Today my guest is Brian Platnick. He’s a world champion (1991 World Junior Teams and 2010 Rosenblum Cup) with six NABC+ titles, including two Spingold wins (2010, 2017) and a victory in the Blue Ribbon Pairs (2012).
Brian is a perfect example of what inspires this podcast: the opportunity to have longer form conversations with fascinating bridge players. The genesis for this episode was getting eliminated from the United States Bridge Championships, by Brian’s team, for the second year in a row. I had too much fun talking with Brian and wasn’t focused enough on winning!
If you've ever wondered if you're a world-class player, Brian has a formula for deciding (Hint, I’m not.) He also speaks candidly about where he sees himself amongst some of the best in the game.
We talk about EDGAR (Everyone Deserves a Game Above Reproach), the anti-cheating software that he and Franco Baseggio have created that is now in use, testing an incredible number of online deals.
Anyone who likes hearing me laugh will greatly enjoy this episode. Brian kept cracking me up!
[1:01] Pre-Alert! Brian is very funny.
[4:11] Explaining WBF placing points, masterpoints and the seeding process. Being on the seeding committee.
[9:36] Determining seeding points.
[14:10] A change Brian instituted in the seeding process.
[16:10] Who’s the client and who’s the pro?
[17:25] Brian’s partner, John Diamond, on who was the best in their Junior days.
[19:55] Explaining some of the processes behind EDGAR (the anti-cheating detection software Brian helped develop).
[23:19] How Brian and Franco Baseggio came together to work on EDGAR.
[27:11] Defining hits and misses.
[34:24] The “fun” parts of developing anti-cheating detectors and the point-people at the ACBL.
[37:00] The nuances of new players’ behavior and the mitigating factors involved in prosecuting and sentencing.
[42:28] Brian has a question for John.
[46:20] Bridge or Excel – which is Brian better at?
[49:30] The opposite of eye candy.
[51:22] Kit Woolsey’s involvement in detecting cheaters.
[59:07] Improving some of the more difficult “definitions” of online cheating.
[1:02:48] Brian’s dedication to providing a clean online game, even though he doesn’t play on BBO.
[1:08:34] John and Brian swap stories about getting called out at the table.
[1:10:45] Brian’s partner, Kevin Rosenberg, shares something about their partnership, as does Geoff Hampson.
[1:13:47] A couple of very funny stories about playing as a high-school kid in West Virginia.
The Setting Trick
Ep. 75
Transcript
John McAllister: Today my guest is Brian Platnick. Brian is a six-time North American Champion, with some big ones, including two Spingolds; he's also won a World Championship and a Junior World Championship. And we have the distinction of having grown up in close proximity to each other. He's from Bluefield, West Virginia, which is about three and a half hours away from Charlottesville, where I'm from. So, I've played against Brian's mother a decent amount, and his brother David lives in Charlottesville, so I play against David at the club fairly often. Really though, as far as resumé, Brian, what might be the most impressive is that your team has knocked my team out of the last two U.S. Team trials.
Brian Platnick: Huh. I guess I didn't even notice you were on the team. By the way, so two things about my resumé that you mentioned, one is, with all the cheating scandals, there were several people who had gotten titles either taken away officially or whatever. I had a title taken away for completely different reasons. Often when I was playing on a team with John Diamond, and Greco, and Hampson, and Brad and Fred ... They don't get last names, just Brad and Fred. If we lost at some point early, frequently I would go home, and Greco sometimes would go home, and Hampson would play with JD in a two-day pair event in the Swiss, or sometimes I would go home, and Greco would stay, and JD would play with Hampson and whatever.
So, once, I left, and they played five-handed and won the two-day Swiss. And for several years, my name appeared as one of the winners of that event. So, I had a National Championship, and then finally that got corrected, so it got taken away from me. But I thought that was kind of a ... And so when we won, so John Diamond and I were on the team that won the Juniors in '91.
John McAllister: Yeah.
Brian Platnick: Which included several players, like Debbie Zuckerberg then, now Debbie Rosenberg. She was already a great player back then, and just continues being a great player to this day. And she was playing with Martha Katz, who's an excellent player. Martha played well, but the best she played in that event was the last 16 boards. When we were in a very close match, she played phenomenally, and just won IMP after IMP for our team. And our other pair was Jeff Ferro and Wayne Stewart. And Wayne doesn't play that much anymore, he's had some success. Jeff, I still see around quite a bit, he's a good friend of mine, and a very good player.
So, after we won that, I left, and just drove to law school. So, I missed the orientation, and some people I met, they're like, "What were you doing?" I'm like, "Oh, I was playing in a bridge tournament." “How'd you do?" "Oh, we won this Junior tournament ..." They're like, okay, whatever. Who cares? Nobody cared, it was kind of funny. But I didn't play in another World Championship until 2010, when we won the Rosenblum. So, when you look at the WBF site, and you see people's names, you'll see Eric Rodwell, a bunch of first place, there's a bunch of other placings in this.
John McAllister: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Brian Platnick: You see this whole list of things. And for me, there was two listings, Juniors in '91, Rosenblum in 2010, it was like, first place, first place. So, I thought that was ... And like an idiot, I played in some additional events, and had the usual so-so results that people have. So, it ruined that record, and I thought I should retire at that point.
John McAllister: Did you become a world grandmaster just when you won the Rosenblum, or did it take more?
Brian Platnick: I think it was when we won the Rosenblum.
John McAllister: Yeah.
Brian Platnick: You need so many, they call them placing points, or something, and you can get some in the trials ... And I think the trials are considered some kind of event where you can get small amounts of placing points, and you can get some for other things. And WBF masterpoints decay.
John McAllister: Yeah.
Brian Platnick: And the placing points don't decay.
John McAllister: Ah, okay.
Brian Platnick: Which is a problem for seeding of our ... At one point we used placing points for seeding.
John McAllister: Yeah.
Brian Platnick: And so, there were players, like Bob Hamman had 200 seeding points for life.
John McAllister: Yeah.
Brian Platnick: So, at one point, when I was on the seeding committee, we made some changes to that, and put a cap on it. Since it doesn't decay, we had to put a cap on it. And so, someone was wondering, how did Bob Hamman lose? Go from 230 seeding points to 35 or something. And I respond, "I'm on the seeding committee, and they're for sale for 500 a pop."
John McAllister: So, you're not on the seeding committee anymore?
Brian Platnick: I'm actually not sure. David Berkowitz runs the seeding committee, which means that nobody really knows who's on it, or when we meet, or what happens. But by the way, if I call anyone a cheater, other than Ron Anderson, an asshole, edit it out please.
John McAllister: Okay.
Brian Platnick: If I call Ron Anderson an asshole, that you can leave in. But other than that, please edit it out.
John McAllister: So, seeding committee, let's go to that. When did you start being on it?
Brian Platnick: So, I essentially, arrogantly, told Berkowitz and others in the seeding committee that they were fucking things up.
John McAllister: Yeah.
Brian Platnick: And that I would like to join the committee and fix them.
John McAllister: Got it.
Brian Platnick: Which is an arrogant attitude to take, and not always helpful, but... I don't know how many committees you've been on for different things, there are people who serve on committees, who show up for a meeting, throw out ideas, and vote on things, and don't do shit. There are other people who do a lot of work, gathering information, doing it, et cetera, who do a lot of work when they're on a committee. And you need people to actually do some work.
John McAllister: Right.
Brian Platnick: So, the fact that I was actually doing work while I was on the committee... Now, other people, like at events, will help seed national pair events, things like this.
John McAllister: Right.
