At a dinner party recently, I was asked whether men and women are equally good at bridge. Not at the very highest level, I replied. If you were to name the top 300 players in the world, only one or two — at most — would be women. When I was asked why, I replied that I thought it was possible that our minds work slightly differently. There was an uncomfortable pause. Then the man sitting on my left — a successful writer — asked whether I wrote my bridge column for the Telegraph; when I said it was for The Spectator, he gave a patronisingly knowing nod (it obviously came to much the same thing). Clearly, his assumption was that I had to be ‘right-wing’ to hold such a view.
What nonsense. In any case, it’s not as if I’d said that men are more intelligent than women. It’s just that, given the equal opportunities in bridge, it’s hard not to suspect that the preponderance of men at the top is due to some innate difference.
And of course, there are, and always have been, plenty of brilliant women players. In fact, one of my all-time favourite rubber bridge hands was played by the New Yorker Barbara Tepper many years ago:
Holding such long diamonds, Barbara’s 6NT call was a reasonable gamble once East had doubled spades. Naturally, West led the only suit to cause problems: the ♥K. Barbara’s solution? She ducked! West, seriously underestimating her, continued with the ♥Q. Now Barbara could discard her υA on her ♦A. Next, she ran seven diamonds. Her last four cards were ♠5 ♣Q107; dummy’s were ♠AKQ9. East was helplessly squeezed; he discarded the ♣A, but Barbara held the ♣Q and made the slam.
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