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Hello.
You probably recognize my face.
Let me introduce myself in another role.
Not as the actor,
but Omar Sharif the bridge player.
In recent years,
my partners have included
not only great players
but famous people,
royalty, cabinet ministers,
famous entertainers.
From my perspective,
nobody cool doesn't play bridge.
Like everyone who plays bridge is super cool
so cool
that people don't even understand it.
When I play bridge
I feel that I maximize my talent.
You're earning a lot of money.
You're living the life.
You're traveling a lot,
hanging out with the richest people in the world.
Bill Gates, Warren Buffett.
People told me I can be a good programmer.
I can be a good financial analyzer.
But to be the best in bridge in the world,
only one.
Yes,
it's me.
He was great.
For his generation,
he may be the best bridge player in the world.
He could have been,
the next Michael Jordan of bridge.
He was that good.
They just kept winning major events, him and his partner
on whatever team they played
almost to the point, it was kind of unbelievable
such a young pair, winning everything.
They were the new stars,
all the way they were like in the front seat.
Nobody could touch them.
They were at the top.
They had everything you could want in bridge.
They were making great money.
They were winning all kinds of things.
What more could you want?
[Crowd cheering]
They were accused by another player
on another team of cheating.
I see people the writing that he's a cheater,
he is a cheater, he is a cheater.
They put it inside my head.
It was all coming to a boil.
There was too much cheating going on.
And it had to stop.
Like the shit had to hit the fan.
I didn't cheat,
but I brought it on myself.
Bridge is all my life.
They took my baby, they took half of me.
I cannot forgive for that.
I came from a family who liked sports.
My father was a soccer goalkeeper,
and my mom, she was a basketball player.
And me, I wasn't into bridge at all.
When I was about 11 years old,
I saw two girls from my class
and I was asking them where are you going?
They told me, "We are going to the mall.
Then we're going to a bridge lesson."
One of them I really liked.
So I was trying to make some impression,
I decided, okay I want to go to the bridge lesson.
So I went up to the lesson, I entered,
we were learning a little bit about the rules
and then we started to play.
He was shocked.
He told me, "Go out! Come with me out."
I thought he was going to kill me or something.
Maybe he thought I'm cheating or something,
I didn't know.
And of course he was speaking to my father
and my father told him,
"No way, my son will not play cards.
He's playing handball.
He's playing soccer, no way."
"I can make him number one in the world."
He said it.
When I see numbers, phone number, credit card,
I close my eyes I can see it.
I can see how you wrote it.
I can hear your voice when you told it to me
there is no way I will forget it.
So basically this is how my memory works, yes.
It was the 20th of January, 2005.
I was playing some tournament in Israel.
When I went to the main table to take a board,
I probably took it very quickly
because I was excited about the match, we played very well.
And then when I took the board, one of the notes
which was on the top fell on the floor.
So I picked it up from the floor,
I didn't look, I hold it in my hand,
I put the board on the table
and I was sitting on my right hand
which holds the note.
And my right opponent,
he saw that I'm holding something in my hand
before I even had the chance to say something,
he got crazy, he started to shout.
He started to call me some names.
He called the director
and he said that I'm holding something in my hand.
They told me, "Okay, just stand up.
We wanna see what do you hold in your hand."
I was crying.
I wanted to tell my story.
I wanted to explain what happened.
I just freezed out.
I had an ethic committee,
I said that I had no intention to take it.
And I had no intention to look.
I took responsibility
and I admitted that I could behave a little more wisely,
when it fell on the floor
to call immediately to the director.
Everybody knew that it was something that
I didn't try to hide it or something like this.
They decided that I didn't cheat
but I might had some intention to.
And I was suspended for two years for that.
That is very, very heavy penalty.
They said it's because I'm young.
And because I have to learn how to behave.
When you watch a really good ballet dancer,
it's this fabulous image, a mirage almost, right?
And that's what good bridge is.
It takes anyone a very long time to kind of
grasp the brilliance of the game.
Not you, you're not brilliant.
The game itself is so fantastic, really.
Do you play bridge?
I don't play bridge- -You don't play bridge.
Well, you have to learn to play.
Welcome to the magical world of bridge.
It's actually an extremely complicated game
requiring decades to master.
Our system will be five card majors,
all jumps by responder forcing.
Stayman, blackwood, and weak two-bids.
This means two clubs will be the old--.
But we really don't have time for that.
So here's all you need to know
in order to not look stupid in front of your friends.
Step one, you're dealt a hand of 13 cards.
The goal in bridge is to win the most rounds
holding the highest card.
Here, for example,
the lucky bastard holding the ace has won the round.
Winning a round is called a trick.
Step two, you and your partner sitting across you
must declare how many tricks you're going to win together
and what's your strongest suit.
One spade.
We call this a contract.
Now here come a gazillion more rules
that have nothing to do with our story.
So let's just forget them all together.
Oh, wait a sec.
There is one rule you must remember.
When playing bridge, you can't just ask your partner
if he's got some diamonds.
In fact, you can't talk to him at all.
No coughing, no winking,
hell, you can't even kick him under the table.
Illegally communicating with your partner
is the one mortal sin of bridge.
That pretty much sums it up,
cheerio.
So I didn't play bridge for two years,
but always in my mind,
I knew that I want to go back and play bridge.
It was already inside my blood.
After I came back from the suspension,
I wanted to play professionally and I needed a partner.
Everybody had a partner already
and Ron was the one to be available.
So I offered him to play together.
At the beginning of our partnership
when I was very, very confident,
some people will say arrogant,
I used to be very aggressive.
I'm looking for someone to be perfect
as I thought I am,
and it's impossible.
I remember after one tournament, he told me I quit.
I don't wanna play with you anymore.
And I needed to apologize.
And then we played again.
I told him I will never do it again.
I did it again even worse than that.
I made him cry a million times.
It's terrible to play with me,
but with time he got stronger
and I was trying to be more calm,
we improved as partners.
If you want to be good, you have to put a lot of effort.
