Brogeland is a boyish, athletically built man whose blond hair, blue eyes, and easygoing smile mask a ferocious competitiveness. The son of a butcher father and teacher mother, he was born and raised in the tiny, isolated town of Moi (population 1,977), in southern Norway. Today he lives in Flekkefjord, a short drive from where he grew up, in a house he shares with his wife, Tonje, and their two young children. “I come from a place where everybody knows everybody,” he says. “Integrity is part of what makes you in such a community.” Early tragedy also had a decisive effect on his character, he says. He was 11 years old when his mother committed suicide. “When those things happen, I think it makes you think a lot about big questions in life,” he says, “fairness and justice.”

Having learned bridge at age eight from his grandparents, he fell in love with the game, and turned pro at 28. He has won several international tournaments, runs a successful Norwegian bridge magazine, and in 2013 was recruited by his current sponsor, Richie Schwartz, a Bronx-born bridge addict, mathematician, and program analyst, who made a fortune at the racetrack in the 1970s. When choosing bridge players for his teams, Schwartz often hires undervalued European players who cost less than Americans. “I always fought to get the best deals,” says Schwartz—who nevertheless admits that he will pay up to $200,000 to play in three annual U.S. nationals with a given pair. “Some pay $500,000 or more, though,” he adds. Brogeland says Schwartz pays him travel expenses and a base yearly salary of $50,000—with big bonuses for strong showings in tournaments.

“IT’S AN UNWRITTEN RULE THAT YOU NOT PUBLICLY ACCUSE ANYONE— EVEN IF YOU’RE SURE.”

Not long after Brogeland joined Schwartz’s team, he learned that Schwartz was hiring Lotan Fisher and Ron Schwartz. Brogeland had heard the rumors: in 2012, Fisher and Schwartz won the Cavendish, one of bridge’s most coveted titles, but under circumstances suspicious enough that other top players refused to play in the tournament the following year if Fisher and Schwartz played. (They did not.) But because Brogeland had never played against them and did not know them personally, he reserved judgment. “I try to base my opinion of people on what I experience myself,” he says, adding that he did, however, warn his new teammates. “I told them, ‘I’ve heard the rumors. Whatever you do, play straight.’ ”

Over the next two years, the team of Brogeland, Lindqvist, Fisher, Schwartz, Graves, and Schwartz won a string of championships: the 2014 Spingold, the 2014 Reisinger, the 2015 Jacoby Swiss. During that time, says Brogeland, he regularly checked Bridge Base Online, a Web site that archives tournament hands, so he could monitor how his new teammates were behaving when playing at the table adjacent to him. He saw “maybe five or six” suspicious-looking hands, he says, “but nowhere near enough to say, ‘You’re cheating.’ ” Nevertheless, he says he was relieved when, in the summer of 2015, the pair was lured away by the deep-pocketed sponsor Jimmy Cayne, former C.E.O. of the defunct investment house Bear Stearns. “When they changed teams,” Brogeland says, “I didn’t have to be faced with this kind of environment where you’re not sure—you feel something is strange but you can’t really tell.”

Fisher, meanwhile, was enjoying his position at the top of the game, where the lives of many successful young pros more closely resemble those of well-heeled, globe-hopping rock musicians than what might be conjured by the term “bridge player.” Convening nightly at a hotel bar in whatever city is holding the competition—Biarritz, Chennai, Chicago—they drink until the small hours, rising late the next day, since tournament organizers mercifully schedule the first matches for one in the afternoon. Fisher, hailed as the “wonder boy of Israeli bridge,” was a fixture of the bar scene. Charismatic, and darkly handsome, with a widow’s peak and heavy brows, he posted Instagram photos of himself posing in well-cut suits in five-star hotels, behind the wheel of luxury cars, or partying with an array of young people—spoils of his status in a game where, for three years, he had been drawing an almost unbroken string of wins that brought bonuses amounting to six figures. There was only one problem: the persistent rumors that he was a cheater. Many people were whispering about it, according to Steve Weinstein, a top American player who writes for the Web site Bridgewinners.com. “But it’s an unwritten rule that you not publicly accuse anyone—even if you’re sure,” Weinstein says. It was a Catch-22 that Fisher seemed to delight in flaunting, shrugging off questions about his suspicious play as if daring anyone to openly accuse him. “He had the Nietzschean superman personality,” says Fred Gitelman, a former champion and co-founder of Bridge Base Online. “He just thought he was in a different league.”

Boye Brogeland By Christian Arp-Hansen/ARP Photo APS.

Champs and Cheats

Contract bridge is built on the rules of the 18th-century British game whist: a deck of cards is dealt to four people, who play in two-person partnerships, sitting opposite each other at a table. The player to the left of the dealer leads with a card of any suit—heart, diamond, club, or spade—and each player in succession plays a card of the suit led; the highest card wins the trick. It’s a deceptively simple game only slightly complicated by the existence of the trump: a card in a suit that overrules all others. In whist, trump is determined randomly, before the start of each hand. In auction bridge, a game popularized in England in 1904, trump is determined in each hand’s opening “auction,” when the teams, communicating solely by way of spoken bids (“Three spades,” “Two hearts,” “Three no trump”), establish which (if any) suit will be trump and how many tricks they think they can take. Pairs who take more tricks than contracted for are awarded extra points for those tricks. The pair with the most points, after all 13 tricks are played, wins the hand.