It’s hard to explain to non-bridge players how much the game means to some of us. It’s not just a pastime; it’s a grand passion. Janet de Botton summed it up well when someone asked her if she really loved the game. ‘I don’t love it,’ she replied, ‘I’m in love with it.’ Ask any
Up to Solihull again (I might as well move there) to play the Gold Cup finals. We sailed through the semis against Ken Ford’s team to meet Allfrey in the final. They had been 52 down with 16 boards to play in their semi-final match and had won! The writing was on the wall. The
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
A few years ago I used to play Rubber Bridge from time to time with an elderly gentleman called Leo Halpern. Leo was unfailingly polite, good-humoured and kind. He was also very, very slow. One day, when he was playing a laydown 3NT he thought for ages and one of the other players finally said:
Ever heard of the ‘gum-wrapper coup’? My guess is not — as far as I’m aware, only one person has ever pulled it off, and that was about 80 years ago. I came across it while reading a book about the ‘father of contract bridge’, Ely Culbertson. Ely was a brilliant player but chronically impatient.
Since the beginning of September I don’t think there has been a single weekend when my team was not away playing in one or another tournament, so when I received an email asking everyone from the first division of the Premier League if they would like to play the Champions Cup in Israel I decided
Time and again in bridge, when tackling problematic contracts, I miss simple solutions which, it turns out, were staring me in the face. It’s some consolation to know that this sort of temporary blindness is a fairly common condition: bridge clubs are full of people slapping their heads and groaning as they see — too
OK, Guv. It’s a fair cop. I admit it. I’ve been feeling a squidgen smug of late. I’ve been playing rather well — even though I say so myself. My team has been successful. We have prospered. I smiled sympathetically when others told me their tales of woe, thinking, ‘That used to be me.’ I
In this country, Andrew Robson and bridge are practically synonymous: he’s the best known, and probably the best, player we have. His love for the game goes to the very core of him. During our recent bridge week at Stuart Wheeler’s house in Tangier, I asked Andrew about his near-fatal accident in 2001. While walking
Somerset Maugham famously called Monte Carlo ‘a sunny place for shady people’. Today über sponsor Pierre Zimmermann has rather unexpectedly turned it into the bridge capital of the world. Last week he achieved another huge win for the principality by moving the world’s biggest money tournament, The Cavendish, from Las Vegas to Monaco for a
I’ve just come back from Tessa and Stuart Wheeler’s stunning house, Dar Sinclair, in Tangier. It’s a lovely time of year to go: the sun was shining, the sea was warm, the souk was beckoning. But this was Stuart’s annual bridge week — so naturally we hardly stepped outdoors. The bridge gang included Andrew Robson
Of all the competitions and tournaments available in this country, the one that somehow means the most is the Gold Cup. We have won it twice and the thrill is immeasurable. We have also been knocked out in round one and the worst part was knowing what we would be missing, in terms of matches,
The sad truth is, the length of time you’ve been playing bridge is no indication of how good you are. When I had my first lesson, aged 27, I’d already been playing with friends every week for five or six years. I quickly found out that almost everything we were doing was wrong. I was
I read recently that bridge today is 70 per cent bidding, 20 per cent defence and 10 per cent play, and if the first weekend of this year’s Premier League is anything to go by that would about sum it up. Most IMPs went out of the window with bidding misunderstandings leading good pairs into
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
A friend told me (no, honestly — it was a friend) that she had had a dream from which she awoke screaming abuse and practising kick-boxing on her (no longer) boyfriend’s sleeping head. ‘What was the dream?’ I, her awestruck audience, gasped. Well — it turned out that said boyfriend’s ex-wife had told him that
Here’s a bridge tip you won’t read about in any book — one which the world-class pro Gunnar Hallberg gave me the other evening during a game of social bridge. You’re declarer, and a suit is led. Let’s say dummy has a holding like 8643 in the suit, and you can see at once that
The Olympics may be over — but is another gold medal in the pipeline for Team GB? At the time of writing, the England Women are battling it out with Russia in the final of the 14th World Bridge Games, taking place in Lille. If they win, it will be their second triumph in as
Here I sit, in hot, sunny, glorious France, pretending to be on holiday but feigning lots of headaches so I can nip up to my computer. BBO is showing the second World Mind Games which started last Friday in Lille. In each Group the 16 teams play a complete Round Robin and the top four
Some players might feel a little inhibited to find themselves defending a contract against the great Michael Rosenberg, known throughout the bridge world as ‘the expert’s expert’ for his encyclopedic knowledge of cardplay techniques. Not a player of Jim Munday’s calibre, though. Quite the reverse, in fact. Munday is a top US player, and as
