The first set of the finals was a wild one with a lot of interesting hands. This one was definitely my favorite though.

White/Red I picked up:

T3
A862
82
AQJT9

My partner opened a gambling 3N, showing a solid 7 or 8 card minor and no side ace or king. What would you bid?

I actually think passing is quite reasonable and possibly correct. You are cold unless they run five spades. Sometimes even when that is possible they make the wrong lead, and sometimes partner has 3 spades and they’re 4-4. More importantly, even if it’s reasonably likely they’ll run 5 spades it might still be right to pass since 5 might be down anyways.

On the other hand, I feel like they will very often be leading spades; they rate to have the most honors in that suit (and of course they’ll make an aggressive lead versus a gambling 3N), and since that is our short suit it will also often be their longest. I think not playing some game is too wimpy; both should have enough chances to be worth bidding.

Rightly or wrongly, I chose to bid 5, figuring it will be better to play it from my side since I might get a club lead.

My LHO led the 4 and this is what I saw

Q62
74
AKQJ9763
—

T3
A862
82
AQJT9

This lead has stopped me from being able to ruff a spade in my hand, so I only have 10 tricks; 8 diamonds and 2 aces. I would like to set up and enjoy my clubs, but I only have one sure entry to my hand.

If the diamond ten was stiff, my 8 would be a second entry. However, I saw a better chance. Maybe my LHO has the ten and I could run this to my 8! I also saw some element of restricted choice on the lead, with T4 of diamonds they would always lead low, but with 54 they might lead either. They also might have T54 (restricted choice on that also). This means when LHO does not have a singleton, he is almost 3 to 1 to have to ten of diamonds.

On top of that, there is one other gain to ducking this trick. If it is RHO with Tx, I might make it after losing a trump trick. RHO will have to guess which major to play, and if he guesses to play hearts I can take a ruffing finesse in clubs and get back to my hand. So I would gain multiple tricks back for the sacrifice of one.

It should be said, though, that if I pop ace and the ten doesn’t drop while having no legitimate chances I still might make. I would come to the heart ace and lead the 9 of clubs from my hand, hoping to catch LHO sleeping and not covering with the king if he has it. This would be my line would be very strong against weak opponents for sure (who would never think to cover), but I think my LHO was good enough to not fall for that. It still might be the wrong line even against weak opponents since if my diamond “finesse” wins, I am cold no matter who has the K, while the swindle requires a finesse if the T doesn’t drop even if they will never cover with the king on my left.

I went for it and ducked, and my RHO won with the ten. He returned a heart, so I won the ace and then took a ruffing club finesse which lost, so I was down 2, losing the not-so-obvious tricks of 1 diamond, 1 club, and 2 spades.

Sadly, RHO had stiff ten of diamonds, and 3N was also cold.

And to think my partner thought he had a solid suit!

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.

On that note I’m thinking of taking an old post that I now disagree with myself about and dissecting where I went wrong.

Bridge improvement is like getting taller as a kid, it happens slowly but then all of the sudden you wake up and realize you’ve grown 6 inches in the past year. I’d say if you can’t look back at your views 5 years later and realize some of them were wrong, then you are probably not working hard enough at improving your game (or you are delusional). The great thing about bridge is that unlike height, you never stop growing, and there is no maximum potential.

—
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 not possible without UI” when they were told about this hand. I have not witnessed any “top experts” express a contrary view.”

I do feel bad that y’all (yes, I say y’all, get over it) got no closure regarding what happened in the bet with Josh. For a refresher on the bet go here.

No doubt you have figured out that if I had won I would have been happy to update, so I must have lost. It came down to the wire, and despite winning 2 of my last 5 and having a 3rd and a 4th, I lost the bet because Josh had 4 seconds and a first. What can I say, he was clutch.

Overall, Josh averaged 1.8 more hands (some of this can be attributed to him passing out more often than I do, but mainly he just played faster), and 100 points per tourney more than I did(4,460 to 4,360). If these numbers seem low to you, they were, but this was also before BBO updated GIB and made it much faster. Nowadays, scores are much higher.

For full stats, go here.

If I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t play on a laptop and I’d play with a mouse. This would probably make me a little bit faster. I was probably a little bit arrogant to think that a skill edge could make up for playing that many fewer hands on average per tourney though, but I think that the bet was fairly even and could have gone either way.

Since then I have retired from Robot Races and found a new addiction, Robot Duplicates. These are matchpoint tourneys where you play with 3 robots, and all the humans have the same cards. There is a very high level of skill because you are faced with many of the same situations as your counterparts, so if you have an edge it is amplified. Maybe we will see a Robot Duplicate bet in the future, I promise to update the results of it within 2 years!

Probably the biggest part of it is not playing that well, and doing things like chatting and playing on a laptop. If I want to win I have to tighten up. Yesterday I made one huge error in a vul game. My trump suit was:

QT9

AJ75432

I was in 5 and had lost two tricks. RHO had overcalled 2. I led the queen of diamonds from dummy, and GIB played small. I should have realized that GIB would always cover with Kx, much like a human but even worse, and would play its spots randomly from K86. This makes it about 2:1 to go for the drop, and the bidding inference that RHO probably has the K is weighed against the fact that LHO would probably have bid with a void.

Of course when you’re playing 20 hands every 25 minutes it’s hard to analyze that fast, but this is clearly a situation I should have taken 5 seconds on since a lot of points were riding on it.

I did take down the first tournament we went first and second in, and in pretty dramatic fashion. Josh with about 1 minute left didn’t stall out and take his good but not winning score when the opps were making a NV game, he played it out and went for the win. He got a vul game on the last board and went into the lead, barely ahead of second. However, I managed to play a NV game in about 30 seconds to go ahead right at the end and win. This seemed like vindication from losing one earlier by 20 points at the very end.

Down by $1.70 but I still have faith. Wanna raise the stakes Josh?

My results today were pretty terrible. I definitely didn’t play great, but the bad luck I was getting on slam hands was just insane. Here is an example:

Kxx
K
AQ9xx
Txxx

AJ
Axx
Jx
AJ9xxx

You do quite well to bid 6 after opening 1N, and receive a heart lead. How do you play?

The best idea here is to strip out the major suits, and go ace and a club. True, you lose to KQx onside now if the DK was onside all along, but you pick up Hx of clubs with the DK on your right, a much more likely combination. So win the heart in dummy and lead a club (maybe they split), then strip the majors and exit a club. Unfortunately it was KQx onside, so your good play is not rewarded.

Note that on a spade lead you have a pitch for your diamond so could safety play the trumps. This is not horrible luck, but if stuff like this happens to you 5 times in a row you can get a little frustrated.

Anyways, luckily Josh didn’t have a great day either so I’m still very much in this. When the luck turns I have little doubt that I wll start crushing

There is no clear answer, but I’d say becoming a part of the community is a good way to do it. If there is a group of players that talks about the hands after the game, try to integrate yourself into that group. Eventually you will come to know many players by doing this, and your choice of partners will go up.

If this isn’t an option an online forum like BBF, or an online club on BBO is a great way to meet players. I know I have met a lot of people this way, some who I even ended up playing with in real life.

Barring that, I would say you should just play locally with pickup partners to meet new people, and eventually you will find someone who seems like a good match.

Once you find that person, what is the next step?

There are two important things to consider now. First, you have similar bridge goals. Before you even play a card together you should discuss these goals and make sure they align. It could be anything from simply learning and getting better to winning a national championship. Depending on your goals you can make plans to study or not study together, and to have a simple or complicated system. The other thing is to be of similar skill levels. If one player is better than the other, unless they will be patient while the other learns, it can be very frustrating for that person. Similar skill is a must to keep the balance in the partnership.

After that, start making your system. Unless one of your goals was to learn a complicated system, I’d say keep it simple. The less the better. Early in the partnership it’s better to build trust and learn each other’s styles. Conventions can be added slowly over time. Don’t worry if you have different styles, though. A lot of top partnerships have a straight man and an action man.

So, you have found a prospective partner, have similar goals, and have a system. In the long run what will you need to survive and flourish?

• Communication. This is the most important. If you think your partner made a bad bid or play, or don’t even understand why he did something, you have to be able to talk about it (at the appropriate time). Don’t keep this stuff in or it will eat away at you and your partnership won’t improve. Similarly, if your communication is too harsh nobody gains. Both partners should be receptive to criticism, but it should be constructive.
• Trust. I’m not just talking about trust that partner won’t pass your forcing bid. That is important, but more important is trust that partner will show up at the table ready to play, not drunk, not late, etc. Trust that they will follow the bounds of the system and style in use, and not violate that on a whim. Trust that partner is always trying their best.
• Mutual Respect. This is tied in to being at a similar skill level. If there is not mutual respect then there is nothing to stop one person from taking a flier, leading to resentment from the other. There will also be condescending attitudes which are not conducive to growth.
• Friendship. Some will consider this debatable, but I don’t. Bridge partners have a unique camaraderie, they are in the trenches together battling it out. Nobody else is on their side. I believe you have to want to fight for not just yourself, but for your partner also. You have to want your partner to succeed, and I believe a good relationship away from the table is important for this. You just lose some edge if you don’t have it.

Don’t worry uncle, there are other fish in the sea!

I still feel I have an edge and will win. Honestly I make very few mistakes single dummy, and so far have been running well below par. Josh may play more hands, but I think his play suffers as a result. It will be a good fight.

We have a link up that shows the results so far. I am down 2 dollars, and am averaging about 500 points less per tourney.

The reason I only played 13 hands in the first tournament is that I got disconnected for several minutes. It looks like Josh will average 24 hands a tournament while I will only average 20, so I will need to play very well!

The money bridge tournaments have an unusual format. For starters, you play with and against GIB robots. Secondly, they are just total points, and you get 25 minutes to play as many hands as possible. That is Josh’s biggest edge. He can play 20 hands plus passouts per tournament most of the time. Obviously in a total points format he is going to crush people who are playing 8 boards a tournament.

Naturally Josh considers himself the king of these tournaments as he is almost definitely the most successful at them. However, I feel like I am better than him, despite my inability to play as many hands. I understand the GIB robots very well, and I think my play does not suffer at all playing so fast.

I asked Josh to put his money where his mouth is. A bet. We play the same 50 tournaments, and the person with the most profit at the end wins. Josh, not one to back down from a challenge, accepted.

This challenge will probably take about a month to finish, and the winner will get their winnings, an extra $350, and most importantly the bragging rights.

I will keep running tabs on this blog. We will be tracking money won, hands played, and what position we are in each tournament. I will also write some about the best strategies for these tournaments.

Game on!