We were practicing 10, 12, 15 hours a day.
And once we started to think about the game the same
and we understood each others' thoughts about the game,
it was very difficult to stop us.
They won the Cavendish.
They won the most prestigious European championship.
And they won the main tournaments in the USA
some of the biggest that even
some of the players ranked in the top 20 players
in the world have never won in their life,
and are dreaming of winning,
they had won already two or three at their age.
Here we have a Lotan Fisher.
One of the young star players of Israel.
They just kept winning major events,
him and his partner.
It seemed like they never lost almost.
They were considered
one of the very best partnerships in the world.
And they were in all of the bridge magazines
on the covers of the bridge magazines.
And they were famous, yeah.
Me and my partner had a very nice defense
at the first day of the tournament
the declarant was very surprised
when my partner won with the queen.
It was nice.
When I play bridge, I see nothing than that.
This is something that is in my blood.
The game takes out of me,
the best part of me.
I think he liked winning.
And I think he liked being right,
and I think he liked being smarter,
and I think he liked being better.
You just sort of felt that way by looking at him
just the way he walked around and carried himself
that he seemed arrogant.
Like he had an "I'm better then you" kind of look to him.
You can tell at a young age, he was very full of himself.
Like you need to be the best.
You're smarter than everyone
because they're idiots and you're a genius.
This is gonna sound very, very fucked up.
But if you invest too much
in the idea of other people adoring you
or liking you or loving you,
you're never gonna win.
You're never gonna get anywhere.
And this is the best lesson in the world playing bridge
because it's not about others approving.
It's a little bit arrogant,
but I don't want to compromise
and to be one out of thousands programmers,
one out of thousands financial analyzers.
I want to be the best, the best in the world.
And the winners of the Gold medal
is the team of Israel.
[Crowd cheering]
I remember I spoke to our sponsor Richie Schwartz,
and he said, oh, he had this new team from Israel.
They had really good results.
So that's, to me, sounded like really good idea.
So I remember speaking to Lotan on the phone
on Richie's phone.
And I was like wow.
I knew Boye from books.
I knew Boye from stories.
He was a big star in the bridge world
and he offered us to join his team.
We just said, yes.
We were just waiting for that chance.
What I remember was that Lotan, he was very keen on playing
on that team with us with me and my partner Espen.
I was calling my friends and my parents,
my girlfriend, I told everybody that Boye called me.
I think he's one of the biggest talents in bridge.
Top top player to me.
From the first moment we became good friends.
In 2013, 2014,
when we were playing on the Richie Schwartz team,
we had an amazing run,
[Crowd cheering] we won three nationals.
We won a lot of European events.
We played well.
You are very young.
You're earning a lot of money, staying in expensive hotels,
going to expensive restaurants,
hanging out with the most richest people in the world.
They're like your friends,
at some way they are admiring you,
your bridge skills and they're coming to you
to ask you questions
and they want you to be part of their team.
If you're a very good bridge player,
you can be pretty rich, you get paid
over 2000 bucks a day,
just playing bridge, travel around.
If you're extremely good, making a six figure salary
is not that difficult to do as a professional player
and the best ones making half a million dollars a year.
There's a lot of money at stake here.
The difference between being one of the top pairs
in the world and just being pretty good
is worth tens, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
So there's definitely a financial incentive
to win at all costs.
This is something very, very good,
but could be very dangerous.
In 2015, we got another offer from Jimmy Cayne.
He called us and he said, "I'm Jimmy Cayne."
And when he said it
I already knew he is Jimmy Cayne.
James Cayne, a notorious CEO of Bear Stearns
was worth more than a billion dollars
but it all came crashing down,
when Bear Stearns subprime investment bubble burst in 2007
critics claim that while Bear Stearns was burning up,
Cayne was literally playing bridge.
It was a big compliment for us to get an offer from Jimmy.
And I knew that we're gonna be his.
Boye was a little bit angry with me.
He felt that he was the one to deserve
to get this kind of offer.
It's a better offer and better money, better teammates.
He said, I played 10, 15 years more than those guys.
"When they didn't know how to hold cards,
I was already been Bermuda Bowl champion.
How come they get it?"
I felt really bad.
First for him.
Second for our friendship.
Third for me, my partner.
No matter what is going to happen with this story,
things are not going to be the same again.
Mike Benson live from the 2015 Spingold.
We've had some intense days here in Chicago
featuring a record number of over 10,000 players
and 64 international teams.
I remember, on the way to Chicago,
I was very excited.
The whole flight, you talk about bridge.
My heart was pumping.
We had a lot of pressure on our shoulders.
You're gonna see 10,000 players
the best players in the world,
and you're gonna compete against them.
As higher that you get in the stages
your opponents gonna be
tougher and tougher and tougher and tougher.
Ex-world champions, ex-nationals champions.
This guy won the national 14 times.
This guy 20 times, no matter where you go
you see champions, champions, champions around you.
You have to bleed if you want to survive.
On Spingold, you start a round of 64
and you're gonna play the whole day.
And then you qualify for the 32 and 16 and 8.
You're bleeding and bleeding.
And I already saw that if we are going to qualify
for the quarters, there is a chance
that we are going to play against Boye Brogeland.
It's all coming down to the quarter finals
with the eight top ranking teams fighting
for their spots in the semis.
All eyes are on the Cayne and Schwartz knockouts tomorrow
where title holder Lotan Fisher and Boye Brogeland
are facing each other for the first time as opponents,
right here in Chicago.
The Cayne team that Lotan and Ron had gone to
and our team we both reached quarter final.
And then this quarter final,
we are actually going to play each other.
That night before the match against them,
that's the only thing that people were talking about.
The two had a fantastic last season
playing alongside for Richie Schwartz.
But now Brogeland and Fisher
are in a showdown for a place in the finals.
It was like a match to decide who is bigger
LeBron or Michael Jordan.
I felt like all my body, like
you know...
I remember that I looked at myself in the mirror
and I shouted, "Showtime baby.
