More Shit August 29, 2010
Posted by justinlall in Blog.Tags: New Orleans Incident
3 comments
Glen responded to my post about the 6D overcall on his blog: here.
His post is typical of the criticism I have received for how I have handled this, so I’d just like to address it.
First, this sentiment is common, but not how it works:
Wouldn’t it be much better to give the hand/the bid to the national recorder and have the perpetrator unaware of the report? Then if the perpetrator, unaware he is being noticed, continues with other hands/bids then there is real evidence of misdoings. Then a proper process can be taken to kick the perpetrator out of bridge competitions.
The first thing that happens after the recorder form is filed is that the recorder talks to the person it was filed on. This is mainly so that they can defend themselves and their action, and a statement can be taken. Do we really want hands recorded with no investigation done as to why the bid was made, and so that people cannot defend themselves?
On that note, I have been accused of cheating before and had a hand filed away that I played. My opponents thought I must have had a wire. The recorder talked to me and I logically explained my line of play, and that was that. In fact, they put it in the bulletin the next day. If the process was secretive, then my side of the story would never have been known.
The more important part of Glen’s post is that I should have just kept my mouth shut. Does this include not telling any of my friends about this hand? Before this hand was posted on BBF, it had already spread like wildfire, and I posted it during the dinner break!
When a bid this sensational and unique is made in the most premier event of the nationals, it’s going to spread. I think it is unreasonable to request that my teammates and I do not tell anyone about this hand, and it is the laws of nature that it will spread around to everyone in the bridge world.
It is not my fault that this bid seems so fishy! It is not like I planted to notion into people’s heads. And it is not like there are frequent witch hunts based on one bid. The fact that this hand spread around is not a function of me (in fact I didn’t post on RGB or bridgewinners at all, and I did not start the second thread on BBF about this), it is a function of how unique this bid is. And we certainly were not “talking behind the persons back.” He has access to the internet, and friends with access to the internet. He heard about it too, and his side got a chance to defend itself.
The reality of the situation in bridge is that it is largely self policed by social pressures, especially for professionals. There is a lot of money at stake, and there is unfortunately some shadiness. It is almost impossible to catch someone who even outright cheats, let alone someone who is just consistently unethical. However, if you are a consistently unethical player, it is known. Word gets around. This is not based on made up things, and if you want to accuse someone of being unethical you better have damn good examples, even in private, or you will get ripped apart. But the fact remains that it is almost impossible to catch people, and if strange hands/behaviors did not get around, cheating would be far more rampant.
And I’m not saying this hand is evidence of cheating, but if you have many hands like this it’s going to be well known and that is a good thing, not a bad thing.
The most high profile case of cheaters getting caught was Lanzarotti and Buratti. It was very well known to “everyone” that they were cheating already. In my opinion the evidence against them when they did get “caught” was not even sufficient (of course maybe the committees were privy to more information than the rest of the world), but they were convicted since it was well known already. Their reputation was already horrible, and it made them less respected and less likely to be hired. You might view this as a bad thing — what if they were innocent and had such a horrible reputation — but this reputation did not come from a witch hunt, it came from years and years of strange hands being talked about. Honest players don’t have bizarre inexplicable hands that are so strange they spread like wildfire, and they certainly don’t have many many such incidents like L/B.
Because of how hard cheating is to catch and prosecute in bridge, I think the nature of the self policing that goes on is fine. I say this as someone who rarely says anything even if it seems fishy because I give people the benefit of the doubt, and someone who has been accused of cheating by clueless opponents who did not understand a bid or play. I would say my reputation with ethics is pristine because I can always defend my actions, and people who understand bridge can always understand that logic. If someone were to post a wild bid on a forum others were to accuse me of cheating because of it, I think they’d largely be laughed at.
On top of that, my initial post was to see if I could win an appeal, and if not that I think the laws should be changed in some way to make that impossible. The forums are a place for discussion about bridge, including whether changing the laws would be dumb or not in this case. I never named anyone’s name in public, nor did I accuse anyone of cheating, and I am still not.
So I ask, is it my responsibility not to even mention a hand that occurred against my team, not to even seek advice on how to proceed, because I know that a majority of people will be outraged by it and tell everyone they know? Is it my responsibility not to post it on a forum without names for discussion, because I know that many will see it as evidence of cheating? To be blunt, if a bid is that fishy and will evoke that type of reaction from the top players in the world, and no good explanation can be given for it, perhaps that is not my problem.
When Shit Hits The Fan August 28, 2010
Posted by justinlall in Blog.Tags: New Orleans Incident, UI
17 comments
At the recent New Orleans national, playing in the round of 64 of the Spingold (the premier event of the national) my teammate’s opponent held:
—
Axx
AQxx
AKQxxx
His right hand opponent opened 3. What would you bid? What would your top 10 bids be? Are you affected by it being about the 20th board of a 64 board match, and you being down somewhere between 40 and 45 (and also being the lower seeded team)?
This person chose an incredible 6! He bought as dummy:
xx
xxx
Kxxx
xxxx
With diamonds being 3-2, 6 is cold by pitching your hearts on the clubs. 6 clubs in the ten card fit has no play, because you must lose 2 hearts.
