03:15 Warwick Bermuda 16 SEP 2015. by GS Jade Barrett
«En su mejor momento, el hombre es el más noble de todos los animales; separado del derecho y la justicia es el peor» – Aristoteles
«At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst» – Aristotle
In the world of animal training, one takes the instinctive actions of a specific beast and converts it to some kind of entertaining trick. One year while traveling through the American Midwest, my parents stopped at a small zoo. There was an arcade where you could drop a nickel (it was a very long time ago) in a slot and an animal would perform a routine. Their three small children were mystified by a chicken who played poker and always won.
After a half hour of staring in fascination at a rooster outperforming every competitor on every single hand, a kind trainer revealed the true nature of its exceptional talent. Chickens have remarkably good vision that allows them the ability to pick tiny seeds from the ground and that by marking certain cards with an exceptionally small dot, the rooster had been trained to pick the winning hand each and every time. Once we learned its strategy, we lost a little joy of the marvel we had witnessed.
It is a grave disappointment to discover that some of the world’s «best» performers have utilized many human instinctive actions in much the same manner. These small, nearly indiscernible slight of hand cons provide a petty parlor trick, and with only a very few notable exceptions, perpetuate a fraud on the vast majority of the unsuspecting bridge public. For not the advent of video recordings of matches, the trickery would remain hidden, unable to be fully analyzed and thereby revealed. The most distressing of this change to our reality is that now we are left to consider how many of the greats were truly thus.
Considering the human condition, there are numerous instinctive reactions that reveal a bridge athletes hand, thought process or intentions. In poker they are called tells, a term also used by a few bridge advocates, though they are more typically described as actions that create unauthorized information or UI.
Years ago I took to filming my players as they trained for competition in order to ascertain what tells they owned. One certainty became apparent virtually immediately: every single player possessed at least one and typically three or more. The worst ones I revealed to them, primarily because they were placing themselves at an extreme competitive disadvantage. I also became concerned that their partners would subconsciously learn them, too.
A reality of any long term intense relationship is that you become aware of your significant other’s mood. You gain a sense of their comfort levels, both good and bad, what they are likely to be thinking and how they are going to act given certain stimuli. A sound bridge partnership shares many of the same traits as successful marriages and families, for the intensity that the game requires dictates the need for compassion, understanding and empathy to develop along the same lines. With the peaks and valleys of competition, no partnership can survive without them. It has been said of one of the great pairs that if one sneezed, the other should alert and explain that they will have a cold in five days.
It is impossible to prevent the subconscious knowledge from developing, and many times a pair who is ethically sound in every way has been described as wired. They are not cheats, they are simply a strongly bound partnership. With this knowledge of themselves, they make every effort to avoid actions that are based on anything other than the information they are legally entitled to. Occasionally, they must be informed of the existence of some mannerism that might be affecting them, and with this increased self awareness they act accordingly to curtail the behavior. Those are the actions of players and pairs who desire only the best from themselves, both as competitors and people.
By looking at the developing player you can see what potential pitfalls exist, and what actions have been taken by bridge organizations to attempt to limit the passage of UI, both unintentional and otherwise.
During a practice match between Junior Teams conducted over twenty years ago, I witnessed a new player placing his opening bid in the center of his space when he held an average hand, to the far left with a great hand and somewhere between those physical points with an intermediate hand. Given that he had only been playing for a few months and sitting in a new partnership, it was obvious that this was not an effort to cheat. It was simply that he was unconsciously leaving room for the bidding cards to be comfortably placed for the expected duration of the auction. With this in mind I began to insist that all auctions begin as far to the left as possible. I also discovered that the opponents were less likely to compete after our players adopted this ritual (for the lack of a better term), which suggested to me that they subconsciously believed that the offense was likely to be stronger than normal. I also noticed that the strength of Responder’s hand was being inadvertly transmitted by this placement as well, so we had to change the dictum to All bidding cards will be placed as far left as reasonably possible. While there were still periods where this instruction was not followed, it was almost invariably due to fatigue or simple laziness. When this occurred, they were required to do a few pushups or a lap or two around the building – who says that bridge has no physical element?
An effort to avoid the inadvertent passage of UI in this manner was made over a decade ago when a bidding tray was designed with notches that provided for consistent placement of every bid or call. The initial action of every player was to always be deposited in the furthest slot to the left, with subsequent actions immediately to the right of the first, and so on through the end of the auction. Unfortunately, not enough of these trays were manufactured (for reasons primarily fiscal), and the adoption of what would have been an immediate improvement regrettably did not transpire.