Brian Platnick: Which takes some effort. I don't do any of that, because... Someone like Barry Rigal plays a lot, and knows a lot of the foreign players.
John McAllister: Right.
Brian Platnick: He knows the lay of the land better, so he would be better at doing that than I would be. Which is certainly one reason, one excuse I use for not helping in that capacity. So, going back to the Juniors, after our team won the Juniors, we beat Canada in the finals.
John McAllister: Yeah.
Brian Platnick: That had a team with Fred Gitelman and Geoff Hampson, and our current ACBL president, Bronia, was on that team.
John McAllister: Yeah. Right.
Brian Platnick: Among others. And a great team, it was a very, very tough match. And then, we go play, a few months later, a lot of us were playing in some Spingold, or whatever. And Fred Gitelman was also on the Canadian team that came in second in the Bermuda Bowl, I think it was probably just after the Juniors, or close. So, we go there, and I have four or five seeding points, just from masterpoints, John Diamond has a couple, Fred Gitelman has three. And then, we see some of the junior players we just beat, that didn't even make the knockout stage, and they have 15 or 20 seeding points. I'm thinking, what the fuck? What did these guys win? They must have won something.
And it's just like, oh, well, they're really good players, they were on their National Junior team, and they're very good players, and some of them are going to be on the National Team, so we gave them 15 or 20 seeding points to make things fair. I'm like, well, what about Fred Gitelman? He just came in second in the Bermuda Bowl, he doesn't get shit? It's like, well, he's an ACBL player, and it's like... So, that just made no sense to me.
John McAllister: Right.
Brian Platnick: It was the same for a lot of forums. So, we had one segment that got seeding points based on, I don't really want to say merit, but based on what they earned, according to a set formula.
John McAllister: Okay.
Brian Platnick: And as I mentioned, when people were discussing ideas, and I said, one way to get a lot of seeding points, is what I did, is have a partner who buys Hampson and Greco and Brad to play on teams, until you get bunch of seeding points. Anybody can do that if they want.
John McAllister: Right. Yeah.
Brian Platnick: So, you have one segment that gets seeding points based on a, I guess you can call it an objective formula. There's always subjectivity in creating the formula, but once you create it, you apply it objectively.
John McAllister: Right.
Brian Platnick: And another group who is given seeding points because people on the seeding committee go around and ask Pepsi, or Zia, or someone, how good is this pair? And they tell them, so they give them a bunch of seeding points.
John McAllister: Right.
Brian Platnick: And to me, that made no sense. So, I thought, if you're going to count WBF for this group, why not count it for the other group? And have some idea of how well... I guess a lot of bridge players seem to think seeding should to be based on the skill level of the player.
John McAllister: Yeah.
Brian Platnick: But how do you determine that?
John McAllister: Right.
Brian Platnick: So, at one point, I had almost as many seeding points as Hampson and Greco, or whatever, and as I've mentioned, there are people who think that I play as well as they do, those people are called my mom. But outside of that, the people who think that Greco and Hampson play much better than I do, is most of the people, including myself. So, I'm not going to pretend like the fact that at one point I had as many seeding points as them, meant I was as good of a player.
John McAllister: Right. Right.
Brian Platnick: It just meant that their old seeding points had decayed, and whatever, and I've been playing on a team with them long enough, to where we all had... I think they had a little bit more, but in the same ballpark. But still, it doesn't matter if it's Jimmy Cayne hiring a team and getting seeding points, or if it's the greatest player in the world, or Zia getting seeding points because he wins no matter who he plays with.
John McAllister: Yeah.
Brian Platnick: It's, you have a formula, you win events, you win your masterpoints, whatever. But we needed some way of making sure that we were trying to treat every group similar.
John McAllister: Yeah.
Brian Platnick: And nothing would be perfect, and there are always some people who fall through the cracks.
John McAllister: Sure.
Brian Platnick: And so, we had a policy where we could have a small number of seeding points to give people who fall through the cracks in the system, but not 20 or 30. That's nuts. And the other thing is, we'd have foreign players, who would come to the Nationals, and play in some regional knockout, and they're in the fourth bracket, and you have, players like Samantha, or Duboin have played, have earned enough masterpoints, so that's not going to happen.
John McAllister: Right.
Brian Platnick: But at one point, you used to have Brink and Drijver, when they were young, up and coming, after they've already become established players. They have some number of masterpoints, but you want to put them in the fourth bracket of some random regional knockout? No one else in that bracket is going to be happy, they're not going to be happy. But if you have some objective measures, like you use WBF points and things like this, then you can use the same system for seeding the Spingold as you do for handling these issues in regional knockouts, or limited events.
The thing that used to piss me off, there were a few players who would whine about how many seeding points they had, foreign players ... And sometimes they were right, I shouldn't say they were whining. But they were whining. And then, I see them wanting to enter some zero to 5,000 event because they were hired for it. It's like, okay, you want to play in a zero to 5,000 whatever event, because you're getting paid, and then tell me that you deserve all these seeding points, because it's a great player? You know what? Pick your side and stick with it. That wasn't many people, and there were some people who would actually come and ask me, and say, am I allowed to play in this event?
John McAllister: Yeah.
Brian Platnick: As if, somehow on the seeding committee, I was the one who kept getting all these emails and everything. And I would say, I'll check with the director. And it ended up, some people who asked, and were told no, people who didn't ask, the answer was they were allowed to play. Which, they finally put a stop to it, or tried to. ACBL's done a better job with that.
John McAllister: So, when did you start being on the seeding committee then?
Brian Platnick: I don't remember. It was 10 or 12 years ago or so.
John McAllister: Yeah.
Brian Platnick: And I feel like we got a new system, a seeding system developed, but nothing's perfect. But basically, you earn seeding points as you win the major events, and it decays over time. And also, there was what we consider the Cedric Lorenzini problem. And not anything having to do with things that happened during the pandemic, but before then, when we were discussing, before we had our formula definitely set, and we were trying to make some adjustments to players, somebody mentioned, well, Cédric Lorenzini has won two of the three-day national pair events in the last year.
John McAllister: Yeah.
Brian Platnick: Which are tough events, because a lot of good players.
John McAllister: Sure.
Brian Platnick: And so, my response was, well, I won the Blue Ribbon pairs a couple of years ago, and that gave me zero seeding points.
John McAllister: Right.
Brian Platnick: Dave Berkowitz has won a shitload of these events, and they give him zero seeding points.
John McAllister: Really?
Brian Platnick: Right. Because it's only the Spingold, Vanderbilt, Reisinger that count in the system.
John McAllister: Okay.
Brian Platnick: And so, if we're going to give seeding points to people for winning a Blue Ribbon pairs, why just give them to foreign players? This should be across the board.
John McAllister: Right. Yeah.
Brian Platnick: So, actually, one of the changes I instituted, which I think was actually Danny Sprung's idea, he gave me, when we were discussing this, so I'll give him credit, was we were talking about how many seeding points for Blue Ribbon pairs, what about a two-day Swiss? What about this? What about that? Blah, blah, blah. So, it's just, why don't just use platinum points?
John McAllister: Okay.
Brian Platnick: So, we incorporated platinum points into the seeding system, where it's like, so many years, they decay 20% a year, maximum of maybe five seeding points for platinum, or something like that. I forget, one per 100... And one of the reasons for doing it that way is, it's something the ACBL already keeps track of.
John McAllister: Right.
Brian Platnick: So, nothing has to be done to track this information, to use it, it's something they already have, and to easily incorporate.
John McAllister: That explains why my seeding is as high as it is.
Brian Platnick: Yeah. I can't think of another reason why that would be. I did actually listen to a couple of your, briefly, part of a couple of your podcasts, and I heard one where you were talking about playing professionally, and I thought it was going to be about you hiring somebody, and I was shocked when it said that somebody hired you. And that's when, I remember when friends of mine, when I was in law school, said, when I told them I was playing, I was making some money playing bridge. "Like what? Like gambling?" I said, "No, no, someone's paying me to play on a team." And they're like, "Well, how do you become a professional bridge player?" And I said, "Well, just find some idiot who will pay you money, and that's all you need to do. It has nothing with how good you are." And then, I see your podcast about, John McAllister, bridge pro.
John McAllister: That is truly ... Well, I've been hired to evaluate hands with somebody, but that's the first time I've been hired to play. And it's just funny, because people so often think that I'm a professional bridge player because how much bridge I play, they call me that all the time, and I'm always like, no, I'm not really.
Brian Platnick: Some people think I'm a client, because I don't play that often, and I play with good players.
John McAllister: Yeah.
Brian Platnick: So, if you and I played, how many people would think that I was hiring you?
John McAllister: That was one of the funny things though, was that there were other pros, like Compton was playing in the event, Ish was playing in the event, and I was like, I wonder if they ... There was definitely some imposter syndrome, you listened to the episode, you heard it all.
Brian Platnick: Yeah, no, I know about it, I always joked that, I guess it was imposter syndrome. If somebody asks me how good of a player I think I am, how good you think you are and how good you are, they're often two completely different things. But like most people, I think that I know how good I am, but I'm sure that's not accurate. But the way I view things is, anyone who's better than me is a world-class player. Anyone who's worse than me is not a world-class player. And then, I can go either way, depending on what people want to argue. But to me, that's the dividing line.
John McAllister: Well, so your partner for much of your bridge career, most of your bridge career, I think is fair to say, John Diamond.
Brian Platnick: Right.
John McAllister: And I spoke to him over email, and on this topic he said, "When all of us were Juniors in our early 20s, Brian was by far the best of us. Better than Hampson, Brad, Debbie, et cetera."
Brian Platnick: Now, Brad is several years younger than us, so it's certainly possible then I was better than... Debbie was a very polished player, long before the rest of us, I would say. She started playing with good partners. And I never played with, I very seldom played with better players. I didn't lived somewhere where there were a lot of top players who would play with some young up-and-coming players. So, had to navigate things more on my own, and figure things out. But that's nice of John to say, I won't say if that's accurate or not. But I'm not sure I was better than Hampson at that point. We were certainly closer in skill level than we are now, that's clear, but I certainly won't say I was better than him. But yeah, he was a pretty good player. When we were in the Juniors, he played pretty well.
John McAllister: Do you talk bridge with Hampson today, at the trials, for example?
Brian Platnick: Yes. It's more listen bridge. It's usually me asking Hampson a question about something, and Hampson giving me ... So, that's my view. People like Chip Martel don't call me up and ask me my opinion about things. Unless you're just taking a poll, just out of curiosity. Chip was a co-captain of our Junior team, and I still, ever since then, he's one of my go-tos. I'd often send questions, I would have my panel of three, of Chip, Kit Woolsey, and Michael Rosenberg. Chip would give me a very concise, very, very workable answer to how you should handle something in bidding, like a simple thing that generally works. Michael Rosenberg would give a response, where he's essentially considered every nuance of every possibility, and say he prefers this and this and this, but not liking to have too many individual rules, maybe he's landed on something a little simpler.
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Brian Platnick: Right. So, if a weaker player... For instance, the bidding here is 1NT all pass. If you have Q J 9 x x of a suit, and nothing else, it looks weird not leading that suit.
John McAllister: Yeah.
Brian Platnick: Leading low from that suit is fine, leading high from that suit.
John McAllister: Right.
Brian Platnick: But another example is, say you have Q J 10 9 x.
John McAllister: Right.
Brian Platnick: The bidding is 1NT-3NT. And there are players who, knowing their partner has king and one, lead low. Leading low from Q J 10 9 x against 1NT-3NT, it's either a misclick, or someone who's not ... A good player who is cheating, a good flight A player is cheating, wouldn't do something that blatant.
John McAllister: Right.
Brian Platnick: They would know that, that just really looks...
John McAllister: Right. Right.
Brian Platnick: But then, there are some players who will make a play, like, say underlead an A Q for no reason, against a suit contract.
John McAllister: Okay.
Brian Platnick: And partner has the king, and so their opponents say, okay, they're clearly cheating. It's like, well, actually, we can look and say, okay, they've done this 50 times over the last year, and partner had the king 20 of the 50 times, and not the other 30.
John McAllister: Right.
Brian Platnick: So, one of the things that I think people don't recognize enough, or speak enough about is, one of the good things I like about EDGAR, is when somebody makes a weird play that works, and then everybody just says, well, they're obviously cheating, we can go to the data, and see, well, no, they just are an inexperienced player, who makes inexperienced plays, and this one worked against you, but it doesn't work for them any unusual number of times. So, I think that's one of the good things I like about it.
John McAllister: So, can you literally plug in ace, queen, third leads away from ace, queen, third in a suit, and the software will spit that out to you?
Brian Platnick: Well, we have to get it set up, but that's something we already have set up, under a larger category we call weird leads. Underleading queen-jack... Underleading honor sequences against suit contracts, some things. And sometimes a lead is not always that weird when you do that. Maybe you're defending against some slam, where you think... And you have a void, you want your partner... Or a five of a contract, you have a side ace-queen, and you need your partner on lead. So, just because it's a "hit" for a detector, doesn't mean that it looks like someone's cheating.
But even a low-level pro, like John McAllister, is not going to underlead ace-queen very often. No, any reasonable flight A or even flight B player is not going to underlead ace-queens very often. And some experts might, once in a while, underlead ace-queen against a suit contract, in a situation where others may not do it, but would certainly consider it. But it doesn't happen as often as people seem to think, underleading an ace-queen or an ace-king to get your partner on lead, it's very rare, but it does happen. That's why you need enough data to make an accurate determination, it's not just a weird play here, a weird play there.
John McAllister: So, you doing this, you and Franco Baseggio are doing this together. How did this come to pass?
Brian Platnick: So, I think it's an article on Bridge Winners, and it's A.J., who's was with the ACBL, he contacted me about trying to develop some automated cheating detection tools. And I said, well, I'm not really a programmer or anything, but I have a reasonable amount of experience in cheating detection, and ideas for how to go about it, but as far as the actual implementing it... So, we always joke that it's like one of those Mission Impossible kind of movies, where it's like, all right, we need a demolition specialist, we need a driver, we need a safecracker, we need a this, we need a that. So, it's like, okay, we need someone who's proficient in statistics, someone who has coding skills, someone who's another expert bridge player, et cetera, et cetera.
And I knew Franco Baseggio was a bright guy, and he was interested in this area, and we've worked on something previously, just a little one-off something. And he's also, I mentioned, when you're on committees or on things, people are willing to put in some time and effort, and he seemed like the kind of person who was actually willing to put in some time. So, I asked him, and it turns out A.J. was already thinking that maybe he'd be a good person. So, there was me, I guess the expert bridge player, or as I mentioned, the level of determining if someone's world-class or not. Is there better than me or worse than me kind of thing? But certainly good enough for this purpose. And then, Franco was the other five guys you need on your team.
John McAllister: And when was this?
Brian Platnick: It's like two years ago ... What's the date. Yeah, it's a little over two years ago.
