When to Rob a Bank: ...And 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants (14 page)

Personally, I am happy that more people at Point A don’t go to Point B (which would make me have to consider boarding at Point C), but I don’t understand why this is so. Here are a few possibilities:

        
1
. Walking 250 yards doesn’t seem like a worthwhile investment to improve a short, if miserable, experience.

        
2
. Having just gotten off the subway, the Point A passengers are already broken in spirit and can’t muster the energy to improve their commute.

        
3
. Perhaps some Point A passengers simply never think about the existence of a Point B, or at least the conditions thereof.

        
4
. There is a herd at Point A; people may say they don’t like being part of a herd, but psychologically they are somehow comforted by it; they succumb to “herd mentality” and unthinkingly tag along—because if everyone else is doing it, it must be the thing to do.

Personally, I am persuaded that all four points may be valid in varying measures, and there are undoubtedly additional points to be made. But if I had to pick an outright winner, I’d say number four: the herd mentality. The more social science we learn, the more we realize that people, while treasuring their independence, are in fact drawn to herd behavior in almost every aspect of daily life. The good news is that once you realize this, you can exploit the herd mentality for your own benefit (as in boarding a bus), or for the public good, as in invoking peer pressure to increase vaccination rates.

Why are there
so
many
fake
memoirs
in the world? The latest is Margaret Seltzer’s
Love and Consequences
. (I would link to its Amazon page but, alas, it no longer has an Amazon page.)

If you had written a memoir that was, say, 60 percent true, would you try to present it as a memoir or as a novel? If you were the editor of a memoir that you thought was 90 percent true, would you publish it as a memoir or as a novel?

Or maybe a better question is: What are the upsides of publishing such a book as a memoir instead of a novel? Here are a few possible answers:

        
1
. A true story gets a lot more media coverage than a lifelike novel.

        
2
. A true story generates more buzz in general, including potential film sales, lecture opportunities, etc.

        
3
. The reader is engaged with the story on a more visceral level if a book is a memoir rather than fictional.

Every time a memoir is exposed as a fake, you hear people say, “Well, if it’s such a good story, why didn’t they just publish it as a novel instead?” But I think reasons one to three above, and maybe many more, incentivize authors, publishers, and others to favor the memoir over the novel.

With number three in mind, and having read recently about how
an expensive sugar-pill placebo works better than a cheap sugar-pill placebo
, I thought of a fun memoir/novel experiment. Here’s what you’d do:

Take an unpublished manuscript that tells an intense and harrowing story from a first-person perspective. Something along the lines of
A Million Little Pieces
or
Love and Consequences
. Assemble a group of one hundred volunteers and randomly divide them in half. Give a copy of the manuscript to fifty of them with a cover letter describing the memoir they are about to read. Give a copy of the manuscript to the other fifty with a cover letter describing the novel they are about to read. In each case, write and attach an extensive questionnaire about the reader’s reaction to
the book. Sit back, let them read, and compile the results. Does the “memoir” truly beat the “novel”?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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
. . .

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: