A cheating scandal in the world of professional bridge

do New Yorker authors get paid by the word or something? Tl;dr They cheated by adjusting a tray to different positions to convey different meanings.

IT sounds like a very interesting game. Have never played it, but I do agree that they should look at how they could stop the cheating in this game.

There was a really interesting paper in Phys. Rev. X a couple of years ago that discussed the use of quantum entanglement to create an optimal bridge bidding strategy [1]. Interestingly, since it is generally accepted that entanglement cannot be used to transfer information, this appears to be within the rules.

[1] http://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.4.0210...

I'm a huge bridge fan - it's a very logical game, and the rules are simple but the implications many. It also has two parts: the bidding, in which you signal to your partner what you have as well as determine both trump and which partnership will play (The game incentives bidding as high as you can, but not bidding higher than you can achieve; and the play, which is an exercise in odds and using the information gleaned during the bidding - it is often practical to pull off bids that sound highly dubious.

Duplicate bridge, as described in this article, is one of the most satisfying ways to play - you aren't relying on the luck of the draw, you are scored how you do on this deal vs others that play WITH THE EXACT SAME DEAL. (generally you preserve your hand as you play, and pass your hands to the next group to play). So even on a terrible hand, if you can do better than others, you score points.

The problem in dealing with cheating is that any efforts to block communication or signaling first require you to have no social chatter. Boring - play Go or Chess then. (and second, they require you to signal to the other partnership if you're using non-standard signals, which gets messy but isn't boring)

For people interested in learning bridge, just recognize that the need for exactly 4 to play is one problem, and without the duplicate part (which then requires at least 8 players) luck plays a bigger part. Despite greatly enjoying the game it's been years since I played. The local bridge club at the time was hard to enter because I was a young 30-something and everyone else was a retiree.

I enjoy bridge, but high level competitive bridge sounds like a nightmare.

"Expert poker players often take advantage of a skill they call table feel: an ability to read the facial expressions and other unconscious “tells” exhibited by their opponents. Bridge players rely on table feel, too, but in bridge not all tells can be exploited legally by all players. If one of my opponents hesitates during the bidding or the play, I’m allowed to draw conclusions from the hesitation—but if my partner hesitates I’m not. What’s more, if I seem to have taken advantage of information that I wasn’t authorized to know, my opponents can summon the tournament director and seek an adjusted result for the hand we just played. Principled players do their best to ignore their partner and play at a consistent tempo, in order to avoid exchanging unauthorized information—and, if they do end up noticing something they shouldn’t have noticed, they go out of their way not to exploit it."

How can you possibly play like this, and expect others to play like this, in a genuinely competitive setting?