It's showtime baby,
now it's time to prove yourself."
When I play bridge,
I feel like I'm fighting in the ring boxing.
Fisher and Schwartz walking a tightrope
as they declare a contract of five no trump.
Sees someone who's very sharp.
His eyes shining,
like he's not going to give up
A very interesting kickoff
with Lotan leading with the king of diamonds.
I think it's very interesting
how something as unimportant in a way as a card game,
how deeply it can get rooted in yourself.
Playing a hand
and knowing that I played that hand perfectly.
That's the greatest excitement for me.
And Boye is back in business,
as he tackles this three hearts contract
with a finesse made in heaven.
So one of the things that you you need to do
is to analyze the situation
and you need to calculate it very quickly.
And this is something that people think that I'm the best.
Lotan just throwing a hail Mary
as he plays a seven heart
just to be saved by his partner's ace.
I mean, sometimes they don't understand as well
how my brain works, 'cause people like to think that
bridge is only about math.
You cannot use any instincts
and you cannot use any reading of the situation
which I don't agree.
An absolutely remarkable move.
You have so many choices to make in bridge.
When you make choices of the choices of the choices
and you play day after day after day
it's very easy that you make mistakes.
You sit there and you know you made like a silly mistake.
It's a really emotional game.
You know that it's really hurting.
You feel it to your bone.
Another gutsy play by Fisher-Schwartz
making bold moves that turn out paying off big time.
The two teams are headed for collision
under now, just pounding each other.
It becomes a very very tough match,
like very tight much.
And you start getting tired.
That was ruthless,
Lotan dropping the ball here as he loses this contract.
It will come down to single digits,
as both Fisher and Brogeland refuse to give up their place
in the semis.
And it's finally over.
Both teams are now holding their breath
as the tournament directors calculate the final score.
What always frightens me,
is the day that I will feel that I get worse
that I'm not on top of my game anymore.
The day I really realized now it's just downhill from here.
and that will be extremely tough.
At this moment, we're still waiting for the results
of the last matches in the final round
of the open teams.
After 12 hours of playing bridge with high pressure
the score was 159, 158.
We lost by one IMP.
I believe.
Gutting. Gutting.
There's no smallest margin than that.
That happens maybe once in 1000 matches
I felt so bad.
First tournament I'm losing on the quarterfinals
and not just losing on the quarterfinals for being unlucky
or whatever it is.
I'm losing to Boye Brogeland.
It was very interesting match.
And I thought we played like me and my partner,
I thought we played great,
it was really one of our best matches.
Good luck, guys. -Thank you very much.
He was so excited, he was so happy.
He went out like high five
every person he saw,
he was so proud of himself,
but he didn't know one thing.
In our table, we called to the director
about some move that our opponents made
that we thought that might
change some decision in the game.
And that might change the all result of the match.
And we went to the appeal committee.
Our teammates told me that they never won an appeal before
all the time they were playing for 50 years,
they lost the European Championship, World Champions
all the tournaments because of appeals.
I told them, you never played with Lotan Fisher.
I'm going to appeal.
The appeals committee is in a tough spot.
No one wants to have to decide the fate
of a match like that.
I was away from the table.
So this appeal now goes on about midnight.
I think the final result I think is about
1:30 in the middle of the night,
and we wait and suddenly I see Lotan coming out of the room.
The appeal committee decided that we were right
about some of our arguments.
So they decided that we deserved to get two points.
I couldn't believe it.
I just won Boye Brogeland.
We started to shout...
Yes! We won, we won, we won.
I've had a few bad losses in my life,
but that was one of the toughest, and I was so hurt.
I remember just looking at Allan
and Richie we had all played, we all fought,
yeah that felt really, really bad.
So it was 1:30 in the morning
and I couldn't sleep because I was so gutted.
And I said, okay,
I'll go and have a look at the other table,
how we lost this match.
So I just went to my computer,
and had to look what happened.
And yeah, I just scrolled through and look at some,
and that was strange.
There was a hand where it was so clear in my view.
And I think that of the top hundred players in the world
at least 99 would have led a heart.
But Ron, led something else,
I said that was strange,
I said why is this happening?
I know how good a player he is.
And that's how it kind of really got started.
We felt that something was astray.
I thought, okay I'll go to the bar.
While I was talking to people and then I met Bobby Levin,
they said, "Oh did you see how they cheated you
"on that board?"
I see this hand, that Lotan Fisher cheats Boye,
so blatantly, it's unbelievable.
And he is going through the hand and furious.
To me, here something was wrong.
An Israeli guy, he asked me, "Oh, have you seen the hand
"under they played against this Dutch pair."
"No, I haven't seen any hand",
"Oh, you should see that hand,
it's clearly, clear that they're cheating."
They mentioned YouTube videos that I could go and look at.
You see Lotan coughing to give certain information to Ron.
Is it cheating?
So you can't have a way of communicating with your partner
that your opponents have no knowledge about.
These are the most important rule about ethics in bridge
and what everybody thinks
that they had a way to communicate
to each other information
the people wouldn't know.
There were rumors about it among expert bridge players
for a long time.
It seemed like everybody knew that these guys were cheating.
When you know they're cheating,
why haven't you done anything?
You must do something when you know they're cheating.
You can't accuse people of cheating
unless you can absolutely prove it.
Let's say I turn to them and go,
"You fucking guys are cheating. You think I don't know it?"
The organizers will immediately ban us from the tournament.
There's too much cheating going on.
And it had to stop.
It had to go outside of the official channels.
Like the shit had to hit the fan.
If other people are not doing, I need to do something.
This cannot continue.
I remember that after we beat Boye on the quarter finals,
he came at the middle of the match to our opponents
and he told them, "You have to withdraw.
You have to stop playing."
It was at the lunch break.
Brogeland came to me, starting to shout at me,
"You're a cheater, cheater.
You know exactly what I'm talking about."
It was almost a fight over there.
I wanted to tell him like, "Boye, the match is over.
We can be friends again, it's over.
You don't have to keep with the trash talk and everything."
And sometimes you just got to do the right thing.
They shouldn't have played there.
They should have been disqualified.
I don't think the organizers realize
how much the players care about fair game.
He went to each bridge player and spoke to him
and told him we have to kick them out.
This is very, very important for the players.
So what is the proof against them?
I saw it just-
When you know you see
Even if other people can't see it,
When you know it yourself,
you investigate it thoroughly and you just know it.
As a bridge player, you know it.
I don't understand cheating in bridge,
I just don't understand.
It's such a darn hard game to learn.
And then you have to learn the game
and then learn how to cheat.
I mean, that just seems impossible to me.
When we lost to Jimmy Cayne's team
that was the quarter-final.
And they went on to playing against the Zimmermann team
in the final.
It had Fantoni and Nunes,
number one, and number two in the world rankings.
And they play Cayne in the final
and Cayne won.
So Lotan and Ron won that tournament.
This Spingold of 2015.
[Crowd cheering]
I see him out in front of a crowd of people.
I go up to him.
I say, "So Lotan, this hand you had the other day.
What were you thinking when you made this play?"
And he couldn't even answer me,
this fast thinking smart guy.
There are many things that I cannot explain.
And this is one of the problems that people
they can't accept it.
Like, why did you do that?
Why did you know to do that and I didn't?
My intuition made me do that
but this is not an answer that people accept.
So I said to him, in front of a lot of people,
"You just proved what a fucking cheat you are."
And he said, "I will sue you for a million dollars."
And I said, "When they find you guilty
you won't be able to collect."
So now, I went back home and I spoke to my wife.
She had talked to Lotan when I was in Chicago
and Lotan said, "Oh Boye's crazy.
"He's accusing me of this and that."
"And I never seen him like this before", Lotan told my wife
she said, "Oh he just needs to calm down a bit
after losing to you,"
or something like that, that he's, yeah.
So we're going back home from Chicago
we know that there is a little buzz.
People are gossiping,
but this is not something we weren't aware before.
People were talking about us all the time.
But every time they were speaking about us for a week
and it's passing, week, passing
and that's what we thought is gonna be this time.
And now, I started trying to get to people that I knew
in the bridge world and saying that this is what's going on,
We need to do something.
The problem here is that everybody denies everything.
Nobody wants to take any blame.
I sent emails,
I phoned really all my contacts in the bridge world.
"It's Boye Brogeland calling here."
"Hi, Steve, it's Boye here."
Have you heard anything from the ACBL or from other people?
I spoke to the federations
to a guy in the European Bridge League.
And his answer to this was that,
"Well, file a complaint. We'll see what we can do."
Well, you need to do something,
we can't have this happening.
The World Championships are coming up in two months
from here in Chennai.
Like we need to stop this before,
we cannot have the World Championships
be tainted by cheats.
Now we have a chance, we have a great chance
Lets get the Israelis and that's fine.
The case with Israelis
that is almost case closed, I would say.
Stop covering up here.
But Bob, speak to them, speak to them
and let's do something that's good for bridge.
I got some people here from a town where I lived.
They helped me.
We were able to set up a site called bridgecheaters.com
where we provided what we thought was information,
but of course it was also
accusations about something illegal going on.
I didn't think of the consequences, really.
I just thought we need to do something
and we know we need to do it now.
First day that we launched the website,
I think we had a 100,000 hits.
I was the Australian captain
played the transnationals in the Netherlands
and our team lost the semifinal to Fisher-Schwartz.
I didn't really think much of it
but when this thing broke with Fisher and Schawrtz from Boye
I went back and I watched the match against our team.
And there were at least 15 hands
where weird things happened.
It was like, man, you're one of the best players I've seen.
You didn't need to cheat.
Like, I didn't know why you would do it.
Like, why would you cheat when you're so good?
There was such an uproar.
It was almost like a revolution.
Top players, medium players
maybe not so good players,
but very keen passionate bridge players
express the same feeling.
Cheating should not be part of a game.
It exploded for sure.
I'm gonna talk about the cheating scandal,
that's been all over the internet.
You know where to look in websites.
So last month, two players that Cayne had hired
for his competitive team.
They were accused by another player on another team
of cheating.
Fisher and Schwartz are denying the charges vigorously,
but the damage has been done for the moment at least.
They're not playing.
Cayne, now 81 is out two top teammates.
And at this point in their season,
it could be hard to replace them.
And he may even have to give back
a big trophy that he won in Chicago, in August.
Few days ago, Mr. Brogeland published
some special gift for me.
He opened a website,
bridgecheaters.com
The greatest scam in the history of bridge.
Basically the whole website is like story of our life
and also Brogeland and is saying that
for the two years he played with us,
people keep telling him, "They are cheaters,
how can you play with them?"
And he's saying that he was checking the hands all the time
and he didn't find anything suspicious.
And still Boye is claiming now,
that we cheated on those hands.
It's easy for me to speak about it. But...
inside my heart,
you have no idea what I'm going through.
It's not so easy.
I'm trying to show business as usual
but it's not like that.
It's very difficult to sleep.
It's in your mind 24/7.
I don't know.
It's not so easy as it looks like.
I got a warning letter from Lotan and Ron.
"Stop all actions on your part which are harmful
including publication of any claim
which is defamatory.
Immediately publish a correction, denial,
and apology on any platform
on which you made the original publications,
including on the designated website."
They write compensation in the sum of $1 million.
It is to be clarified and nothing in this amount
expresses anything other than a small part of damages
and mental anguish which has been caused to me."
To me, this is what's so sad about the whole thing
that we were friends in my view, like good friends.
We were all like one big,
and I hope like a happy family kind of.
So that's also what's so hard when you, like
when you realize that actually your friends
are willing to do this against you.
They're entitled to a process.
I know, but...
Don't you think that I think they are entitled to it?
Absolutely.
But when you know it, you know it.
If someone came into your house
and you saw that guy, you knew him.
It was a friend of yours, okay?
And he stole your things and he went out.
