ITALIANS DISQUALIFIED
European Open Bridge Championships, Tenerife, 27th June 2005
Following a lengthy hearing
of the Championships' Appeals Committee, yesterday evening,
the pair of M. Lanzarotti and A. Buratti, was disqualified from
the teams event.
Telegraph
Article, UK
Telegraph article on Tenerife Scandal
Bridge pair thrown out for peeking
By Patrick Jourdain in Tenerife and Tom Leonard
(Filed: 28/06/2005)
The cut-throat competitiveness
that can lurk beneath the civilised
surface of bridge was exposed yesterday when two of the game's
leading
players were disqualified from an international championship
for
allegedly cheating.
In an apparently brazen display
of card sharkery, one of the Italian
pair was accused of peeking at his opponent's cards and then
signalling
the information to his partner with his fingers.
The professional players,
Andrea Buratti, 55, and Massimo Lanzarotti,
46, were playing an Israeli team in the European Transnational
Teams
Championship in Tenerife, which aside from the world championships
is
bridge's most prestigious competition.
In May, the pair, who were
members of a team financed by Maria-Teresa
Lavazza, the wife of the owner of the Lavazza coffee company,
won the
world's biggest money bridge tournament, the million-dollar
Cavendish
contest in Las Vegas.
In 1995 and 1997 they were
on the Italy team that won the European
Championships but, despite a remarkable run of success at international
tournaments since, they had never again been selected for the
national
team.
Their disqualification, the
biggest scandal to hit bridge since a
British pair were thrown out of the 1965 world championships
for also
allegedly indulging in underhand finger play, has transfixed
the 500
top players gathered in Tenerife.
In the final match of the
qualifying stages of the competition, the
Lavazza team needed a convincing win against Barel, an Israeli
team, to
progress into the knockouts. Early in the match, Ilan Bareket,
35, of
the Israeli team, summoned the referee and claimed that Massimo
Lanzarotti had been guilty of foul play.
He said that Lanzarotti, sitting
in the dummy seat and therefore
technically out of the play at that point, had looked at Bareket's
hand
and then surreptitiously conveyed information about the cards
to
Buratti with a finger signal.
The crucial intelligence -
that Bareket had three of the remaining four
trumps - was allegedly given by Lanzarotti placing three fingers
of his
right hand over his left wrist as he rested his arms on the
table, said
Bareket.
Buratti subsequently played
"against the odds" - a risky course of
action without knowing opponents' hands - and won, helping to
provide
his team with a 25-2 victory. Asked at an appeals hearing chaired
by
Bill Pencharz, a London lawyer, why he had done so, Buratti
was
apparently unable to give a satisfactory explanation.
In its official ruling, the
contest's appeals committee said it found
the reasons given by the player for his play unconvincing and
the
nature of these explanations by a competent player self-incriminating.
Its decision was greeted with applause by the 80 team captains
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The
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