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
No one could have been more of an Olympic moaner than me. The past two-year countdown has left me seething with rage and resentment as we were asked totally to change our lives and basically stay home so that the dignitaries could whisk through London. Then came Danny Boyle’s Opening Ceremony and it seems the
The longer I play this game, the more convinced I am that the single most important quality required to be a great player is mental discipline — the ability to push your concentration to the limit. My own concentration, I should add, is decidedly erratic: when trying to work out probabilities and contingency plans, I
Some bridge tournaments take everything you’ve got and then some. The emotional output is as extreme as the most demanding, turbulent relationship and you stagger home needing urgent hospital care. Then there are some that are great bridge but not life or death. And then there is Biarritz. A cracking holiday with a bit of
Much as I love chit-chatting, there’s no space this week. The hand I want to describe, played by Frank Multon (Monaco) in the recent Europeans, requires not one but two diagrams. Multon worked out the answer in his head during a pressurised match. The rest of us get to view all four hands at leisure,
As Susanna reported last week, England’s amazing Ladies Team took Gold in the European Championships having led virtually from the first board. It was Nicola Smith’s seventh title, moving her into third place on the all-time list and a fourth title for Sally Brock and Heather Dhondy. Special mention must go to the ‘youngsters’ —
The European bridge championships are over, and although all the England players did well, the real stars were the women’s team, who won gold. Congratulations to Sally Brock, Nevena Senior, Nicola Smith, Heather Dhondy, Susan Stockdale and Fiona Brown. In the Open series, there was never really any question who would win, although a few
The 51st European Championships, which are being played in Dublin, started last week, and at the time of writing England are doing brilliantly in all three classes: Open, Ladies and Seniors. Very sadly, Alexander Allfrey and his partner, the incomparable Andrew Robson, one of our pairs in the Open, had to pull out and reserves
The 2012 European championships are upon us. No, not football, I’m talking about the ones we actually stand a chance of winning: bridge. England has fielded three excellent teams in the Open, Womens and Seniors events, held in Dublin. I’ll be following the Seniors with particular interest because my friend Simon Cocheme is making his