He stole, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
No, no, no, I can't put him in jail.
I'm not putting anybody in jail.
I think that you have because you-
I'm having, how can I?
You have convicted them in a public forum.
You've convicted them.
So you're not entitled when you saw this thief
that you know, you knew it was your neighbor.
I know the process, just go and have a trial.
What do I? I have no power to judge, no power.
But you have judged. -No, I haven't judged.
You have judged in the public arena.
There's a huge difference in today's world.
Hello, Giannarigo how are you?
Are you ready now?
It's impossible to take any sanction
without the decision of a judge.
If found out something got in here, okay,
there's the prosecutor where they can be guilty or you.
I know a 100 precent
maybe you don't know, but I know.
And I understand the game, I can tell you that.
I understand the game, and I know
that these guys have been cheating big time, big time.
You can be as much lawyers as you want to
but if you think that Fisher and Schwartz didn't cheat
then I must say, you don't understand the game.
And the problem here if there is any case,
the decision has to be taken by a judge, a judge.
Why? -Why, because is the law.
My attitude is to say that
if they are cheats, someone sanctions them,
because I can't believe that.
I couldn't believe, I couldn't believe myself.
It's just,
yeah, okay thanks.
Yeah, thank you.
See you later in the week. -Yeah, yeah, yeah, hope so.
When the federations saw how much buzz this created
and saw the uproar by the players,
I think they realized that we need to do something.
And then the day after I got an invitation
from the Israeli Special Committee.
All of them were well known bridge players.
Two of them were lawyers,
they put on the table all the allegations.
Spoke loudly about what is going on.
And I remember one guy of the committee said,
"You two are done with bridge.
The only place that you two can sit in front of each other
is in the restaurant downstairs."
And we we're starting to get ready for a war.
The war of our life.
These two young players come to me
and they say, "Don't believe anything you're going to read.
We didn't cheat."
"Okay, why should I believe you?
They said, "Take us to a lie detector."
I said, "Are you willing to do that?
You know if you're going to fail the lie detector
I would find it very hard to keep on defending you."
They said, "Take us to a lie detector."
So we decided we gonna do it.
It wasn't an easy decision, especially not for Ron.
Because sometimes even when you're correct
if you're very emotional, the results can be different.
So I had to explain him a lot,
that we are innocent and don't worry.
Lotan is a, I mean, I wouldn't trust him
as far as I could far as I could throw him obviously,
he's a fast talking, fast thinking guy,
who is always looking to impress everybody
with his quick talking, quick analysis.
And Ron Schwartz was very soft-spoken, almost didn't speak
like a nitwit.
While Lotan was a gifted player, no question.
Ron is not, not even close.
He wasn't, I don't even know if he was a good player.
You could tell that he just didn't quite have the instinct.
He would every now and then make a play
that we would say no, like it cannot win.
It can only break even at best.
The kind of thing that a real expert player would just not do.
It was the cup in Moscow.
Schwartz lay down contract on the last board
that 99% of player in the top 100 in the world would win.
He made incredible mistake
and went down with the contract on the last board
to give us the title.
Ron Schwartz, he's a terrible bridge player.
It was just impossible
he was winning all those tournaments.
So you ask yourself,
why would a guy like Lotan Fisher
play with a schlub like Ron Schwartz?
Well, there's only one logical conclusion,
here's a guy that's willing to cheat with him.
They were both caught cheating many times in their youth.
Obviously when he was allowed back,
his plan was,
I wanna become rich and famous playing this game.
Who's gonna do this with me?
He needed to find someone he could control the brain of,
saying, I think Ron Schwartz was a perfect victim for this.
What I did to humiliate Ron, was against us
because when I came in front of everybody, shouting at him
and tell everybody how bad he is,
people started to think, "How come he's that bad,
and they are so good together?"
Sometimes I made mistakes as well.
Again, I'm not perfect, I just thought I am.
And my best way to deal with that was shouting at him.
And sometimes he was playing really perfect.
Sometime I was shouting at him for over tricks
for mistakes that didn't even cost us nothing.
But when people saw it, they thought like
how come they are that good?
How come they're so successful?
They must be cheating.
They were asked three questions.
Have you ever at any time received from your partner,
Mr. Schwartz Ron
information during a bridge game by means of coughs?
He answered in the negative.
Have you ever at any time during the bridge game
provided improper or illegal information
to your partner, Mr. Schwartz Ron?
He answered in the negative.
Have you ever at any time,
during a bridge game,
provided improper or illegal information,
by means of a bottle of water?
He answered in the negative.
I remember, I didn't want to think about
what comes up with the results.
The only thing on my mind is to clear my name.
I got a phone call from my lawyer.
He was asking me if I'm alone.
So I told him, wait a second.
And I went out.
And the lawyer told me that we passed it, absolutely.
The results were absolutely,
that they're telling the truth.
I was so ashamed,
so embarrassed about all the situation
because my parents were so proud of me
when I was so successful
and then something like that comes up
and it's in the newspapers and everywhere.
Every place they used to go,
"Oh, your son is a cheater, your son is a cheater."
And we both started to cry.
I don't know.
I don't know that a lie detector test is a 100%.
I've seen situations in my lifetime
where innocent people have failed lie detector tests.
So I don't see why guilty people shouldn't pass them.
Isn't a doubt in my mind
passing the lie detector test doesn't mean a thing to me.
I'm absolutely sure that somehow they cheated that too.
So what happens, more evidence coming every day.
Yeah, yeah, we have more evidence coming every day
because a lot of people like digging into it.
Like everybody can see that they're cheating, like big time.
And what do they have left? The only thing they-
Some people are beside them, but you know-
I don't know about that, I think like 98%.
The information from these hands he had looked at
was not enough.
He had damning hands.
He had lots of stuff.
But in of themselves were not sufficient.
My wife and also friends that I had said,
oh you need to find the evidence.
And to me that wasn't so important.
To me the evidence were clear through the hands,
through all the irrational non-logical
actions that they took.