John McAllister: And A.J. is not on the ACLB Board anymore I think, so did you lose your sheriff?
Brian Platnick: Well, he was still working with us, but he's now involved in the IBA, it's bridge arbitration. And he didn't really... Once we started moving forward at the ACLB, he really didn't want to be involved in both. It didn't seem like he should really be involved in both sides, he thought. So, I think his heart was staying with EDGAR, but he thought he would be more valuable with the IBA. So, he went that route. Like A.J., A.J., he's another hard worker.
John McAllister: So, give me an EDGAR story. Can you give me an example? You came up with some great idea for cheating detection when we were playing in the trials, but you said that was not for public.
Brian Platnick: Oh, that was something that, actually, I was playing with a bit. And as usual, when I talked to Franco, he's like, that seems good, but. No, so he's always thinking about things with an eye toward, if we're going to use this, we have to define things carefully, so that we can be able to statistically analyze and have some kind of quantitative result, not just a qualitative result. So, that's why when we come up with something, if you look at something in terms of percentages, so Franco likes to look at things in terms of a hit or a miss. Like you have one of two outcomes. Or there's a neutral, like a non-outcome. So, one example might be okay, say you have underleading ace-queens, you call it partner has a king, that's a hit, I guess or a void, you can call it hit. Otherwise, it's a miss.
Now, what if you underlead a king? So. The bidding is one spade - four spades, and you're on lead, and you don't really have a good lead, so underleading king-fourth of the suit, -fifth, it's a little risky, but it's certainly nothing cheat-y about making that lead. If partner always has the ace, when they underlead the king, that starts to tell you something. So, here, you underlead a king, how do you define a hit? Well, if partner has the ace, that's certainly a hit. If partner has the queen, is that necessarily a hit? Well, let's say you have king-fourth and your partner has queen-third, well, that may set up a trick now, but that may be a trick you're getting anyway, and maybe that helps them. You have to know more about the hand to know if partner having the queen makes it attractive to lead under the king or not.
But it's too complicated to analyze the whole hand, we just have to look at the suit in isolation. So, if partner has the queen-jack, we'll call that a hit. If part has the queen-10-9, well, that's a hit. Or if between us we have the king-queen-10-9. As long as the opening leader doesn't have the king-queen. So, you have, basically a hit, you could look at as, this rates to be good for us, and it doesn't seem like a normal scenario where it's bad for us. Maybe some other lead, it's better for some reason, but just looking at this suit. It doesn't look bad. Now, if partner has four small and then you lead the king, sometimes it doesn't matter, maybe dummy has the ace. Maybe you're tricking him into going up the ace, thinking if you have king-third, maybe they're short. Maybe they think you have a singleton.
So, there are times you might, even if you're cheating, underlead king-third, but partner has two small. Because you're hoping to fool declarer, if you know their hands also. But again, that's too complicated to deal with. So, a miss is where it doesn't look like we're gaining anything from the lead, and we could very well be losing from this lead. Underleading a king-jack to nothing is certainly not good. If partner has a jack, maybe they misguessed, and you can set up a trick you wouldn't set up otherwise, or maybe... Who knows? But so for that we have hits, neutral, and miss. And for a lot of leads there's hit, neutral, and miss, for some things it's easier to just have hit and miss.
John McAllister: So, how many pairs have you prosecuted through EDGAR?
Brian Platnick: So, I don't look at it as us prosecuting through EDGAR, I look at it as us giving feedback to the ACBL. And I think they have numbers on their website about what's been done, so I don't really want to speak for the ACBL. But essentially, they will tell us who they would like us, and maybe just they look at random groups, they want to go through everybody, they give us a random group of players, or they might look at ACBL employees, or people, or directors, or some group like this, or people who are in position of authority, or whatever.
John McAllister: Pros like me.
Brian Platnick: Yeah, exactly. Or before giving someone Volunteer of the Year, or some other award, they might want to run a check. So, when I got Volunteer of the Year award, Franco and I, it's like yeah, okay, we're fine, checked ourselves. No, that's a little difficult to... But yeah. But the idea is for them to come up, they've come up with a method that is fair, and will take care of, and-
John McAllister: How many hands do you think you've analyzed through the software?
Brian Platnick: A lot. But for some individual players it's been, who have many different partners, it's tens of thousands of hands, or over a 100,000 probably for some players, but not that many. I don't know. Franco could probably have a better idea, because he's the one who does all the actual computer work.
John McAllister: Yeah.
Brian Platnick: I'm the one who comes, I come up with the cheating detection ideas, and do a lot of the analysis. And so, it's also when we have an idea. So, we have an idea for a way to detect cheating. We want something that's not going to capture expert play, we're not trying to distinguish good players from weaker players, we're trying to distinguish cheaters from non-cheaters. So, we want something where we're not capturing the wrong group of players. So, when we test things, we have to be mindful of this.
So, we're developing a detector, we'll have a group of pairs we run for testing, anyone that comes back as cheating, then I'll just take an old-fashioned look at their hands and see does it look obvious to me they're cheating? For other reasons or whatever. And we're not as concerned with letting cheaters slip through the cracks, because we're not sensitive enough to catching everybody. We don't want to catch anyone who's not cheating, and say they are. We're very careful. So, we tune things to a level where we're pretty confident that's not going to happen. You can't say never, but we're pretty confident. And then, we will get other data and run other tests, we don't want to use the same data to run every test for every player.
John McAllister: Sure.
Brian Platnick: That's the problem with that.
John McAllister: Sure.
Brian Platnick: Or then we'll get fresh data from BBO and players we haven't looked at. Like Franco may just, can you get data for 500 pairs, who've played about this many hands? Or whatever. So, we just have a bunch of random pairs. BBO is hugely helpful when you're developing and testing things, providing anonymous data or things. So, we really appreciate that.
John McAllister: Got it. Thanks, BBO.
Brian Platnick: Yeah. I'm not going to get into the wars of this platform versus that platform, but BBO has been very helpful with us for when were developing EDGAR. It's not that other platforms wouldn't have been, they just didn't have the data available.
John McAllister: So, how often do you talk to Franco?
Brian Platnick: Probably too often. But no, we talk on the phone every now and then, it's more like if I am driving somewhere and have 15 or 20 minutes to kill, it's a good time to go over things. But our conversations end up going on too long, and covering too many topics. So, we often handle things by email, which go on too long and cover too many topics also, but ...
John McAllister: Is it fun?
Brian Platnick: So, for me developing new detectors, testing, it's kind of fun. Some of the administrative things we have to do because we're helping the ACBL, can be a little tedious, but it's not drudgery or anything, but it can be a little tedious. But now that we're working with the ACBL, and spending a lot of time with that, it takes away from times ... We basically had to stop tweaking, have everything set for what we were going to include and not include with EDGAR, and then go from there. And then, any changes, we have to be very careful, any changes we make to our detection tools, that we thoroughly test them before we implement them.
John McAllister: Who's the person at the ACBL you're working with?
Brian Platnick: So, we've worked with Bronia quite a bit, there's Sabrina, one of the administrators, who is ... She's our point person for data flow back and forth. We've worked with people on the Board, like Joann Glasson was very helpful when she was on the Board. And now, Margot, we haven't, things are sort of mostly done before Margot took over, so we haven't really worked with her that much. But the few times we have, she's been very helpful, and very... Anytime it's some issue, I feel like the Board ... So, I don't always agree with how the Board comes down on everything in this area, but I certainly would not pretend like my view is correct and theirs is incorrect.
