[Deanrover]

Here follows an idea for a tourney.

It is an individual tourney. You do not know who your p is, or who the opps are. There is a MINIMUM numbers of players needed for it to go ahead, say 100. No kibitzers are allowed.
Say 90% of the prize money is returned in the following percentages

1st 50%
2nd 20%
3rd 10%
4th 5%
5th 3%
6th 1%
7th 1%

The tourney could be any length, but for high stakes would be at least 20 boards I guess.

How much would you be willing to pay? If it cost $100 a piece, then top prize is a juicy $5,000

If you are a good player, and 90% is paid out, then it is definitely worth entering. These events could costs as little as $1 up to $10,000.

It would also be possible for you to sell a stake in yourself to someone else on BBO. E.g. if it costs $100 each, and you are a good player but poor or risk-averse you could sell a 50% stake in you. This would not have to go for exactly $50, if you are a phenomenal player you could even get more than $100 for it.

Thoughts would be most welcome. Would the possibility of cheating deter you? How could we making cheating more difficult? Would you like longer tourneys, say a 2 day event?

[Dwayne]

It's been days since we had a decent discussion on the proliferation of cheating on BBO but if ever there was a thread that ripe for the picking...

You would obviously attract cheaters to a big prize money tournament.

After all, $5000 is a pretty good incentive to cheat, isnt it?

Dwaynos.
Currectly south of the murray

[Deanrover]

I guess Dwayne is right. Even with our restrictions, two players can phone each other up and quote their hands, thus greatly benefitting both of them. Whilst we can search the winners' boards for signs of foul play, good cheaters will leave just too little rope to be hanged with.

This is very frustrating as there must be thousands of honest people who would be delighted to play for money, and BBO would certainly be delighted to take a % of that

With blind tables in a large tournament we can probably make it so that users can not arrange to play with or kibitz each other and cheat this way. We can at least make this probability small. With the collective brain power of this board, we must be able to come up with solutions to the other problems.

[the hog]

Look I love this idea, but cheaters would proliferate.

[EricK]

If by "don't know who your partner is" you mean that even during the tournament you have no way of knowing who you are playing opposite or against, then I don't see any reliable way of cheating.

But since I am not a cheat there may be something obvious I am missing.

Eric

[Dwingo]

I wouldn't waste even 1$ until, I am reasonably sure I am not getting shafted by the online cheaters. There are atleast 2 online prizemoney bridge sites and lessons can be learnt from here.

As of today, the cheaters have the upper hand. You find one way to block it, they will find another loophole.

I am hopeful that one day technology should be able to find a solution to this.

Some sort/variant of blind Individual is the way to go. Some things for the programmers to think about to prevent cheating.

1. Partner not known, Opponent not known
2. No Directions on the table ( only you, Partner, LHO, RHO)
3. No. Indication of Table Number anywhere
4. No kibitzers offcourse
5. Only 1 Standardised bidding and and agreed carding standard
6. No chat whatsover, even among players at the table, so that players cannot be identified by thier Hi's and coded messages. Courtesies are not needed as you dont know who your pd & opps are.
7. The same deal will not be played at more than 1 table in any one round.
Since the sequence of boards being served at every Table is different, Swiss movements is not possible.
8. Some sort of symmetric rotation of majors and minor suits should be done for the same deals, to prevent deal identification


Radical Thought: No two deals are the same in a tournament. So every one is playing a totally different set of boards. So there will be an element of luck as we are not comparing everyone playing the same set. If people are willing to accept this, then it boils down to preventing the identification of your partner or Opps, so as not to dump that board. This is probably easier to achieve for our programmers.

[guggie]

Agree with Dwingo. Nicks players blinded could do something. You also should blind table numbers. (I have at least 10 BBO members on my msn if I and they really needed the money we could all enter such tournament and communicate)

But what fun: blinded tables, blinded players, no communication allowed, no kibitzers, only grim playing for money

YUK

[Deanrover]

EricK, on Jul 25 2004, 08:09 AM, said:

If by "don't know who your partner is" you mean that even during the tournament you have no way of knowing who you are playing opposite or against, then I don't see any reliable way of cheating.