This is not like proper bridge.
It almost feels like the car is not in the right gear.
It's like we're playing, but we're not,
we're just revving that there's just something wrong
at the table. I can't tell you what it is.
Of course we couldn't prove anything
but we knew they kept doing things
that were impossible.
The hand, that my partner was very upset with him about
was a hand when Lotan led a club,
a correct play based on math would be to play a diamond.
A club was actually a very bad bridge play.
It happened to be right
because his partner had an unusual combination
that made it correct.
How, how is this possible if they weren't cheating?
So we played once or twice with Mr. Alder
and his wife kitty.
And he wrote a column about bridge,
for years for "The New York Times".
And this one time we were playing the hand
and I finessed a card in a certain direction.
And he literally almost started screaming
in the middle of the game.
He's like, "Excuse me, that should not work."
And I was like, "Well, it did, it worked."
And you could see his mind just go
like tha, you know?
But I tried something and it worked
which wasn't supposed to work.
All bridge players do illogical things,
but they also end up most of the time
looking really stupid when they do.
These guys ended up winning world championships
by doing illogical things.
You can almost think about it in the same way
as someone who does too well at the stock market,
they probably know something that they shouldn't.
And one defense could be.
I'm just better than you are.
I'm just smarter.
You don't understand because you're not at my level.
I'm so much better at playing bridge.
Of course, it looks illogical to you, but I'm so good,
you don't even understand my brilliance.
I remember that I was very emotional,
and I came there with heavy feelings.
Even though I felt that the bridge community
are a little bit biased,
I was happy.
I was happy to have the first time
to tell my side of the story.
I remember their face.
They didn't even understand what I'm saying.
Not because I was talking Chinese or something like that,
because they don't even understand the logic,
how I think about the game.
I led the hand because I'm a genius
but he is a cheater.
Hi this is Steve,
please leave a message, thank you.
It's Boye here, I just wondered
if there was any more news about the video footage.
If there's nothing to cover up
then just send those tapes so we can check them with experts
and go over the tapes with experts.
And if I find out that, okay, the tapes are for real,
okay, that's everybody's happy.
We just go, we'll get the Israelis and that's fine.
We all lucked out in that the year before
the European championships had been filmed
for the first time.
What it meant was that for the first time ever,
we had data.
Watching 100 hours of hell is hard work.
And probably it takes a particular character flaw
to enable you to do it.
None of us got paid.
I just, I worked nonstop for the better part of a month
just going through hand after hand after hand and just
getting evidence and looking at what they were doing
and watched thousands of hours of video.
And then when I worked out yet, some of the time,
you had to actually watch in slow motion
to see what was happening.
Some hands we thought there was signaling
but you can get paranoid
at every little thing that players do
and what means something and what doesn't mean something.
And that's where it gets difficult.
Placement of cards on a board, the way things were turned.
To drinking bottle on the table, on the floor.
The way you do with your hands.
The bidding cards wide or narrow.
You can do like this on your shirt or move your watch
or do your fingers.
But if you move the bidding box this way or that way
that could mean something.
If you wanna cheat you can find a way.
Sounds were a big issue we looked at,
sniffles, scratches, coughs.
I suspected that whenever they coughed,
they had a very bad hand.
We were all making fun of it
'cause they were wearing scarves in June
and stuff to pretend that they were ill
but we all knew it was not the case.
All over the world,
I got thousands of emails and phone calls from China,
to Australia, the U.S, Europe.
And we felt, we knew, we didn't know how.
Stopped mowing the lawn, stopped paying the bills
like this, to me, this was going into a kind of a bubble.
I wasn't afraid of losing any, like my money.
They could take my money.
They could take my house, they could take anything.
It was very strange for me
to get a lot of phone calls from Brogeland.
[Phone rings]
During the day he's writing those kinds of stuff.
And then later in the evening he's calling me.
"Hey, Lotan, how are you?
How are you hanging on?
I am not mad at you.
I think you should come up for the game.
You need to do the right thing.
Everybody will appreciate
that you came forward and you admitted."
I hope that he would come out and say,
sorry, guys, we cheated.
And then we can build on something from there.
And they would have to take the certain number of years off.
And hopefully that they could come back
and play a clean game.
Maybe not together, but at least come back.
He would call them and always give them a chance
to come clean and always say, "If you admit what you've done
we would support and help
in whatever influence we may have."
The ACBL encouraged people to come forward
to say, "Hey, if you come forward and admit this,
there will be leniency for you."
To come and say that I cheated in bridge, when I didn't
is like, say
I worth nothing.
Bridge was and still is everything.
I breathe bridge.
I go to sleep bridge.
My whole life is bridge.
And coming up and say that I cheated in something,
which is everything for me,
is like giving up
everything inside me.
He never really admitted anything.
It was still that we were wrong,
and we just put out accusations that were just nothing in it
that we was just making up stuff
destroying their career with this.
To me with this, like with the "Me Too" campaign,
these kinds of things like,
sometimes people need to wake up.
Like we need to see that the culture we have here
is just wrong, we need to do something.
And...
And when the authorities,
when the bridge federations organizations
are not willing to do anything,
what's the alternative?
What alternatives do you have?
I went to a cabin of ours
to try and get some sleep and relax a little bit
because I had been working so many hours.
I just slept like maybe three, four hours a night.
And I couldn't sleep
because I was so gutted and felt really really bad.
There was a Swede with the name of Per-Ola Cullin
that in the middle of the night sent me a text message
saying that, "Wow, I know their code."
The normal thing is to put it in the middle.
So here he puts it very far left.
You could see
that it just couldn't be random placement of the board.
This is huge evidence.
I remember I was crying.
And I phoned Ishmael Del'Monte in Australia
and said this is what comes here.
Can you have a look at this?
I remember like, when he told me the code,
I was like, "My God, that's so simple."
And he sent this to Kit Woolsey in the U.S.A
And he looked through it and tested it.
Because of the videos,
it is red-handed the evidence is right in front of you.
