Cheating online
Hi all... is it me, or is there much less cheating online than there is face to face in a club?
There is the obvious overt cheating that could very easily take place in many many ways that are not possible in a face to face environment. Though there is very little incentive to do that: it would take 2 people to sit down and discuss the possibility of out and out cheating and to agree to do it (for no monetary reward), with all the possible societal risks of being caught etc.
I mean the more day-to-day cheating of hesitating, huffing and puffing, slatting down cards etc makes it far more level of a playing field.
So, whilst I find that the social aspect of online play is not anywhere close to that of face to face bridge, the game itself seems to work better. There are no mechanical issues of dropping cards on the floor, hands cant be put in the wrong slot, you cant over hear someone berating their partner for missing a slam, you cant play the wrong pair or the boards out of order and all those annoying things that can happen in a club.
Has anyone else noticed this?
Comments
Online play is fairly good at preventing unintentional UI abuse (tempo can still be a problem sometimes, but hardly anything else is a problem). It can make MI a little worse; if one partner fails to alert, the other partner won't be aware of the failure to alert and thus can't let the opponents know that there was a missed alert.
This will have eliminated much of the low-level, unintentional UI abuses that happen all the time at clubs, in which someone picks up something from their partner (perhaps subconsciously) and this informs their play.
It is less good at preventing intentional, premeditated cheating; however, I expect this to be very rare both offline and online, so the total amount of cheating is likely to have gone down overall.
(It's worth noting that by far the most common form of intentional cheating online appears to be "self-kibitzing", in which a player uses a second account to kibitz your partner or opponents and thus gains information they shouldn't have. One notable aspect of this is that it's possible for a player to cheat without their partner being aware that anything is wrong. Kibitzing is banned in EBU tournaments, probably because of this.)
There is various stuff going on. Some of it will come out over time.