John Blubaugh Blames Pig Accident For Shuffle That Caused 'Cheat' Cries

The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition

John Blubaugh Blames Pig Accident For Shuffle That Caused 'Cheat' Cries

The American Contract Bridge League says John Blubaugh is a card cheat. Mr. Blubaugh's defense is that it's all the pig's fault.

The bridge league, which is holding its national tournament in Toronto this week, is the ruling body for bridge tournaments in the U.S. In March, it suspended Mr. Blubaugh from play after catching him, it says, slipping the ace of spades to his unsuspecting partner. Mr. Blubaugh says he is a whistleblower who has caught league officers buying themselves dinner instead of using league money to promote the game.

In March, he went to federal court, seeking redress under the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act. The bridge world is roiling. Bridge will be a demonstration sport at the Winter Olympics in Utah, but it wants recognition as a full-fledged participant. Bridge participation is way down -- to about 10 million players nationally, from 40 million in the 1950s -- says bridge columnist Bobby Wolff. And then along comes this pig.

The story so far:

Fourteen years ago, Mr. Blubaugh gave up his career as an Indiana vacuum-cleaner salesman and turned bridge pro because, he says, he found cards a place to escape; There's no prize money at U.S. bridge tournaments, so professionals earn their livings by hiring themselves out as partners to lesser players. The more pros win, the more they can charge. Last year, Mr. Blubaugh won enough tournaments to accumulate 1,152 master points, which placed him 22nd on the bridge league's list of top 500 players. Charging $500 a day, he earned about $80,000 from partners, he says.

Mr. Blubaugh -- stocky, balding, 54 years old, battling high blood pressure and diabetes -- is the sort of person who does not take things lying down. He says he once sent a letter to a bridge competitor denouncing his card-playing skills, and for good measure had it notarized. He carries a pocket tape-recorder during tournaments in the event of a chance unpleasantry. During a dispute with the World Bridge Federation, which oversees international play, he made off with a truckful of its office equipment, which he stashed in a storage locker and ransomed back for an apology, he volunteers. "I've been critical of nearly everyone,"; he says quite cheerfully.

"Bridge players are very rude." Carol Welch, one of Mr. Blubaugh's several lawyers, offers by way of explanation: "The squabbles and such ... this is not a normal group of people."

Normal or otherwise, thousands of bridge players were gathered for a tournament in Indianapolis last July when, the bridge league says, a tournament director noticed something unnatural about Mr. Blubaugh's shuffle, about the way the cards were moving from one hand to the other. Bridge players contend theirs is a game of skill, and to prove it, they have exiled even the slightest hint of luck from their tournaments. Hands for an entire morning are dealt at the same time and passed from table to table so everyone in the room plays the same cards. That means partners or teams compete based on how they each play the same cards. Partners also are obligated to disclose certain fundamental aspects of their strategies, called bidding conventions, to their opponents, "so your opponents know as much as you do about your plans for the hand," says Richard Colker who, as the league recorder, is its chief investigator. "It's considered an obligation -- full disclosure," he adds.

Mr. Colker mostly investigates bad behavior -- swearing, berating a partner, banging the table -- and rules violations. It's against the rules, for example, to think too long before a play: That could relay information to your partner. It's against the rules to look at anyone's score: That could tell you something about the hand he has played. Occasionally, Mr. Colker nabs a player for signaling his partner by the way he lays down his pencil or scratches his throat. But only twice before has the league nabbed anyone for his shuffle.

Two weeks after the Indianapolis director reported his suspicions to the league, Mr. Colker stuffed a surveillance camera in an overhead duct, aimed it at Mr. Blubaugh's table, and recorded his shuffle at a tournament in Anaheim, Calif. Mr. Blubaugh has since put the tape on the Internet on a website that proclaims itself as "Dedicated to Investigating the ACBL Suspension of John Blubaugh." The video is grainy and vague; a man with a big belly keeps getting in the way. Mr. Blubaugh's paying partner, in a testimonial on the Web site says he didn't see any cheating. Mr. Blubaugh's opponents, in their own testimonials, say they didn't see any cheating. Matthew Grover, who identifies himself as a member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians and who was hired by Mr. Blubaugh to interpret the tape, says he didn't see any cheating.

