Bridge | 30 April 2022

Recently, a friend was browsing through the bridge books on my shelves, when suddenly she burst out laughing. ‘Here’s a funny one,’ she said. ‘It’s called Loser on Loser Play.’ Why would anyone want to read a book by a loser on how to lose? Given that she’s only recently learnt how to play – by recently, I mean two years ago, which is the blink of an eye for a bridge player – I explained that it’s a fairly common technique which involves substituting one loser for another. You might do it for a number of reasons, for instance to force a particular opponent to be on lead, or to reduce two losers to one by creating a trick. She looked ever more perplexed (it’s a surprisingly difficult concept to explain), so I gave her this example, played by Patrick Lawrence the previous week in a teams match against me.

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