This is the action,
the physical action that was taken.
This is the hand that the person actually held,
do they match?
In my opinion that was a 100% evidence
that they were doing something.
You wouldn't have to even know the rules of bridge
to be able to look at these videos
and say, yes this is what they were doing.
I saw that and I was like, okay,
we nailed them a 100%.
Oh my God, yes, like how did I not notice that?
How can I miss this?
It seems so obvious once you know it.
[Laughing out loud]
You hear my evil glee, the evil happiness in my laugh.
It's almost like those "Where's Waldo?"
If you're looking for Waldo and you get,
then when you find him, you're like,
"Oh, he was right in the middle of the page all along."
I remember the morning when I woke up
was one of the most happiest days of my life.
That finally we will get rid of those bastards.
Poof...
Honestly, I can say
that it's very easy to believe that we cheated.
Let's say I'm not Lotan.
And I'm not the one who is in the story.
And I hear like
over and over again, over and over again
no matter where I go on the internet,
I read about it, I read about it.
I see people writing that, "He's a cheater, he is cheater,
he is a cheater."
They put it inside my head
and then I see those kinds of videos.
I need nothing more than that.
I will be sure 100% that they are cheating.
And no matter what people will try to show me after,
I will still have it in my mind.
At that time I worked at CERN
the biggest lab of particle physics in the world.
I was one of the main developers of the statistical framework
of the search and discovery of the Higgs boson,
so-called the god particle.
This is the particle
that gives all other particles their mass.
And in a way, one can show that
this is one of the basic things,
thanks to which we are living, we exist.
I got a call from a lawyer.
And he asked me if I'm willing
to check some statistical issue that has to do with bridge.
I told him, I don't understand anything about bridge.
Turned out that this problem of bridge has a lot to do
with what we do
when you search for new particles
because it asks the same question.
What is the probability
that the phenomenon that we observe
is a fluctuation of nothing?
Or is it a real thing?
Are they cheating or not cheating?
When I looked at the numbers, I told them,
That I think the analysis the people did on the case
is wrong.
I don't think there was enough data to make
a fair statistical analysis here.
The one that was done was not kosher.
It's stinking.
We were filmed over 250 boards,
they picked only 37 boards out of those 250.
37 boards.
And from those 37 boards,
we showed them and we proved them
that only six boards confirmed their code
that they claimed that we are cheating.
Now six boards out of 250, this is not the pattern.
This is totally random.
I told them "You look at the data
and you throw away the cases that disturb
the hypothesis you want to claim."
This is something you don't do in statistics.
I felt like I'm talking to a void.
Talking for nothing.
Nobody cares about the statistics.
You look, and it looks like they were cheating
and this is it.
Nobody cares about probabilities, et cetera.
It just smells bad, so it's bad.
This is it.
Unfortunately, there are some cases that my memory
is not good for me,
because if I can remember numbers
or if I can remember credit cards,
I can also remember
the bad moments that I had in my life.
Even if I want,
and even if I try to delete them from my mind,
it will be impossible.
I remember everything.
So I remember it was February, 2017.
I got the message from the Israeli bridge chairman.
He told me that
I got an email with the decision,
and I have two hours to prepare for the media.
And probably some people will call me.
So I'm reading this email
and I feel my heart is pumping so quickly.
I'm putting my hand on the screen
and starting to read word by word.
And then I get to the paragraph that they found us guilty
and I see: coaching - banned for life,
watching - banned for life,
playing bridge - banned for life.
It's like losing part of you,
like something inside you is dead.
Like they take your heart outside
and they break your heart.
I hate to lose.
I was very, very disappointed from the results
very dissapointed.
I think they really hoped that people will listen to me
but I understood that I'm not gonna help them
because it's been decided already.
In the middle of my interview
some point they stopped the interview,
a guy comes and take the trophy away from them.
And it is such a humiliating moment.
It took every achievement away from them.
It was like a murder,
they murdered them from the bridge point of view.
They completely, they killed the career completely.
They were not guilty beyond any doubt.
No way, no way.
I didn't feel like it was a satisfaction.
Not at all, I would say. It was,
I thought it was very difficult,
to go out against my friends.
I looked at them as friends
and in a way destroy their bridge career.
I think at some point, you have to make a stand
when you see that things are wrong.
I was angry.
How dare a couple of people try to take down our sport.
I felt that they were really trying to take down bridge.
Do they understand that they're unique
in the sense that they're the only ones cheating?
Well, are they unique?
I mean, that's the fear.
I mean, that was my fear as CEO is how unique was it?
Did we just uncover the top layer of something?
And then when you dug down deeper,
we would find it was more rampant.
How deep does this go?
I think it kind of happened when people saw
that it was actually possible to prove
that someone was cheating based on the videos.
And what did we do?
That people got interest in maybe
in looking at other pairs too.
Now that we realize what a gold mine,
these videos from the European Championships are,
we get somebody who's cracked the code on
Fantoni and Nunes.
Fantoni and Nunes,
was number one and number two in the world rankings.
Boye called me and he told me,
"Pierre, may I kindly request you to withdraw
from the Bermuda Bowl?"
I say, "What, whom, what happens?"
He say, Fantoni and Nunes are cheating.
There was a Dutch woman,
and she'd started looking into Fantoni and Nunes.
And she came up with was a very strange,
the way they put their cards.
They were very deliberate
about whether they would put the cards vertically
or whether they put the cards horizontal.
They were giving their partner information
from the angle of the card when it was on the table.
So I phoned up Fulvio Fantoni after this came and I said,
you need to come out and admit to some wrongdoings
and say that, sorry, yeah
we have been doing something.
Hello Fulvio, it's Boye calling you,
Hi, Boye.
I'm not sure really where to start yet,
but yeah, that I came over things that I think,
with you and Claudio that I thought was suspicious.
Yeah, he said that he didn't cheat.
Like they didn't cheat.
It was all something that we just cook together
and that we were jealous and nobody admitting anything.
Good day, it's Peter here and
today I'm gonna talk
about another cheating scandal
that's rocked the bridge world.