Norman Beck, however, says he can see it all. Mr. Beck is a Dallas magician and card ace who interpreted the tape for the bridge league. In the first deal, he writes in a statement that's also on the Web site (see To Catch A Cheat), Mr. Blubaugh shuffled the deck seven times, keeping the ace of spades on the bottom each time. He then dealt the cards, putting the last one, the ace, into the stack that he handed his partner. In the second deal, Mr. Beck adds, Mr. Blubaugh shuffled five times, kept the ace on the bottom, dealt the cards into equal piles and gave the last one -- the one with the ace -- to his partner. The man with the big belly obscured the third deal. In the fourth, Mr. Beck writes, Mr. Blubaugh shuffled four times and again kept the ace on the bottom.

The Odds Aren't Good. "The odds of a card starting at the bottom of the deck, and being there again seven shuffles later are 1.026 trillion to one," Mr. Beck says in an interview.

"I knew I wasn't a good shuffler," says Mr. Blubaugh, pulling out a deck of cards in an Indianapolis hotel lobby and demonstrating to a visitor. He shuffles, clumsily, it happens, four times. Piles of cards move from one hand to the other and back again. He riffle-shuffles; he jog-shuffles. The bottom card, an ace of spades, never moves.

Mr. Blubaugh's first defense is the pig. In 1982, while he was running his family's farm, an 800-pound spotted Poland China sow bit him as he was trying to take away her piglets for weaning, crushing one finger and taking off the tip of another, he explains. The sow spit out the finger, but plastic surgery didn't take. Pictures of the hand, yes, are on the Web site, along with a letter from a plastic surgeon who calculates that the pig caused a 52% impairment to Mr. Blubaugh's ring finger and a 9% impairment to his middle finger. That converts, the surgeon adds, to a 7% hand impairment, which converts to a 6% upper-extremity impairment which, in turn, converts to a 4% whole person impairment.

"It makes me awkward," Mr. Blubaugh protests. "He can't mix the cards as he should because of the hand injury," he says. "But pride -- and his sense that a fee-earning partner should do more than his share of the tedious shuffling -- have always prevented him from passing the chore to someone else," he adds.

Knowing one card in your partner's hand is a small advantage, if any, because it is just one card in 13. In Mr. Blubaugh's federal court suit, already thick with filings, the league never contends he benefited from his alleged knowledge that his partner held the ace. Mr. Blubaugh and his partner lost the tournament.

"We were terrible," he says.That's further proof of his innocence, he adds: "If he had known what cards his partner held, he would have set up a better play for his partner to follow."

The 'Limo' Question

Mr. Blubaugh's second defense is that his role as a league snitch earned him the enmity of league leaders who are trying to get him out of the way. On his Web site at http://pages.prodigy.net/jblubaugh/index.htm, in speeches and in a newsletter that he says he sent to several hundred readers, Mr. Blubaugh complained that the league was using membership funds to pay for dinners, hotel rooms and limousines for its officers during tournaments.

The league doesn't deny the rooms and meals, although it insists the limos were in fact just car rides from the airport. But even if the league was out to get Mr. Blubaugh, he adds, "How did we convince John to cheat so we could catch him at it?" "Win or lose, advantage or none," says league lawyer Peter Rank, "it's still cheating to knowingly deal a card."

Last November, after an all-day hearing that was interrupted for several hours so the ethics committee members could play bridge, the league barred Mr. Blubaugh from the game for four months. Mr. Blubaugh appealed, and in March the league's appeals committee upped the suspension to 18 months after deciding that the initial penalty was too light, says Mr. Colker.

"The suspension is basically a sentence of death for a man without another job," says Bruce Abel, another of Mr. Blubaugh's lawyers. Mr. Abel has filed a $3 million suit in federal court in Indianapolis, claiming that the suspension by Mr. Blubaugh's fellow bridge pros is a restraint of trade and that his 4% whole-person impairment entitles him to federal protection as a disabled American.

Those arguments so far haven't swayed U.S. District Judge David Hamilton, who turned down Mr. Abel's request to stay the suspension. The marketplace isn't likely to suffer for lack of a professional bridge player, and shuffling cards isn't exactly a major life activity, he wrote in May. Instead, he set a Sept. 23, 2002, trial date, leaving a year for pretrial motions and discovery. Mr. Blubaugh's suspension expires 10 days earlier, but never mind: He vows he won't play bridge again "unless someone apologizes." As yet, no one is offering

June Kronholz june.kronholz@wsj.com