The Fisher and Schwartz cheating scandal in bridge
Chicago, United States, 2015
This case is a work of fiction. The characters, names, places and events in the game do not portray real people. The account below is a factual summary, based on public sources, of the case that served as inspiration.
In August 2015, in the quarterfinals of the Spingold, one of the main team tournaments of North American bridge, held in Chicago, the team of Norwegian Boye Brogeland lost by 1 IMP to the team of sponsor Jimmy Cayne, after an appeal that cost him 2 IMPs. On the winning team played the Israeli pair Lotan Fisher and Ron Schwartz, who the previous year had won the same trophy alongside Brogeland himself.
Brogeland spent the following day reviewing the vugraph recordings, the card-by-card broadcast of the main tables, and concluded that the pair was cheating. At the end of the month he created a website and made the accusation in public. In September, Swedish player Per-Ola Cullin, analysing videos of the 2014 European Team Championships in Croatia, proposed how the code worked: after the auction, the board was taken out of the tray and left in different spots on the table, in view of the partner on the other side of the screen, to indicate strength in a suit. On 5 September, Israel withdrew its team from that year's Bermuda Bowl.
Sources
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher_and_Schwartz_cheating_scandal
- npr.org/2015/09/28/444236958/top-bridge-players-withdraw-from-bermuda-bowl-amid-cheating-scandal
- telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/11824257/International-bridge-champions-accuse-teammates-of-cheating.html
- newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/07/the-cheating-problem-in-professional-bridge
In the game
Table Corner
Chicago, an August Friday in 2015, 11 pm. In the ballroom of a lakeside hotel, the bridge tables are still cut in half by wooden screens, with the trays resting underneath.
The two always denied it and said they had passed a polygraph test. In May 2016, the European Bridge League suspended them for five years from all its competitions and banned them from ever playing together. In July, the North American league expelled them for collusive cheating and stripped titles and points, including the 2014 Spingold. In August, an Israeli ethics committee found them guilty of signalling by the position of the board and, in February 2017, the Israeli federation banned them permanently.
