You’ve won a national championship by the narrowest of margins. You’re too elated to sleep: you’re going over the hands in your head, when suddenly — argh! — you realise you scored one board incorrectly. If you come clean, your score will drop. What do you do? This is exactly what happened to the American player Debbie Freeman, winner of the Mixed Teams in the recent North American Bridge Championships. What did Debbie do? She informed the tournament director the next day, dropping her team out of first place and into second.
This sort of good sportsmanship is not unusual at the top level in bridge. Zia Mahmood and Michael Rosenburg, for instance, have always taken great pains to play fair. ‘Michael and I take it to such an extent that if someone accidentally drops a card on the table, we refuse to take advantage,’ Zia has said. ‘That’s not how we want to win.’
Of course, there are other, legitimate ways of conning or manipulating the opponents, and Zia has no qualms about these. This deal comes from last month’s World Bridge Games:
The room was in 3NT; most Wests led the ♦10. There are 8 tricks on top; how do you stop the opponents switching to hearts before you can get a 9th? Some declarers won with the ♦A and played a spade to the ♠K, hoping East would duck with the ♠A; others ran their 8 winners, hoping the opponents would have discarding problems. No one succeeded. Zia, however, made an overtrick. How? On winning the first trick with the ♦A, he played a heart to the ♥J! Who could blame West for winning and switching to ace and another spade?
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