I think among ... There's several different rational or reasonable choices, and sometimes they pick a different reasonable choice than I would've picked, but they often have different considerations than I do. So, that's sort of like my view on bridge, disagreeing with me doesn't make you wrong, disagreeing with me doesn't mean you're stupid, it just means we disagree on something. But for the most part I think we see eye to eye with the Board on how things should be handled, and what they've implemented. It's just kind of around the margins, and a few situations how they should be handled, so whatever.
John McAllister: But is Sabrina, is she a bridge player?
Brian Platnick: No, she's just the administrator, she's the one who gives us the information, like who we're supposed to run, we send to her, then it goes from her to the recorder's office.
John McAllister: Got it.
Brian Platnick: It's good to have one point person at the ACBL because we don't want to get in a situation where there's someone on the Board, or someone else is thinking, ‘I think these players might be cheating, can you run these players in this area?’ And even if there's nothing untoward going on, you don't want the appearance of anyone, anyone of the ACBL, targeting any groups of players, or things like that. So, it's sort of best. Nothing like that's happened or whatever, it's more the Board members, in my experience, are very hardworking and diligent. The ones I've dealt with anyway.
So, right now, Larry Sealy on the Board is the person we interact with the most. And he's a smart guy, he's very technically oriented, and a very good bridge player. And I think he's a bit more of a hanging judge than I am when it comes to people who cheated. But I understand people have different opinions. I think all of us feel like if people were beginners and they were cheating at home with their spouse, you have to be a little more lenient, it doesn't mean they don't get some kind of suspension, maybe, but be more lenient with inexperienced players. But if a bridge professional like yourself was caught, that's ...
John McAllister: How closely do you follow prosecution?
Brian Platnick: So, we just do it, we have the ACBL numbers, and then we do ... So, often I don't even know who most of the players are. But then I see when the reports hit the ACBL site, I check and see. But you could look up, there are ways on the ACBL site to try to match names to numbers, if you dig around a bit. But I'm not ... Why? I'm not really ... Everybody makes mistakes, people do things, but pay for your mistake, and move on with your life. Try to clean up your act.
John McAllister: Does your wife play bridge anymore?
Brian Platnick: Not very often, no. She has much better things to do. Actually, when discussing this area online at one point, somebody made a point to me, and I think they actually had an email exchange, saying basically, ‘You don't play club games, you said’ which I don't really, not that I wouldn't sometime, but I don't. And said, ‘Even looking at when you play in some regional event, where there's a lot of weak players, it's not the same.’ You really need to remember what these club games are like, and he explained... Like, there are people, when they're taking lessons, so maybe you have two couples, or whatever. And often, they're discussing while they're learning to play, they're discussing, they'll show their hand, and then, okay, this is a no one, no trump opening, you see this. And this is how they learn to play. And he said even at the bridge club sometimes they're talking when they're not supposed to when they're playing, and have to be reminded because that's how they learned to play.
And now they're playing online at home, and they learn to play just before the pandemic, or even whatever, and they're talking to each other, people who live in the same house, the same way when they took lessons. And they're sometimes retirees just learning to play, and this is just how they learned to play. And there are other people, I'm sure, just talk back and forth, who don't even think they're cheating. They don't realize how much they're cheating. Some people claim, who argue that they're definitely not cheating, when they obviously are, they may believe it at first, sometimes, or sometimes they certainly convince themselves of it, I'm sure. But there are others who are just... It's hard to admit when you did something wrong.
So, if people deny they're cheating when they're cheating, it's human nature. I don't really know. But the one thing I do feel strongly about when it comes to penalties is, if somebody confesses immediately, that's one thing. If they require you to go through a lot of work, I don't mean just EDGAR running them, but go through a lot of work, presenting with a lot of information to demonstrate so that they can't really defend themselves... That they know they're cheating, they know they're caught. And then they confess, that's another level. If somebody actually goes to a hearing, and then once they realize, whatever, they decide to confess... The more work-
John McAllister: Yeah, that makes sense.
Brian Platnick: ... you make people like me, or Jeff Edelstein and his crew in the headquarters office, et cetera, the more work you make people do before you confess, the longer your suspensions should be after you confess. But it's just one thing that I feel strongly about. But certainly, giving people a break for confessing, or else the system has just become unwieldy. Not everyone agrees with that, some people would just expel everybody who cheated.
John McAllister: Yeah. No, that makes total sense to me.
Brian Platnick: I have a question for you now.
John McAllister: Okay.
Brian Platnick: Do you play much online?
John McAllister: Yeah.
Brian Platnick: How often do you feel like you're cheated when you play online? If you're playing a set game against someone, it's one thing, but if you're playing in some ACBL event, it's random players, how often do you think you're cheated?
John McAllister: Maybe twice a week.
Brian Platnick: So, how many times do you play. Say, how many board times per session do you think you play against someone who cheated? Almost every session? Every other session?
John McAllister: No, no, no, definitely not. I play a fair amount online. Probably one out of every five or six sessions, and I'll report ... There was something last night that I played, something happened, I don't remember what it was, but I didn't end up reporting it, but I remember being like, maybe I'm exaggerating. I've recorded, I've filed probably ... Yeah, I think that's an exaggerated number. I've filed a couple recorder forms in the last-
Brian Platnick: So, you can look after the game, at the pair who you think was cheating, and look at how they played. So, do you look and see how they played other hands that-
John McAllister: Sometimes. Sometimes, yeah. Sometimes. Maybe sometimes I'll think, wait, this is a little strange that they did X. I actually did file a recorder form against a pair, a husband and wife, that were convicted of cheating, the Andersons. Sharon Anderson. I was very surprised that ... Playing against them in some speedball, and they did something, and I was like, I cannot believe that I'm filing a recorder form on this person based on her resume. And then, it came to pass that they were convicted, and that was surprising. But it was also validating because I don't remember what they did, but it definitely caught me.
Brian Platnick: So, I haven't run numbers on this, but from what little experience I have. So, let's say that we assume that maybe 3% or 4% of the players were cheating. So, if that's the case, then you're going to play against them, it's occasionally, and sometimes there's hands where there's nothing to do, so there's no reason to suspect someone's cheating. Anyway. But pairs who cheat I think play more often than other pairs. They get addicted to this, they play a lot more. So, even if it's only 3% or 4% of the pairs that are cheating, it may be 7 or 8% of the boards that you play, you play against when they're cheating. Now, don't take these as numbers that are... This is just an example, just a point. So, I don't want to... Because I think-
John McAllister: How can people email you? What's your cell phone?
Brian Platnick: Yeah, right. No, we've gotten a couple of things. Luckily, I guess the EDGAR email and website is not that well-known, but if anyone does go to the EDGAR website, we're happy to take donations through a 501C3.
John McAllister: Oh, okay.
Brian Platnick: And we work based off of donations. And we have a policy that other than our annual trip to Hawaii... No, I'm kidding. That we don't pay ourselves. We've used money to buy upgraded computer hardware, because to keep up with all that we have to run. And that wasn't me, I don't do anything. I used to joke that Franco was running everything on his iPhone. Franco did make a joke, when we got the Volunteer of the Year award, I mentioned how Franco, how he does everything, and whatever. And he said, "Yeah, and Brian's pretty handy with a spreadsheet." Just joking. And that appeared in the ACBL article. Again, it's kind of funny that if someone who's looking at, if someone with the ACBL, or a volunteer, or someone who's trying to... We'll send them a spreadsheet with a lot of information, and I'll say, are you good with Excel? And some people are like, well, I'm okay, but I'm not an expert. I'm like, well, do you know how to filter data? And they're like, oh, of course. Yeah.