The number and number two ranked players in the world
were accused of cheating.
It's all shaken up the bridge community in a big way.
Wow, this is all coming down.
Boye was a man on a mission.
Once we had people,
and even sometimes before,
he confronted them,
gave people a chance to tell the truth.
And in all cases but one, everyone denied and lied.
What happens now when we clear
that our pair is not cheating?
No, that's not clear.
That's not clear at all.
Someone sent me a file yesterday
and when I looked at that file,
I would say it doesn't look good.
So why did people cheat?
Because they couldn't take the rigors of brilliant play.
They couldn't take it, I guess.
And they're the wrong people
the wrong people cheat at bridge.
You just don't want them in the world.
You just want them to go away and play their own game.
I talked to Lotan during this process,
I said, I hoped that he would do something actively,
maybe that he could help the bridge community
when maybe catching other cheats also.
He's incredibly smart.
The guy, this Lotan
and we actually had quite a long talk
and he gave me a lot of information on the other pairs.
And he said if you wanna know who I think is cheating
Fantoni-Nunes,
Balicki-Zmudzinski,
Piekarek-Smirnov,
and there was a Bulgarian pair
who they actually no longer play together.
He even told me an exact hand to go
and look the video of Piekarek and Smirnov.
And I went and watched this hand and he told me exactly
what he thought their code was.
Lotan is laughing
because he knows exactly what he's done
and because of how he had placed the bid
and what Lotan thought their code was.
He was pretty sure he knew what he had.
Yeah.
Good day, it's Pete here,
I'm here to discuss
the breaking news of a third pair, cheating allegation.
Good day, it's Pete here,
and I'm back to talk about
the new recent installment of the cheaters.
Good day, it's Pete here,
today I want to do a bridge cheating update.
And there is a new cheat.
New development and another pair
has been accused of cheating.
Do you think some of the sponsors
might have been looking the other way?
Absolutely, and the professionals too.
I mean, there will be some that will deny it
and say it never occurred to me that they were cheating,
but I don't believe them.
Were they aware?
I can't say what's in someone's head,
but I think it's impossible
they weren't hearing the same rumors I was hearing.
So if they hired them, they did it at their own risk.
These people don't wanna know if they're cheating or not
and don't really maybe care.
They just wanna win so badly.
Maybe they don't care how they win.
Maybe you get addicted to it.
Maybe you get addicted to that winning and you can't stop.
A great player had his sponsor hire a pair
that was highly suspected to be cheating.
And his comment was, "We couldn't beat the cheaters,
so we had to hire them."
Well everybody else is hiring cheaters,
why shouldn't I hire cheaters?
It was very sad for me personally,
but for for the bridge community,
you have so many decent players.
You have so many nice people around.
Some of those people are being robbed
of their chances to win.
People had put in their heart and soul
and their energy and their life
into trying to become great at something
and really caring were playing on this field
that wasn't leveled.
And they were losing to people
that were not doing it fairly.
We were looking at the World Bridge Federation's website
and they showed past winners of various events.
And we were looking okay, cheaters, cheaters, cheaters.
There was so many cheaters accepting awards
and then this pictures.
And it was just really sad.
We got phone calls and emails from people that said
they didn't want to play the game anymore
because they were devastated.
They flew to foreign countries.
They competed for days and days and sweated, and tried.
And then you find out that the team that you lost to
in the finals or semi-finals were convicted.
It's almost like losing to Lance Armstrong
in a bicycle race.
You worked all your life to win the Tour de France,
[Crowd cheering]
you finished second or third to somebody
that's later found to have been gaming the system.
[Crowd cheering]
Every single world championship of the last 30 years
has been invalidated because we now know that
there were cheaters that were in those tournaments.
And in most cases did very well in those tournaments.
It's like invalidating 30 years of bridge history.
It's like saying, you know, Wimbledon didn't happen
over the last 30 years because we now know that,
all the great players were cheating.
I think that there are a couple more pairs
that I would like to see not play together.
And people of interest.
Are there suspicions going on
against new players or now we're in this magic hour
in which nobody suspects anybody?
I can't comment on that.
I play every day, like three or four hours
sometimes till the late hours of the night.
There are more than 10,000 players online.
Some of them professionals, you can see they have stars.
You can watch them if you want.
You can see here,
now playing in other table
Jimmy Cayne is practicing with his partner.
I'm playing with a Bolivian partner
and he's playing so bad.
I would assume he is playing bridge less than one year.
And if he's playing more than that, he should quit.
If I was playing with him live
I will probably shout at him like I used to do.
And sometimes I really miss it,
what can I do?
Some people are not that talented and it's okay.
I mean,
oh my God.
The things that he did just right now,
it's like unbelievable.
This is embarrassing.
I can try to get
to play with some pros or something like that,
but usually nobody will want to play with me online.
You go with like an alias or you go with your real name?
Usually I play with my own name,
lately people don't like to play against me.
So I'm playing sometimes on my friend's account.
And this is sad
but this is the reality
and I need to face it.
Do you ever play with Ron as a partner online?
No, I mean, Ron hurt a lot
from the story and he lost his passion to bridge.
I'm even afraid to ask if he wants to play
because I know the answer.
Now I'm going to be dummy.
So my partner he bought the contract
and he's going to take responsibility for my cards.
And of course
it's better that I will close the computer
with what he is doing.
And no, it's like sometimes I take it as a nightmare
and sometimes I take it just like a comedy.
Like you go to,
oh, my God.
I don't want to be rude
and ask him like, to leave the table.
But it's like, it's a nightmare.
I mean,
I can be even very cynic and tell him that,
well done partner.
I miss playing bridge.
I miss it that much, that I don't even care
who I'm going to play with.
There is a screen anyway,
so I'm not going to see my partner.
I don't care if you put Boye Brogeland behind the screen,
you're going to put the committee behind the screen.
I don't care, I just play the cards.
And whoever I found out after the game behind the screen,
Like, who cares?