The Latest Entry Into the Cheating Hall of Fame
(SDL)
If you like cheating, you have to love British rugby player Tom Williams’s ploy last week.
Apparently there is a rule in rugby, as in soccer, that once a substitution is made to take a player out of the match, that player can’t return to the game. The exception to this rule is “blood injuries,” in which case a player can come off until the bleeding is stopped and then return to play.
Tom Williams suffered just such a blood injury at a very critical moment of a recent match. I don’t know anything about rugby, but his team was down by a point and they had some sort of drop-kicking specialist on the sidelines and it was the perfect time for him to come in and try a kick that would give the lead to Williams’s team, the Harlequins.
The trouble began when Williams left the field looking a bit too happy, considering the large quantities of blood pouring from his mouth. One might have written this off to his being a rugby player, but apparently even rugby players get cross when smashed in the mouth. This led to an investigation. Eventually, television footage revealed that Williams had pulled a capsule of theatrical blood out of his sock and bitten into it in order to produce the faked injury.
A brilliant idea, but alas, in the end not only did Williams get suspended, but his substitute missed the kick and the Harlequins lost the game by a single point.
Is Cheating Good for Sports?
(SJD)
That was the question I found myself asking while reading through the Times sports section in recent days. I understand that we are sort of between seasons here. The Super Bowl is over, baseball has yet to begin, the NBA is slogging through its long wintry slog, and the NHL—well, I just don’t care much about hockey, sorry.
In any case, this is plainly not a peak time of year for professional sports. But still: it is amazing how many sports articles have nothing to do with the games themselves, but rather the cheating that surrounds the games. Andy Pettitte apologizes to his teammates and Yankees fans for using HGH, and reveals that his friendship with Roger Clemens is strained . . . Clemens pulls out of an ESPN event so he doesn’t cause “a distraction” . . . there are drug-testing articles about Alex Rodriguez, Miguel Tejada, and Éric Gagné.
And that’s just baseball! You can also read about Bill Belichick’s denial of taping opponents’ practices and the continuing tale of doping cyclists. There are a few NBA articles, too (though nothing lately about refs’ gambling), and soccer (though nothing lately on match fixing), but by and large, the sports section that arrives each morning feels more like a cheating section.
Maybe, however, this is just how we like it. As much as we profess to like the games for the games’ sake, perhaps cheating is part of the appeal, a natural extension of sport that people condemn on moral grounds but secretly embrace as what makes sports most compelling. For all the talk of how cheating “destroys the integrity of the game,” maybe that’s not true at all? Perhaps cheating actually adds a layer of interest—a cat-and-mouse element, a detective-story element—that complements the game? Or maybe cheating is just another facet of the win-at-all-costs drive that makes a great athlete great? As the famous sports adage goes: “If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying.”
Also, we love to applaud cheaters who have confessed their ways. Pettitte, for instance, got a hero’s welcome for talking about his HGH mistakes; Clemens, meanwhile, with every further denial seems to be soaking up ill will like a sponge. Just as the theological concept of the Resurrection is so powerful, and just as a harsh winter is followed by an insistent spring, I wonder if our interest in sport, too, springs eternal, not in spite of the cheating scandals but because of them?
Should We Just Let the Tour de France Dopers Dope Away?
(SJD)
Now that virtually every cyclist in the Tour de France has been booted for doping, is it time to consider a radical rethinking of the doping issue?
Is it time, perhaps, to come up with a pre-approved list of performance-enhancing agents and procedures, require the riders to accept full responsibility for whatever long-term physical and emotional damage these agents and procedures may produce, and let everyone ride on a relatively even keel without having to ban the leader every third day?
If the cyclists are already doping, why should we worry about their health? If the sport is already so gravely compromised, why should we pretend it hasn’t been? After all, doping in the Tour is nothing new. According to an MSNBC.com article, it was cycling that introduced the sports world to doping:
The history of modern doping began with the cycling craze of the 1890s and the six-day races that lasted from Monday morning to Saturday night. Extra caffeine, peppermint, cocaine and strychnine were added to the riders’ black coffee. Brandy was added to tea. Cyclists were given nitroglycerine to ease breathing after sprints. This was a dangerous business, since these substances were doled out without medical supervision.
How We Would Fight Steroids If We Really Meant It
(SDL)
Aaron Zelinsky, a student at Yale Law School, has proposed an interesting three-prong anti-steroid strategy for Major League Baseball:
1. An independent laboratory stores urine and blood samples for all players, and tests these blood samples ten years, twenty years, and thirty years later using the most up-to-date technology available.
2. Player salaries are paid over a thirty-year interval.
3. A player’s remaining salary would be voided entirely if a drug test ever came back positive.
I’m not sure about points two and three, but there is no question that point one is essential to any serious attempt to combat the use of illegal performance enhancers. The state of the art in performance enhancement is the best set of techniques that cannot be detected using current technology. So, by definition, the most sophisticated dopers will evade detection, unless they are unlucky or make a mistake.
The threat of future improvements in testing technology is the most potent weapon available in this fight, because the user can never know for certain that the doping he does today won’t be simple to detect a decade from now. Retrospective testing of samples attributed to Lance Armstrong suggest that he used EPO, which was not detectable at the time. The circumstances surrounding this test were sort of murky (the identification of the sample as Armstrong’s was indirect, and it was also unclear why these samples were being tested in the first place), so the Tour de France champion didn’t pay the price (at the time) that he would have if formal testing at later intervals had been a standard policy.
The athletes most likely to be deterred by this sort of policy are the superstars who have the most to lose if their long-term legacy becomes tarnished. Presumably, it is doping by superstars that is of the greatest concern to fans.
Zelinsky has provided a measuring stick against which we can see how serious Major League Baseball, or any other sport, is about fighting illegal performance enhancers: if the league adopts a policy of storing blood and urine samples for future testing, it is serious. Otherwise, it is not serious.
How Not to Cheat
(SDL)
Let’s say you discover an old lamp and rub it, and out comes a genie offering to grant you a wish. You are greedy and devious, so you wish for the ability, whenever you play online poker, to see all the cards that the other players are holding. The genie grants your wish.
What would you do next?
If you were a total idiot, you would do exactly what some cheaters on the website Absolute Poker appear to have done recently. Playing at the very highest-stakes games, they allegedly played every hand as if they knew every card that the other players had. They folded hands at the end that no normal player would fold, and they raised with hands that were winners but would seem like losers if you didn’t know the opponents’ cards. They won money at a rate that was about a hundred times faster than a good player could reasonably expect to win.
Their play was so anomalous that,
within a few days, they were discovered.
What did they do next?
Apparently, they played some more, now playing worse than anyone has ever played in the history of poker—in other words, trying to lose some of the money back so things didn’t look so suspicious. One hand history shows that the players called a bet at the end when their two hole cards were two-three and had not paired the board: there was literally no hand that they could beat!
I don’t know whether these cheating allegations are true, because all the information I am getting is thirdhand. The poker players I’ve talked to all believe it to be true. Regardless, I bet these guys wish they had it to do over. If they had just been smart about it, they could have milked this gig forever, winning at reasonable rates. For the stakes they were playing, they could have gotten very rich, and their scheme would have been nearly undetectable.
(Note that I say nearly undetectable, because while that poker site probably never would have detected them, I am working with a different online poker site to develop a set of tools for catching cheaters. Even if these guys were careful, we would catch them.)
A FEW WEEKS LATER . . .
The Absolute Poker Cheating Scandal Blown Wide Open
(SDL)
I recently blogged about allegations of cheating at an online poker site called Absolute Poker. While things looked awfully suspicious, there wasn’t quite a smoking gun, and it was unclear exactly how the cheater might have cheated.
A combination of some incredible detective work by some poker players and an accidental (?) data leak by Absolute Poker have blown the scandal wide open.
The firsthand account can be found at 2+2 Poker Forum, and The Washington Post has followed up with an extensive report, but here’s the short version:
Some opponents became suspicious of how a certain player was playing. He seemed to know what the opponents’ hole cards were. The suspicious players provided examples of these hands, which were so outrageous that virtually all serious poker players were convinced that cheating had occurred. One of the players who’d been cheated requested that Absolute Poker provide hand histories from the tournament (which is standard practice for online sites). In this case, Absolute Poker “accidentally” did not send the usual hand histories, but instead sent a file that contained all sorts of private information that the poker site would never release. The file contained every player’s hole cards, observations of the tables, and even the IP addresses of every person playing. (I put “accidentally” in quotes because the mistake seems like too great a coincidence when you learn what followed.) I suspect that someone at Absolute knew about the cheating and how it happened, and was acting as a whistle-blower by sending these data. If that is the case, I hope whoever “accidentally” sent the file gets their proper hero’s welcome in the end.
Then the poker players went to work analyzing the data—not the hand histories themselves, but other, more subtle information contained in the file. What these players-turned-detectives noticed was that, starting with the third hand of the tournament, there was an observer who watched every subsequent hand played by the cheater. (For those of you who don’t know much about online poker, anyone who wants can observe a particular table, although, of course, the observers can’t see any of the players’ hole cards.) Interestingly, the cheater folded the first two hands before this observer showed up, then did not fold a single hand before the flop for the next twenty minutes, and then folded his hand pre-flop when another player had a pair of kings as hole cards! This sort of cheating went on throughout the tournament.