But I've only written macros for this, I'm like, okay, so what you mean is... I say I'm a Flight B Excel user. I know how to do a lot of basic things, and I can look up... If there's something I want to do, and I don't know how, I can look it up and kind of figure out if it's something that I think should be easy to do. But I don't... So, when people tell me, I'm okay with Excel, that means that they’re levels beyond me, and they think that I'm going to tell them they either know or will catch on in two seconds. And then, you have the other end. So, I'm kind of handy with the spreadsheet. So, we joke that all the time-
John McAllister: Who wrote the article?
Brian Platnick: What's her name. Someone at the ACBL. But it was kind of funny. I don't want to call her out for that, it was-
John McAllister: Was it Amy Casanova? Because she helps me with the show notes for the podcast.
Brian Platnick: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not offended or bothered, it was kind of funny.
John McAllister: Good job, Amy.
Brian Platnick: But Franco is very smart, he's very good at... He's one of these people where if he says he knows about something, he knows about it. He doesn't talk out of his ass like a lot of us do.
John McAllister: Got it.
Brian Platnick: That's why, well, there was one detector I was working on where I mentioned, what I thought, I said, I think this is a better way of looking at defense, and his response was, "Well, but that's throwing away most of the data, and throwing away data is not usually a good thing." I said, "But it's throwing away the noisy data, and honing in on the signal part," is what I think. And so, then he coded it up, and I got a response like, holy shit. And there was another thing with opening leads, that this sort of approach, instead of using double dummy, it's taking an approach of, if partner has an ace-queen of a side suit, and you have a king, that's something that you would want to lead. If you have an ace and your partner has a singleton, that's something you'd want to lead.
Not taking the whole hand; just a suit in a vacuum. What suits look attractive to lead? Because a lot of players who are cheating will do things based on partner's hand, but an expert player would look at it, and say, well, that's not really what you want to do knowing partner's hand. But that doesn't mean they're not cheating. Yeah, if I saw the hand I'd lead trumps, because they can only take trump tricks or a few ruffs. Yes, but why are they leading, partner overcalled a heart, they have king-third of hearts and king-third to diamonds, why are they leading from king-third of diamonds? They're like, well, what does it matter? Trump's a better lead. But their lead is because they see partner's hands.
So, I was joking about it being like, it's like eye candy. Seeing this holding in this suit is like eye candy. You see this, and you want to... So, we came up with this approach, we defined situations that are eye candy, and situations that were the opposite, in honor of the first Bush president, called them eye broccoli, because he made some comment about not liking broccoli. So, like eye candy or eye broccoli. And then, the in-between, the ones where who knows. And so, instead of looking at double dummy, we looked at how often, again, suits contracts, there was an eye candy situation, and what percentage did the person lead it? And when we compared a group of convicted cheaters to a group of people, who we had vetted, who were good players, good flight A players. So, we expect them to do better. The difference was striking.
And I remember Franco, that was like, I got a holy shit from Franco. Like holy shit, that was a great idea. And I said, "Do you think this is better? Does it work better than double dummy?" And he said, "Maybe 10,000 times more sensitive." The probability of saying someone cheating from this versus double dummy, it's like orders of magnitude more sensitive. And from that we developed what we call the Kit-O-Matic opening lead detector, named after Kit, a method of his. And Franco was pushing for this, and I did like this for a while, and I was not really on board, and then after the eye candy approach, that's when Franco's like, okay, well, why don't we take this and we can make this better, and that was, it improved it tremendously. So, I'll back up a bit.
So, one idea, Kit's had many different ideas for cheating detection, and most of his ideas, I think he was full of Kit. I think they were not very... They were good in some ways, but not in others. And a lot of times my complaint was, Kit's idea is good if executed by someone other than Kit. Because as I mentioned earlier, his view of mainstream and non-mainstream is not the same as other experts. So, I feel like he's looking at things through the Kit skewed lens of what's normal, as opposed to say the Chip Martel lens of what's normal and not. So, I don't want to be unfair to Kit, Kit's very good at this, and a lot of other things. But the one idea he had that I think is phenomenal was, when people look to see if someone's cheating, people often fall in the trap of looking at all four hands.
If you think the pair is colluding, you don't look at all four hands, just those two hands. And they bid to a slam that's hard to get to, and trumps were 5-0. So, that has nothing to do with anything. So, this idea of Kit's was, just look at the hands, say through, give everybody 200 John McAllister leads, or give someone 200 John McAllister leads in the auction. So, somebody gets, let's say we give Franco 200 lead problems. You want someone who is you think the same level or better as the player. So, we'll say, we'll take Franco. I don't know if he's a bridge pro like you are, but he's probably drafted a few rounds ahead of you on the bridge team. So, we gave Franco 200 opening lead problems that you faced, and he picked his opening lead. Now we give an independent judge, here's 200 hands, now anytime you and Franco chose the same lead, or spot card doesn't really matter, or you could look, if one of you led the king from king- queen and the other low, that we could include.
But so we take, say out of the 200 hands, there were 110 where you chose different leads, or something, whatever. Then we have someone else is given the auction and the hand, and also can see partner's hand. And you basically say, okay, here are your two choices, which lead do you think rates to work out better? And you like to apply the 15-second test. If after 15 seconds you're not sure, stop thinking about it, call it a tie. And if it's something where you think, okay, this one may be a little better, but I don't know ... Then it's a tie. If you think, okay, they're the same, except there's maybe a 10% chance declare is six-five, in which case this lead is better, but it's never worse, than it's a win. You have these parameters for win and loss. And sometimes people disagree on what won or what lost, whether it's a tie, because somebody missed something, or looks at it.
But there's general agreement. If you give the same, you do a group of experts, they'll come down pretty much fairly aligned on how they judge these. And they don't know who led what, they don't know what you led, and what Franco led. So, say there's 110, or whatever there were, hands, that weren't the same, and say maybe 30 of them are doesn't matter, so we're left with 80 hands. So, you expect each person to win about 40. It's like 45-35, you don't really care. But if you assume that it's equal, then you could just calculate the probability of what are the odds of this happening by chance. So, what happens in one of the cases that I helped the recorder with before EDGAR was completely up and running, there was someone who won, who beat people like Chris Willenken and Dave Berkowitz, 60 to 6 or something.
John McAllister: Wow.
Brian Platnick: And what does that tell you? That tells you the person's cheating. So, that's the Kit method. And you could do this for bidding, and for defense, and for whatever, but it's easier for opening leads. It's more cut and dry. But sometimes in the auction, okay, if partner's also colluding... So, you didn't bid game, you only invited, but partner's now going to bid the game. You get into that kind of thing, where do you assume both ... So, it works better with opening leads, it's cleaner. So, the Kit-O-Matic is trying to automate this process. So, here's a bridge hand, here's an auction, what would a person lead? Assume you polled it on Bridge Winners or something. So, the bidding is 1NT-3NT, you have K Q J 10 9 of hearts and an ace. Okay, so a heart lead is the top-tier lead. So, if a person leads a heart, we don't care if partner had a void, or if they had ace-third, or whatever. We don't care what partner had.
That's basically, we assume that our imaginary expert who's also competing chooses the same lead, this kind of thing. So, it's like having an automated other person making leads. Let's say you have king-fourth, king-fourth, it goes 1NT-3NT. Well, half of the people would lead one half will lead the other. So, it matters what your partner has now.
John McAllister: Right.
