Curtis Cheek Case

Curtis Cheek has admitted to cheating in the United States Bridge Federation (USBF) Invitational (May 30 - June 3, 2020). The full USBF report is here.

Data - All

Mr. Curtis Cheek (CC) played with four main on-line partners in 2020. Mr. Cheek's BBO handle is CURTIS.

I will focus on two main statistics for CC through this data set: DECWER and DEFWER. They are explained in the terminology section of this web site. I will also mention DDOLAR and ADDOLAR.

Event # boards Partner DECWER DDOLAR ADDOLAR DEFWER
ACBL Pairs 654 JOAN_DELIA 1.59% 80.22% 74.10% 1.53%
Various ACBL + team games 1,348 ARTC 1.77% 78.39% 71.91% 1.56%
Alt V, VI, Major Alt I,1st/2nd OCBL Cup 311 (1 pass out) H_BERTENS 1.03% 95.83% 94.34% 0.60%
USBF 253 DANK 1.19% 86.49% 83.05% 0.71%
Major tournaments combined (USBF+Alt+OCBL) 563 DANK/H_BERTENS 1.10% 91.03% 88.29% 0.64%

 

I have comparative data so you can see how his DECWER, DDOLAR and DEFWER compare to top players in top events from 1955-2020.

CURTIS played in ACBL pair games with JOAN_DELIA.

CURTIS played in ACBL pair games and ACBL team events and other private team events with ARTC.

CURTIS played with H_BERTENS (Huub Bertens) in various major online events in 2020.

CURTIS played with DANK (Daniel Korbel) in all 253 boards in the USBF event.

I merged the major tournaments, USBF + Alt/OCBL into the last line.

I compared the major tournaments with data from all US players that had 550+ total boards played in top level FTF competition. I have removed nine sponsors from the list, all of these sponsors had a DECWER above 2.4%.

The chart shows the declarer weighted error rate (DECWER) on the horizontal (X axis) and the defensive weighter error rate (DEFWER) on the vertical (Y axis). As the declarer play improves, the dots will move more to the right. As the defensive play improves, the dots will move lower. Perfection is the bottom right corner.

The red "dot" for Mr. Cheek with 311 boards from the various online tournaments is just under the 'h' for "Cheek All-(563), it can be difficult to see. There was one pass out.

The data includes all of the top US pairs. The lone blue dot just below the 1.00% DEFWER horizontal line is Mr. Hamman playing with Mr. Bramley.

The various red dots show Mr. Cheek individual performance using different data sets above. The only fair comparison should be with dots with 550+ total boards.

The dots by themselves are not necessarily indicative of cheating. They point out that Mr. Cheek was playing at a level above and beyond any US player that had played more than 550 boards in top level competition by some margin. To statistically determine the likelihood of this being random, or at least to approximate it, requires knowing the expected variance of the data. This information is not provided here.