But since I am not a cheat there may be something obvious I am missing.

Eric

Eric, imagine that we agree to cheat in a high profile tourney. We exchange phone numbers. If the tourney follows the current format (all play same boards) you simply say to me

I have "SAKxx HAxxxxx Dxxx"

and I say

I have "ST9xx HX D xxxx C QTxx"

Both of us will benefit at our respective tables. We also comment on what bids are being made. It is possible that we will realise we are at the same table. We agree on one of us who is more likely to win, and the other throws the board, going for 1400

etc.

[paulhar]

EricK, on Jul 25 2004, 03:09 AM, said:

If by "don't know who your partner is" you mean that even during the tournament you have no way of knowing who you are playing opposite or against, then I don't see any reliable way of cheating.

But since I am not a cheat there may be something obvious I am missing.

Eric

I don't cheat either, but the cheaters are pretty clever!

One way that's obvious to even the most casual of observers:

OOPS - I wrote this whole paragraph and then decided it would be better to leave it out in case any cheaters were snooping around for good ideas, but Dwingo's 8 precautions will not prevent this method. I will gladly E-mail this method of cheating to the yellows or anybody of the people that posted before me that are clearly looking to stop cheating if they promise not to publish it. My E-mail is paulhar@juno.com. Unfortunately, I don't think there is anything you can do to stop this form of cheating save having a chaperone in the room of every potential player.

Y'know, with the seemingly thousands of threads about cheating in tournaments, I realized that it would be impossible for me to win a tournament, especially matchpoints, when there were people in the event that knew all the cards. I was going to previously write this (plus a win) as evidence that cheating might not be as widespread as expected, but was afraid that people would tell me 'well, HELLO - maybe your partner was cheating!' (I picked up said partner and didn't know him.) I am very happy to see on a recent thread (maybe this one!) that this partner railing against the cheaters, so I can now happily say, 'if there's so much cheating out there, how could I possibly win one of these tournaments with neither pard or me cheating? It would seem as though one of the allegedly several pairs cheating would have been able to amass a higher score than we did - I think it was only about 70% which should be easy for a cheater to beat.' And this tournament allowed kibitzers! As this appeared to be a tournament where winning allowed you to play in some special events, the incentive to cheat in this tourney should have been higher than average. I'd like to add that in the few tournaments I have played in on BBO, I have not noticed any pairs that took unusually lucky positions that might have implied that they had information they shouldn't have had. Maybe I've been lucky, but I haven't noticed the proliferation of cheating that others are talking about.

But I'm going to join in the chorus - where there's money involved, there's likely to be cheating.

[inquiry]

I have thought about it, and no. I would not play in such an event for high stakes even if cheating could be totally blocked. Bridge is a parntership game. High stakes games should be played at high quality level. How can random, non-identified partners ever lead to such a game.

An exception might be if the pool of players were all known to each other and all played exactly the same basic system or group of three systems.

ben

[Chamaco]

The only way I think this would work is making it impossible to cheat, and the only way I think will make it impossible is a SUPERFAST pace of play, similar to lighning chess:

1) you have 3 seconds for every bid and card play; if your play is slower, you get a penalty for every single slow play or bid; making it so fast, people will have very little time to message themselves nor call each other

2) this can be made independent from connection speed with techniques similar to online chess where the thinking time is computed independently from the delay from connection speed ("timeseal" program).

[Rado]

Hi all friends,
Just note that "cheating" just cannot be tottaly deleted.
Every human being activity proves that "cheating" or "crimes" are always one step ahead of the "laws" or "police"
So in my view keeping BBO free of rankings or pay competition is the right way
Regards
Rado

[Chamaco]

Rado, on Jul 25 2004, 08:34 PM, said:

Hi all friends,
Just note that "cheating" just cannot be tottaly deleted.
Every human being activity proves that "cheating" or "crimes" are always one step ahead of the "laws" or "police"
So in my view keeping BBO free of rankings or pay competition is the right way
Regards
Rado

Agree 100%