Brian Platnick: So, you have to have a definition for how well it hits. So, we have definitions for the tier, this hit great, this hit decent, this hit average, this hit poorly, this was a disaster, or something like that. So, if somebody makes a lead... If you have, the bidding goes 1S-4S, and you have K-Q-J; K-Q-J of two suits, or something, and three little of another suit, and they lead the three little, even if it doesn't really matter, if you lead a king and knock out an ace, it's probably not going to cost you a trick. But who in the hell would lead from three little instead? Hitting partner’s like, A-K-J, unless they misclicked or they cheated. Who would do that?
So, picking a lead that would be a low minority choice, a very unattractive lead based on our definitions, and hitting something that's a hugely attractive result, that looks a bit more cheat-y than just guessing which king to underlead. And Kit and his method didn't like to look at levels of cheaty-ness because he thought that gets into too much subjectivity. It's just win or lose. But I think he agrees with, that when you've defined these levels, now you're not falling into the trap of using your own judgment for each individual case, and maybe getting swayed. There is judgment in how you create these levels, but again, they're objectively instituted once you come up with them. So, Kit is a big fan of the Kit-O-Matic. So, we named it after him because automating this is really great, and his way works well, but it's time-consuming.
John McAllister: Yeah, getting somebody to make 200 opening leads is going to take a long time.
Brian Platnick: We would do things like we improved on it a few months ago, some of the definitions around... Some things are easy to define, but some are a little more difficult. Like, is it better leading from three little or from queen-fifth? So, we just of call all these random things, just go in the middle, just a random guess. We don't try to put our own ideas, or other people's ideas, on passive-aggressive this, that, whatever, on things. Just partner bid a suit - that's more attractive. The right-hand opponent bid a suit - that's less attractive. Just some basic rules. But then defining what's a hit and what's not is also kind of difficult. But we looked at how often would someone lead a doubleton? There's no really attractive lead, how often are people choosing A over B?
And we look at a group of experts who are Flight A players, who we're pretty sure aren't cheating from vetting them previously, when we find, okay, 90% of the time they're choosing their small doubleton over their four small, or their this or that, then we can tweak which group to put certain leads in. Or against no trump, how often do people... There's one unbid suit, the opponent's bid a diamond, a heart, a spade, three no. Do you automatically lead a club? Well, no. If you have king and one club, that's probably not what you're going to lead.
But there are times you led a club when it went 1NT-3NT. So, you have to change how you view that. And so, we looked a lot at, how do good players, what do they lead in these situations? How often do they lead doubletons in the one unbid suit? How often do they this? Often do they do that? To try to get an idea of what's more common? How do people think? How do they approach it? And as Franco being smart, points out things such as ... So, on our rules, most players have a miss rate in, I think for our notrump lead detector, in the mid to upper 40% level. Most good players. And it's not a huge difference between experts and others, because a lot of opening lead rules, lead partners suit lead top of a sequence, lead longest and strongest are basic rules that everybody follows.
So, there's only some edge cases that distinguish experts from not experts. So, if we have all of our definitions perfectly matching the way an expert looks of the world, then we would expect experts to have a 50% miss rate. We'd expect our methods to do as well as the expert. And when we disagree, we would be right half the time, they'd be right half the time kind of thing. And the fact that the level, it's up to the high 40s, tells us that, for good players that we've vetted, tells us that our bucketing system of how we define the single dummy lead, and then how we define how it hits partners, so we call it partner dummy, looking at your hand and partner's hand, but not the opponent's.
That our definitions are reasonably good because we're approaching this 50% level. Now, for cheating detection, we give a lot more leeway in how we're measuring things. We have things set to give the benefit of the doubt to players, because again, if we miss the occasional cheater here and there, whatever, we'll still sleep at night. But if we start catching John McAllister because he led well for a while, for some lucky streak, then that's a problem. So, we're very sensitive to that.
John McAllister: It's interesting to me that you don't even really play online, and in these ACBL games, and yet you're dedicated to doing this.
Brian Platnick: At one point I was working with the Credentials Advisory Team, early in the pandemic, which we were advising independent games, where a lot of top experts were playing. And they would just disinvite players who were cheating. And some NBOs would prosecute players, others say, well, they're cheating in a private game, that's nothing to do with us. We can't really do anything about that. Which, is a bit of a problem, but whatever. And there are all these complaints, what about these games we play in? I'm thinking, okay, there's some people... It's like there are people who donate money to charity, there are people who go and help build houses, or help do this, or go to soup kitchens, whatever. If you're donating money, my view is always I'll write them a check and I'm going to stay home and watch the ball game, or whatever. If somebody else doesn't give any money, if they show up and actually help and do stuff, I'm not going to say you're a cheapskate, I'm going to say good for you.
Different people have different ways of volunteering. If people are volunteering, giving their time or money or whatever to any good cause, doesn't have to be my cause, my way of doing it, good for you. So, the fact that we were a group who were helping, doing this, cleaning up these expert games, and trying to do with that, I don't really think people should criticize that because we're not looking at these other games. Other people can do that if they want, it takes a lot of time. By the same token, now that we're working on, Franco and I are working on these BBO games, there's a lot of, well, these are a bunch of low-level whatever players, who cares? And the answer is the people who play in those games care.
John McAllister: Yeah.
Brian Platnick: Nobody wants to be cheated, people want to play in a fair game. And do I care if someone's cheating in some BBO game that I never play in? On some level I don't really care, but what I do care about is the people playing the game care. And for bridge to survive, we need more players, and if people who are playing, beginners, experts ... Not even just beginners. But people who like playing online, if they're having a bad experience because there's people cheating, is that really going to drive people to the game? It'll drive cheaters to the game if they can cheat and not get caught, but that's not what we want. I think maybe a lot more could be done for the bridge community as a whole trying to help clean up these games, non-expert games, just making it sort of a ... Cleaning up the playground for everybody. It's not going to be perfectly clean, but trying to do the best. And I guess someone had to do it, and Franco and I had the time, and hopefully the knowledge to figure out how to do it.
John McAllister: Do you feel equally good about, are you exonerating people?
Brian Platnick: Certainly, sometimes when there's people where there's recorders filed on some people, we've given responses and say, no, this person is, if they're cheating, they're the worst cheater in the world. But it's impossible to say someone's not cheating, you cheat on one hand, and you cheated. There was a case written up where somebody, at a club game, a face-to-face club game, the hand records came out and they were late, I guess late starting the last session, he goes to the bathroom and grabs a hand record. And I guess it caught on video, and he has a hand record, and then did something unusual on the last round. So, did he cheat on any of the first ever rounds? Presumably not. Did he cheat for the last month? Probably not. But he cheated on that hand. But for online, we're just inferring from the result that someone cheated. So, it's not on camera, there's no one at the table, there's no way to really prove that somebody cheated on one hand. Now, there's single hands that have convinced me someone has cheated. But that's kind of rare.
And for those players, you don't need to just rely on the one hand, because they have a whole resume of cheating hands, typically. And if not, then you just have to write it off as just some random aberration, and let it go. So, there's no way you could exonerate someone and say they're not cheating. That's just impossible, you never know. But we can certainly say that there's no evidence of cheating. The evidence is consistent with not cheating, it's not consistent with cheating. But whatever. Think about it, I'm sure you've had a hand here or there where it's like, all right, if partner has the jack of spades, I want to bid seven no trump, whatever. And if you bid seven no trump or not, no one's going to think either way about it. And if you just asked your partner and they said, yeah, I have the jack and bid seven no trump, even if someone thought, well, that seemed against the odds, but whatever, and you never cheated again, you still cheated on that hand. But who's going to catch you? Nobody.