So the poker detectives turned their attention to this observer. They traced the observer’s IP address and account name to the same set of servers that host Absolute Poker, and also, apparently, to a particular individual who seems to be employed by Absolute Poker! If all of this is correct, it shows exactly how the cheating would have transpired: an insider at the website had real-time access to all of the hole cards (it is not hard to believe that this capability would exist) and was relaying this information to an outside accomplice.
Online poker is a game of trust—players send their money to a site believing that they will be playing a fair game, and trusting that the site will send them their winnings. If there is even a little bit of uncertainty about either one of those factors, there is no good reason for a player to choose that site over the many close substitutes that exist. If I ran Absolute Poker, I would take a lesson from past corporate attempts at cover-ups, sacrifice the cheaters, and institute safeguards to prevent this ever happening again.
The real lesson of this all, however, is probably the following: guys who aren’t that smart will figure out ways to cheat. And, with a little luck and the right data, folks who are a lot smarter will catch them doing it.
Update: According to The Washington Post, Absolute Poker ultimately acknowledged it “found a breach in its software and is investigating.” Shortly thereafter, the company “informs players that a high-ranking consultant in its Costa Rica office breached its software and spied on competitors’ hands . . . But in a move that angers players, it refuses to identify the cheater or turn him over to authorities.” Absolute Poker was later fined by a gaming commission but was allowed to keep its license. Meanwhile, according to the Post, “a new cheating scandal surfaces at sister site of Absolute Poker, UltimateBet.com.” UltimateBet would later acknowledge insider cheating and pay more than $6 million in refunds—but, again, it was allowed to pay a fine and keep its license.
Tax Cheats or Tax Idiots?
(SJD)
Neither Tom Daschle nor Nancy Killefer will be joining the Obama administration. Their nominations were both undone by their failure to pay taxes. Tim Geithner, meanwhile, was recently confirmed at treasury secretary despite his own tax failures.
Good God: What does it say about the U.S. tax code that people like Geithner, Daschle, and Killefer haven’t properly paid their taxes?
(By “people like” them, I mean people who are smart and accomplished, have been through many application and vetting processes in their careers, and above all have reason to comply with tax paying.)
Here, let’s make it a quiz:
a. If all three of them were intentionally cheating (and getting away with it until high-level scrutiny), then it’s much too easy to cheat on taxes.
b. If all of them made honest mistakes, then the tax code simply isn’t working.
c. If there’s some combination of cheating and mistakes, then it’s too easy to cheat and the tax code isn’t working.
I’d vote for C. We once wrote a column about tax cheating which included this passage:
The first thing to remember is that the IRS doesn’t write the tax code. The agency is quick to point its finger at the true villain: “In the United States, the Congress passes tax laws and requires taxpayers to comply,” its mission statement says. “The IRS role is to help the large majority of compliant taxpayers with the tax law, while ensuring that the minority who are unwilling to comply pay their fair share.”
So the IRS is like a street cop or, more precisely, the biggest fleet of street cops in the world, who are asked to enforce laws written by a few hundred people on behalf of a few hundred million people, a great many of whom find these laws too complex, too expensive and unfair.
Maybe the gross embarrassment over these high-profile tax failures will at least spur some tax-code sanity—like the Simple Return, promoted by the economist Austan Goolsbee, who has Obama’s ear.
People like Daschle wouldn’t fill out the Simple Return, but it might free up the IRS to catch tax violations before the Senate confirmation hearings flush them out.
Have D.C.’s “Best Schools” Been Cheating?
(SDL)
A USA Today investigation found what appears to be compelling evidence of teacher cheating in Washington, D.C., schools that were heralded as major successes due to test-score increases. The smoking gun: too many erasures resulting in answers being changed from wrong to r
ight. The numbers are so extreme that they do seem to indicate that massive cheating occurred. Not surprisingly, the school district is none too eager to investigate—especially because teachers at the schools were given big bonuses as rewards for the test-score improvement. Though on Tuesday, acting D.C. schools chancellor Kaya Henderson did request a review.
When Brian Jacob and I investigated teacher cheating in Chicago schools, which we described in Freakonomics, we didn’t use erasure analysis. Rather, we developed new tools for identifying strings of unlikely answers.
You might ask why we didn’t use erasures, when it is such an obvious approach. The answer: unlike the D.C. schools, the Chicago schools did not farm out grading of the test exams to a third party. What got the D.C. schools in trouble is that the third party routinely analyzed erasure patterns. The internal group that scored the exams in Chicago did not routinely look for erasures; that was only done when there were suspicions about particular classrooms.
Conveniently, there was an acute shortage of storage space in the Chicago warehouse where the test forms were graded. This, of course, necessitated that all the actual test forms be destroyed and disposed of shortly after the test was administered.
When to Rob a Bank: ...And 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants Page 11