[pilowsky]

Live-streaming of video games has a large following.
Today in the final of the Meltwater championship Magnus Carlsen edged out Hikaru Nakamura (again).

Right now, in the ACBL Open-Pairs Fri 7:10PM an 18 board matchpoints tournament with 256 players, (at least) one of the players (West) is live-streaming their game.
Sounds like fun?
Unfortunately anyone playing at the same time can jump between BBO and TwitchTV to see what the West holding is on his hand.
Or just wait a minute or two and see the whole layout before bidding/playing their own hand.

[dokoko]

In a game with incomplete information you probably need a delay if players are able to connect to the "life broadcast".

The delay might even be necessary in a chess game with "slower" time control. If instant engine evaluation is available on the broadcast, watching the broadcast may help an active player (if evaluation suddenly goes up, you can conclude that there is some winning combination).

[diana_eva]

pilowsky, on 2023-February-10, 19:02, said:

Live-streaming of video games has a large following.
Today in the final of the Meltwater championship Magnus Carlsen edged out Hikaru Nakamura (again).

Right now, in the ACBL Open-Pairs Fri 7:10PM an 18 board matchpoints tournament with 256 players, (at least) one of the players (West) is live-streaming their game.
Sounds like fun?
Unfortunately anyone playing at the same time can jump between BBO and TwitchTV to see what the West holding is on his hand.
Or just wait a minute or two and see the whole layout before bidding/playing their own hand.

Streamers have been asked to always use a delay when streaming from games which take place in real time, such as ACBL pair games. They're usually good at following this requirement and if someone is found streaming live, even after being warned, we suspend them temporarily from the games where they can jeopardize the result.

I would guess the streamer had a delay -- if not, you are welcome to PM their name and we'll send them a warning and/or take harsher measures.

[thedurtler]

I frankly don't see why people streaming a speedball matters at all, even without a delay. There are far easier ways to cheat in a speedball than to pull up the stream for one of the like 4 people who stream bridge, hope that they are streaming a game, get into that game, then hope that they are playing at a pace that enables you to gain an advantage, then for you to recognize that advantage, then for you to actually decide to use it, and THEN for it to actually have an impact on the outcome of the game. It's a ridiculous number of steps to go through. Is it theoretically possible? Absolutely. But your reward is going to be all of 0.27 unpigmented masterpoints. Congrats on your big score. There are hundreds of examples of actual factual cheating that happen during speedballs and weirdly, stream sniping doesn't seem to place too highly in the ways that they do so. Punish people who actually cheat, not those who provide content on a platform aimed primarily at people under the age of 30 (a demographic where that the ACBL and BBO need in order to survive in the long run). This concern trolling about an obtuse method of cheating is a pointless waste of time and just frustrates the small community of people who actually enjoy watching bridge in their free time.

[hrothgar]

The reason that streaming delays are getting build into these systems has NOTHING to do with ACBL tournaments that pay .27 matchpoints and a whole lot to do with events like the Bermuda Bowl and the Vanderbilt where

1. Pros get paid lots and lots of money
2. There have been numerous cheating scandals involving top level competitors

The requirements are bleeding down into less serious events because

1. It can't really hurt
2. There's no reason why you need to see this stream in live time as opposed to with a short delay

[thedurtler]

This post is specifically about speedballs/slowballs which pay out unpigmented masterpoints. No one is arguing that high-level competitions shouldn't have a delay. That is reasonable and the Twitch community respects that.

However, the purpose of twitch and streaming is community engagement--streams are active back and forth conversations between the people watching and the person streaming. You interact directly, making it a starkly different experience from watching something on Vugraph or youtube. BBO has requested a 5+ minute delay for speedball games. This effectively turns streaming into a youtube video. The streamer will not see any comments made until after the delay has passed, viewers will need to wait that long to hear a response to something they say, and as a result, the streams tend to be unlively, boring, and generally unpopular. As a streamer, without viewer engagement, it is very difficult to keep up an interesting and fun conversation that keeps viewers engaged and watching when you're doing all of the work yourself, and it also removes a lot of enjoyment from making the stream in the first place. By asking for such a long delay in these less serious speedball/slowball games, you are explicitly removing the purpose of streaming to Twitch, which drives fewer people to stream bridge to twitch, which means fewer people will watch bridge there, and eventually bridge streaming will die. Two years ago there were far more people streaming bridge on twitch than there are now, I was one of them. Having a long delay bleed down into speedballs/slowballs is completely unnecessary, and it actively hurts the community who wants to stream bridge.

[mycroft]

One difference between bridge and many other games being streamed is that most do not get (much) benefit out of ghosting their teammates' streams, and so being ghosted is almost always the opponents trying to gain an advantage. And it is handled in high-level events by isolating the players from "the real world", and in lower level events with (frequently draconian) anti-cheat technology and pretty much "ban-on-proof" reactions from the servers. And it still happens. And it's still a problem.

But the biggest issue in bridge cheating is "knowing your partner's hand", and ghosting their stream is a *really good* way to do it (oh, add "listening to partner's thoughts" to that list. But that, while big, isn't as big). And streamers, for some reason[*], won't feel quite as disturbed with (and frankly, won't be quite as alert to) "partner-sniping" than "the opponents seem to know what I have in my hand".

Oh, the other thing "unique" to bridge is that I don't have to ghost my partner's stream to know their hand - I can just ghost anybody else's stream, if they're in the same event and playing in the same seat as partner. That whole "duplicate" thing, you know?

Perhaps the livestreaming should be limited to higher-end team games like the Reynolds (if they allow it), where the boards in each match are different, and a good track can be kept of who's online. I agree, even a 5 minute delay kills the "interaction of player with chat" part of the experience, and I agree that that is a huge thing - frankly, 80+% of the twitch experience. But I'm not sure how you can reconcile that with "duplicated hands across the board", unless you do a record and do review-streaming.

[*]Note, as (almost) always, that I am not implying anything conscious or deliberate here. They just will feel like they were "in sync with partner" today, as opposed to "hey, that's the third short honour lefty's dropped offside."

[diana_eva]

First of all, welcome thedurtler, nice to see you here


There are many many games on BBO, not just ACBL pair games. Our request to be considerate about the security of ACBL games does not mean you can't live stream at all, from anywhere else.

There are zillions of express and robot games and other free games. You can also live stream from a casual table if you like, etc.