So, just like in face-to-face, there are pairs who have their little mannerisms or do things, and some more intensely than others, but it's not quite the same. Doing things that are out in the open for all to see is one thing. You're not trying to do ... Partner thinks for a long time, and then you bid. Everybody sees that, that's not doing anything sneaky. Little signals are one thing, but. I don't really consider cheating, I consider that, that's just... If somebody in football, somebody's called for holding, did they cheat? No, they got called for holding. It's kind of a different thing.
John McAllister: Yeah. I got my wrist slapped the other day, I was playing online, and my partner established her side suit, and she played the hand well. And so, I typed in the chat, I said, "Well played." But she hadn't claimed ... I knew that she knew what was going on, and I accidentally-
Brian Platnick: You typed it in too early, yeah, yeah, yeah.
John McAllister: I typed it in, I wasn't going to press return, and somehow now I pressed return. And so, the guy, one of the opponents goes ... Oh God, it pissed me off. I'm like-
Brian Platnick: Well, okay, before you get pissed off at that, even if they said something obnoxious, you're the one who did something inappropriate first.
John McAllister: I know. I know.
Brian Platnick: So, that's my rule. It's like when someone complains, they call the director for whatever, it's like, well, you didn't explain your bid properly. So, even if you think it didn't matter, don't blame the guy for calling the director.
John McAllister: Ah, yeah.
Brian Platnick: It's fine, you call the director. So, you shouldn't have done that-
John McAllister: No, it's true.
Brian Platnick: ... not a big deal. Maybe the guy reacted worse than he should, he or she should have, whatever. But I think that's somewhere you should give the person a bit of slack, and then just say, I apologize.
John McAllister: I know, I should have said it. I couldn't bring-
Brian Platnick: Actually, Michael Rosenberg called me-
John McAllister: I couldn't bring myself to do that. It's too hard.
Brian Platnick: Michael Rosenberg called me out at the table a couple tournaments ago for playing too slowly on defense, when I was just following suit to something, like signaling. And he gave me some shit, and he was 100% correct. You try to play in tempo, especially in a signaling situation, playing in tempo, if you're just following with a low card. And I didn't, I kind of fumbled a bit before I played whatever. It made it obvious that I was giving it whatever signal, and he was right to call me out on it. It was just like one of these things where you just, you don't mean to do it, but you do it sometimes. And I try not to, and he's right, and I'm glad he called me out because he's 100% right, and that was not a good thing. Not good. Everyone other than Michael and Kevin … Kevin has very good tempo on defense things, he's very good, very good tempo on things.
John McAllister: I want to share, I said, "Kevin, do you have any …" I reached out to him. "Kevin, do you have any anecdotes or something you could tell me about your partnership with Brian?" And he said, this is the entirety of his response, "He brought some nice breakfast during the summer NABC in Chicago, like fresh fruit and pastries."
Brian Platnick: That's true, I was driving in from home, and I went to the farmer's market here in Evanston beforehand, and brought in a bunch of stuff for him and his peeps, and whoever. That's funny.
John McAllister: I asked Hampson the same question, he said, you're going to like this, "Only that he is one of the best teammates that I've ever had."
Brian Platnick: Wow.
John McAllister: Yeah.
Brian Platnick: That's nice to hear from Hampson. Does that mean I was too intimidated to ever give him shit for anything? No, but I think part of it is the attitude of just because I wouldn't have made this bid doesn't mean it's a... Not picking on everything people do. You're there to win, playing fairly, of course, so why give people a hard time? JD would always... We got into it a few times, but.
John McAllister: Your brother David, who I talked to, he said, I asked him, "Any particular questions I should ask Brian?" He said, "You could ask him about how his ideas on bridge have evolved over the years." And then he said, "He also loves talking about EDGAR, his bridge cheating [inaudible 01:12:34]"
Brian Platnick: Exactly. Yes.
John McAllister: And then, I spoke to your mom on the phone yesterday, she was very clear, "This is about Brian, this is not about me," but she had a bunch of stuff that she shared.
Brian Platnick: Yeah, my sister always joked that my mom, everything is always in the frame, she puts everything within the frame room, like her. She puts herself in the situation. I have a joke about that, that I said to my kids once, but I'm not going to say it on here. She often... Yeah, but she looks at things through how she would do things... She puts herself in everything, I guess.
John McAllister: Your mother?
Brian Platnick: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's kind of funny.
John McAllister: Oh, well she was-
Brian Platnick: That's what she said. "I know this is about him and not about me." So, she was trying to remind herself.
John McAllister: She was very clear. Yeah.
Brian Platnick: She was reminding herself of that. It's kind of funny.
John McAllister: Yeah. She told me about how you had some guy who was like a 70-year-old, when you first got your driver's license, you would go pick him up and drive 40 minutes to play at the club.
Brian Platnick: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Growing up in Bluefield, West Virginia, there were some games in town, but I was in high school so I couldn't really play. But there were some evening games in a few places that were 40, 45 minutes away. So, often, there's the neighboring town of Princeton, and so people would meet in the parking lot there, they'd arrange ahead of time, and all sit and drive together, and then come back. And so, one of the first times, when I got my driver's license, so this guy who I played with, Doug... He was like a grandfather to me, he was this older guy, he was a funny guy. And he just moved over, he said, "I don't see too good at night," and I was like... So, I would drive his car. There's one woman who had a Mercedes, who had me drive her car. And I was driving our Chevrolet piece of shit, we didn't have... My dad wouldn't let me drive the new Chevy Citation. And I'm like, so-and-so lets me drive her Mercedes, and I drive so-and-so's brand new Saab.
So, I was always kind of nervous. But this guy, I remember once, this guy, Doug, he was a 70-year-old guy, pretty good player for... I learned a lot from him when I was a young up-and-coming player. And we were playing against someone, husband and wife pair, and this woman started giving the guy hell for something stupid. And she was right, she was a much better... And she was like, "You're a fucking idiot." And he just said, "You know, Ma'am, I've only heard language like that in two places. One was in a whorehouse, and the other was when I was in the Navy. You never were in the military, were you?"
And another thing he did that's only funny when you're a 16-year-old high school kid like me, is we were playing in a local sectional, an hour away or something, probably on a team with my mom, I don't even remember. And someone had been to a regional, and had one of the plastic convention card holders, looking all cool. Which, most of the club players didn't. And they had a convention card, multicolored, it was five different colors of things, really done... He picked up the convention card, and says, "Look, guys," he says, "I'll have two cheeseburgers and some fries." And I don't know why, but to the 16-year-old me, that was the funniest comment.
John McAllister: This is the guy Doug, Doug said that?
Brian Platnick: Yes. Yeah, he was...
John McAllister: Oh man.
Brian Platnick: He was my first good bridge partner, other than my mom or my brother.
John McAllister: Right.
Brian Platnick: But yeah.
John McAllister: I asked David when you were better than him, he said when he went to college. Is that right? Is that what he said? I don't know. Anyway. Well, this has been super fun, man, I've really enjoyed it.
Brian Platnick: Thanks. Good luck with your professional career as a player.
John McAllister: Thanks, man.
Brian Platnick: Maybe I'll hire you sometime.
John McAllister: Yeah, I've got a ton of availability, as it turns out. All right, this is a lot of fun, man, I appreciate it. I'll be in touch when we're ready to ... When it's published.
Brian Platnick: All right, thanks.
John McAllister: All right, man. Thank you.
Brian Platnick: All right. Bye-bye.
John McAllister: Bye.