My teammates did not call the director, but after the set everyone they spoke to (including me) told them to do so. My contention at the time was that there should be an adjustment, because this bid is impossible without UI (unauthorized information). The player who bid this was a well known player who is a bridge professional with many masterpoints, not just some random person.
The question is, can a bid in and of itself be evidence of UI? If it can be, we go possibly go down a slippery slope of adjusting a result when someone makes a lucky bid and it works. If not, then nothing happens when someone acts upon UI.
In many cases UI is not 100 %, for instance the 2 sides might dispute if there was a break in tempo. In these cases the directors use the hand as evidence. It seems to me like if there is a 99+ % chance of UI being used to make a bid, that should be grounds for an adjustment.
The directors ruled that no adjustment could be made, and when speaking with people who are on the Appeals Committee they seemed to agree that no adjustment could be made based on one bid. All advised simply to record the facts with the national recorder, and move on.
In general I would say that every player I spoke to who was playing in the Spingold (which was many of the top 100 players in the world) viewed this as outrageous. None believed that this bid was even within the realm of possibility. In all of the years that all of them have played bridge, so probably a combined experience of millions of hands and most of those at the top levels, none of them had seen a jump overcall of slam into a 4 card suit on a persons first bid of the auction. Additionally, nobody had ever even heard of such a bid (later the partner of the 6 overcaller claimed that he or his partner HAD heard or seen a bid like this before).
Again, if all of these experts consulted viewed this bid as impossible without UI, is that evidence of UI? How strong does the evidence have to be? Maybe this player is simply more creative than everyone else.
Personally, I thought if the laws were such that an adjustment could not be made, then the laws should be changed.
I posted on the Bridge Base Forums about this incident here. That is when the madness started.
This thread ended up being almost 500 posts long before being closed. After that, a new thread was started that ended up being almost 150 posts long.
Meanwhile a thread was started on RGB and also on bridgewinners.
For the bridge world this was a big deal. I did not post the name of the person involved, but other people figured it out and his partner came to post in his defense. Part of the problem was that this person has had a history of conduct and ethics problems, including Bobby Wolff writing in his book about an incident where he feels the person cheated. Searching RGB, there were a lot of threads back then about an incident involving the person.
Unfortunately this led some to believe this person was being persecuted solely for that reason. Some blamed me as the catalyst for this person being openly accused of cheating, but I never accused the person of cheating nor did I mention his name. This led to me getting a call quite early in the morning at the nationals from the person stating that he would take a lie detector test. Gee, thanks, I care.
There were some interesting points about this hand:
If you had UI that 6 makes and 6 does not, would you just overcall 6? Isn’t that really suspicious? This is a reasonable question. However if you double, most people would bid 4 in response to that with 4-4 in the minors. If you bid 4N, most people would bid 5. In general it’s better to bid your cheaper one. Even if half the people would bid diamonds, you might not want to risk partner bidding clubs in which case you can never bid 6D later. If you somehow rigged the hand, maybe you should rig it so that partner has 4 diamonds and 3 clubs and would bid diamonds over a double? No, the problem now is the other table might get to 6 also on a normal auction. The best way to win a sure swing is for 6 to be impossible to bid at the other table, and that requires bidding it yourself at this table.
Maybe this player did many crazy things before this, and only one worked, and you’re crucifying him for it. This is what the 6 overcaller’s partner thinks, but I do not view that as the case. For instance, he jumped to slam on a hand in the first set with 5053 and very strong pointed suits and no club stopper after drury. This is a bid that MANY people (including my teammates) would make. You cannot compare this calculated jump to a jump to a 4 card suit at the 6 level when your partner has not bid. They are simply not even close to the same.
Again, I would go back to the metric that if no other expert would think of, let alone actually make this bid, then it is a very strange bid indeed. To actually catch the double dummy perfect layout where 6 is unbiddable otherwise, and 6 is down, and 7 doesn’t make, that is an amazing coincidence. Comparing that to a normal jump to slam that many people would do is simply not right.
It really is important to focus on how unique and unheard of this 6 bid is. It is not reasonable to me to say he made a reasonable slam jump in his longest suit with a known fit before and it didn’t work, so how can we say this one is based on UI just because it worked.
He was down a lot and swinging, this was just a swing action. This has also been said and presented. Down 40 with 45 boards left is not that much at all. That is a ton of boards and not that many imps. And even if you’re swinging, would you really bid 6? Really? This just seems like a weak argument, especially when the player did NOTHING remotely similar to this level of swinging after or before this board, until the last 16 boards when he truly was down a lot and needed to swing hard.
The end result of this was that nothing happened. There was no conduct hearing on this player for this one bid. There was no adjustment. Some people thought I should face a conduct hearing (despite not mentioning the player’s name, and not accusing him of cheating), but that also did not happen (yet?). There was no lie detector test. There was no changing of the laws. But that is the story, and I still think the laws should address this.
Some have rationalized the 6 bid as a reasonable and findable bid that some would make, or a reasonable shot to swing. However, they know the results and they have their own biases. Why not deal with it like the usual way we deal with UI cases, poll the persons peers and give them the state of the match and see if any do bid 6, or even consider it, or is at all possible without UI.
For those who do not believe me when I say that every single person in the top 100 players that I asked said this bid is impossible without UI, or that I am biased, I’ll end with a Fred Gitelman quote from BBO:
“I have personally witnessed several “top experts” express “6
