The WBF’s dealing hands protocol

Following a proposal jointly put to the Management Committee by Maurizio Di Sacco and Hans van Staveren, in June 2018 the WBF decided to adopt a new protocol for producing computer dealt hands to be used at WBF events.

The original purpose is to avoid any possible suspicion about any kind of manipulation of the hands.

The ultimate goal is to set a standard for all organisers worldwide.

• • At a defined moment ahead of a Championship the person responsible for generating and storing the hands – in WBF events Maurizio Di Sacco – randomly generates hexadecimal string of numbers which will be part of the one eventually used to produce the championship’s hands (for the World Championships 2022 this was done on Thursday March 24th).
  • That number, called “the championship’s secret”, will be encrypted in such a way to be impossible to crack.
  • The encrypted string will be officially published for everyone to know and store it.
  • At the end of the championship the original string will be made public.
  • At that point anybody can verify it is the original string: by applying the “ash” method to match the encrypted original code to the published one.
  • However, somebody could still claim that the organisation tried a few strings and eventually selected the ones which better suited its purposes (eg using the one which produced wild sets of boards in the crucial rounds)
  • To prevent that objection we must add to the string some part that is random, public, and that the organisation cannot control.
  • At the moment the protocol claims for the Dow Jones index to be used: upon publishing the encrypted version of the championship’s secret we will also publish the date and the time of the day for the Dow Jones index to be used (for the World Championships 2022  it will be the DJI at the end of March 25th).
  • After that date the whole string will be used to generate all the championship’s hands (for the World Championships 2022  this will be done any time from April 10th onward).
  • Here are the original text documents generated by the program. They include all the necessary information:

  TN = Tournament Name
  KH = Championship’s Secret Code
  DI = Delayed Information (Dow Jones Index on March 25th)
  SN = Session: on the right there are the information about how many rounds, how many boards per session, how they are numbered in each of the phases and the hands’ file name.

  e.g for the Bermuda Bowl, the first SN line reads: 23 rounds; boards numbered cyclically 1-16, 17–32; files named RR (the ## means that the extension will have a two digit number, here from 01 to 23); event Bermuda Bowl Round Robin made out of 23 rounds.

  Bermuda Bowl, Venice Cup, d’Orsi Trophy, Wu Han Cup:

  TN World Championship 2022 Salsomaggiore

  KH 0dec0d2fb8a4bbca80893f46e731d13db22a3b821ec67f4123c8f626db1ad0d7

  DI Closing DJI March 25

  SN 23:1-16,17-32:rr##:Round Robin #/23

  SN 6:1-16,17-32:QF#:QF #/6

  SN 6:1-16,17-32:SF#:Semi Final #/6

  SN 6:1-16,17-32:FIN#:Finals #/6

  NBO Trophy:

  TN NBO Trophy 2022

  KH 2e50200b84ca27563f12065d245d44a958f79704ebba6ccf1aa9b0d387720da5

  DI DJI March 25

  SN 15:1-10,11-20,21-30:SW##:SWISS #/15

To be able to verify that the hands were not manipulated in any manner, you should now:

• Copy the Championship’s secret for the event you are interested in
• Get a copy of squaredeal.exe at http://www.xs4all.nl/~sater/SquareDeal.zip (it includes documentation and instructions).
• Get familiar with the “ash” procedure
• At the end of the championship(s) look for the original hexadecimal string (to be published on the Championship’s Daily Bulletin and on the WBF website) and use it to generate the hands: they will correspond to the ones used in the event (in our case, Orlando World Series 2018)