
| Sounds like a fun idea to me, not to replace the current
| rules but as a different game.
| cortesoft wrote:
| It's life in general.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| This could be the premise of a reality TV show. Five
| professional poker players. Five slight of hand / card
| magicians. One poker tournament.
| brianwawok wrote:
| You can't really cheat in Chess. I mean you can con-man move 2
| pieces, but its very very easy to detect with spectators (and
| impossible online)...
|
| 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".
| Iefthandrule wrote:
| There are plenty of ways to cheat at chess. Here's one:
| program chess pieces to make the optimal move for you. If you
| are not allowed to provide the pieces, find out the pieces
| being used ahead of time and create programmable replicas.
| Then swap each piece out with your programmed pieces under
| your sleeve.
| brianwawok wrote:
| But easy to verify. Strip search before game, etc.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Sure you can. Did you watch "Queen's Gambit"?
|
| 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?
| DSMan195276 wrote:
| That seems more like a complaint about the game itself, it
| can't really be cheating if there's no rule against it nor
| anybody hiding it. It was also part of the game to try an
| influence when the adjournment will happen to give yourself
| a more favorable position to analyze (and also determine
| who has to seal the last move).
|
| 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.
| mcguire wrote:
| Once upon a time in a Diplomacy tournament, two players
| locked a third into a bathroom, forcing the third player
| to miss a turn. The referee ruled that was acceptable,
| although I think later tournaments forbid that sort of
| thing.
| LanceH wrote:
| Locking someone in a bathroom is false imprisonment and
| not really a clever way of playing the game. If this were
| a tournament it would be easy enough to get the referee's
| ruling reversed by threatening arrest of the players
| guilty of doing it. This, of course, would be blackmail
| and also illegal -- but much more in the spirit of the
| game.
| DSMan195276 wrote:
| I kinda get your analogy (assuming you were trying to
| make one), but I think that example is fundamentally
| different. With adjournment everybody already knew how it
| worked before the game even started, there was no
| surprise "technically not against the rules" kind of
| thing.
| yyyk wrote:
| >I consider it cheating to recess for the day, then have
| your team game out all the alternatives for you.
|
| 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?
| brianwawok wrote:
| Right, you would need to finish a high level game in a
| single day to prevent that scenario.
| CrazyStat wrote:
| Which we do, these days. Recesses are a thing of the
| past, and that wasn't considered cheating at the time.
| neaden wrote:
| People cheat in chess all the time, using an engine to help
| them out, or before that getting outside assistance. Take a
| look into the Korchnoi v Karpov match for world champion
| which had accusations of cheating involving secret messages
| in yogur and one player hiring a hypnotist to be in the
| audience and the other responding by befriending two local
| murderers and bringing them to the match.
|
| More recently Anna Rudolph was accused of hiding a computer
| in her lip balm.
| thenanyu wrote:
| Anna Rudolph didn't cheat. Her opponent was angry at losing
| to a girl and made wild accusations. Also it wasn't close
| to "recent".
|
| 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.
| neaden wrote:
| I know she didn't cheat, but she was accused and has
| shared the story several times. I thought it was more
| recent then that, but I suppose it just means I'm getting
| old.
| notJim wrote:
| > cheating involving secret messages in yogur
|
| > 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.
| yifanl wrote:
| Context: "recently" was over a decade ago, well before
| electronics of any sophistication could reasonably fit in
| such a form factor, if anyone was curious.
| nitrogen wrote:
| _well before electronics of any sophistication could
| reasonably fit in such a form factor_
|
| What level of sophistication would be required to get an
| edge from a 1cm by 3-4cm cylinder of computing and
| batteries?
| thenanyu wrote:
| no one in the chess community seriously believes Anna
| cheated. there's been plenty of analysis e.g.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2JedouTRZo
| saghm wrote:
| > secret messages in yogur
|
| 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?
| dimatura wrote:
| Under the lid, presumably.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| Doesn't have to be under the lid. The flavor you send
| could mean something like: Position not winnable, play
| for a draw, or "the novelty move we had planned for this
| position has been found to be flawed."
| stordoff wrote:
| > When Karpov's team sent him a blueberry yogurt during a
| game without any request for one by Karpov, the Korchnoi
| team protested, claiming it could be some kind of code.
| They later said this was intended as a parody of earlier
| protests, but it was taken seriously at the time.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Chess_Championship_19
| 78
|
| > 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)
| chowells wrote:
| Cheating in online chess is easy. You just throw the current
| position into stockfish (or some other software) and see what
| it would do. I don't know if it's common, but it certainly
| happens.
|
| 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.
| brianwawok wrote:
| You are right about online chess.. so let's stick to
| inperson for a serious game.
| beermonster wrote:
| Tournament chess players have already been caught
| cheating in person using mobile phones. Recent example
| [1]
|
| [1] https://www.chess.com/news/view/igors-
| rausis-58-under-invest...
| handrous wrote:
| From the caught cheating scandals I've read about, and with
| how _easy_ it would be to cheat in small ways at bridge, I
| 'm like 90% sure that all or nearly all bridge partnerships
| [EDIT: in "serious", competitive bridge, I mean] are
| cheating in limited, sparingly-used, practically-
| impossible-to-catch ways. Money's on the line, after all.
| vkou wrote:
| > You can't really cheat in Chess.
|
| 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.
| adharmad wrote:
| To a top flight grandmaster, even a signal indicating
| "think now" is sufficient. No actual variations or moves
| need to be communicated.
|
| 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.
| kwindla wrote:
| I'm genuinely interested in the reasoning behind this:
|
| > 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.
| brianwawok wrote:
| As someone who has played semi-competitive games for a long
| time.. yes, the nature of man is to cheat ;) Not everyone,
| but enough. Rather than try to shape man, I would rather
| make a game "cheat proof".
| chmod775 wrote:
| > As someone who has played semi-competitive games for a
| long time.. yes, the nature of man is to cheat
|
| 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.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| I can't remember the last time I played a game with
| someone who cheated. The nature of humans is to murder,
| steal, etc., but it's not really a risk when I'm playing
| chess. In other words, people have free will, they have a
| choice, to cheat or not.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| > You can't really cheat in Chess.
|
| 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.
| CalChris wrote:
| You can agree to an outcome (win, lose, draw) ahead of time.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/13/sports/chess-karjakin-
| mis...
| duxup wrote:
| How much any given situation already is your first sentence ;)
|
| 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 ;)
| josephcsible wrote:
| > Casino found out about the flaw after they won big and
| refused to pay.
|
| 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.
| duxup wrote:
| The player negotiated the brand of cards to be used. I'm
| guessing if that brad was the Casino's default, that they'd
| wouldn't have had to specify it.
| stupandaus wrote:
| Not sure if you are misremembering the Phil Ivey edge sorting
| case [1] or if you are thinking of another story. Notable in
| this case that the casinos won in the end.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Ivey#Edge-
| sorting_litigat...
| duxup wrote:
| That's not the one I'm thinking of but his history is
| amusing.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| Ive seen enough f these such cases that i cannot believe
| that anyone spends money in a casino anymore. If the casino
| can claw back winnings even if the person did in fact
| "exploit" the game they can do it for any outsize win.
| Basically nullifying the reason anyone plays games of
| chance.
| zem wrote:
| Never played bridge myself, but I learnt a lot about the game and
| the world of competitive bridge from Louis Sachar's wonderful
| novel "The Cardturner". Highly recommended.
| duxup wrote:
| I wonder how much cheating is fueled by folks who get upset at
| losing, assume that cheating "must" have been involved, and go on
| to cheat.
|
| 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.
| DFHippie wrote:
| This is ubiquitous. Another variant: you think of a way to
| cheat; you assume your opponent is villainous and always
| cheats; so you assume your opponent was already cheating in
| this specific way; so you cheat in this specific way "to even
| the playing field". As soon as you accept it as axiomatic that
| the other guy cheats you are liberated from the rules yourself
| out of fairness. And you are still the righteous hero! How dare
| the other guy be so villainous, and so cunning as to hide it!
| He forced you to do a dastardly thing! He's ruining X for
| everyone!
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| Huh... funny how much that sounds like a current American
| political party.
| MerelyMortal wrote:
| I used to play Half Life 2 online, and I developed a knack for
| sniping, even when people hopped, I was accused of cheating. I
| wasn't that good otherwise, so I can believe your proposal.
| People have a hard time believing there are tallented people
| out there, or that they might be playing against one such
| person.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| > I used to play Half Life 2 online
|
| You mean counterstike? HL2 never had any deathmatch mode,
| there was a coop mod iirc.
| aaronax wrote:
| It is called Half Life 2: Deathmatch. Pretty fun, with lots
| of custom maps.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I stand corrected, yea I guess a gravity gun could make
| some times.
| misiti3780 wrote:
| I found it interesting that, Jimmy Cayne, ex head of Bear Sterns,
| is caught up in this scandal too:
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/23/former-bear-ceo-jimmy-cayne-...
| Someone wrote:
| Poker players can have tells
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tell_(poker) ) that unknowingly to
| them give their opponents information.
|
| 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.
| mandevil wrote:
| I don'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?
| omnicognate wrote:
| Why not get someone from the opposing partnership to read them
| out?
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Or just buy a set of playing cards with braille on them (even
| if he didn't read braille, it would be easy enough to learn 4
| suits and 13 ranks).
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| FWIW, Braille doesn't have a super high literacy rate among
| the blind. It depends on the age, education history,
| economic status, etc.
| Traster wrote:
| You would have thought Braille for cards is pretty
| trivial to learn - there's only 13 values and 4 suits.
| snarf21 wrote:
| Exactly. Having the opposing team read out the cards prevents
| information transfer. Bridge has controls like this already.
| You aren't allowed to lie about what your bid means, for
| example. If a player is confused about a bid from the player
| on their right, they are allowed to ask the player on the
| left what it means and they have to honestly answer.
| gostsamo wrote:
| well, when I play cards, everyone is announcing what they are
| putting on the table.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I haven't seen anyone mention this yet, so:
|
| 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.
| devit wrote:
| Well, you can have the competitors play naked in a physically
| isolated and sound/vibration/light/radiation insulated faraday
| cage, with a metal detector and whole-body MRI scan applied
| upon entrance, competing through a computer system with fixed
| clock time for each action that only reveals the action once
| the clock expires.
|
| 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.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| A great sci-fi movie, anyway. Except no one wants to see
| really old people naked.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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 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".
| vikingerik wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| neonate wrote:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20211027170733/https://www.nytime...
|
| https://archive.md/SjbkD
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