Janet de Botton

I don’t mind a bit of carefully controlled nostalgia but when it even nudges mawkishness I’m out. To prove it I am not going to gush and rhapsodise that this is my last column for the Speccie, but I will say that it has been a pleasure and a privilege filing this column every fortnight for the past 16 (give or take) years, and I have greatly enjoyed calling myself a ‘journalist’ at every opportunity. Particularly to journalists, some of whom get amusingly irritated! But that was then and this will be a new year; I don’t know who your next bridge columnist will be but I look forward to finding out. This simple but instructive hand came up at the recent WBT Copenhagen 2025, which I may have mentioned was won decisively by my team, sans moi.

I first met Susanna in 1987 when Ed Victor, the late literary agent, invited both of us for lunch at the recently opened River Café. It was love at first sight as she chatted hilariously about her up-and-coming blind date with a rather well-known politician and people we knew, all of whom had something in common: they played bridge. Ed and his wife Carol had been taking lessons and were properly hooked. It was typical of Susanna’s generosity that she frequently played with them, not minding at all that they were newbies and she was already a very good player. She asked me if I played and I told her I didn’t. ‘Well you must learn,’ she said: ‘the sooner the better.

England’s ladies bridge has a grand past, with many international titles and gold medals to its name, but obviously the same players can’t go on forever. It would appear that the future may also be looking bright as many girls and young women discover how fascinating and obsessing bridge can be. We have, without doubt, a very strong pair coming through the ranks. When Dido Coley and Lily Kearney won the Lady Milne trials last year, not many had heard of them. Last week they repeated the feat and I watched them on BBO whenever they were shown. I was very impressed. They have a well worked out, modern bidding system which they both know backwards and forwards; an active and aggressive attitude to competitive auctions; and an enthusiastic partnership chemistry.

‘Greed is good,’ announced Gordon Gekko, in what became a definitive clarion call for the 1980s. But as we all regretfully know, greed often ends in disaster. Have you ever sat over a pint after the game with the hand records in front of you and said: ‘Jolly lucky I didn’t double that four spades. They could run to four no-trumps and make it!’ It’s true, they could, but in general they won’t. Successful run-outs occur rather seldom, but when they do they’re almost always spectacular. This hand from the World Bridge Tour in Copenhagen last month impressed. West could have collected 100 in 5♥️ undoubled, but he understandably thought it could well be more and attached a double.

Sometimes the stars align in such a wondrous way that the team they are favouring cannot go wrong. Such a line-up fell upon my team in last week’s World Bridge Tour in lovely Copenhagen. First star that kerchunked into our constellation was that I couldn’t play, which left six professionals with no weak link who couldn’t spot a Vienna Coup if it was staring her in the face. The second was having Denmark’s best pair playing with us: Dennis Bilde and Martin Schaltz. And all the other stars needed to win a top-level tournament, fell neatly into place. The play started with four days of qualification: the top four teams (after 21 ten-board matches), qualifying for the finals and the rest playing a two-day Swiss.

The Chairman’s Cup – the flagship teams’ event of the Swedish Bridge Festival held in Orebro at the end of July – set a new record for the number of teams entering: up 19 to 157 in total. This despite it clashing with the American Summer Nationals, which attracts a lot of the European Pros. It’s now so large that they are considering a different format, as qualifying only the top 32 teams out of nearly 160 is too narrow a window. The final was contested by two Swedish teams – actually a rarity in itself – and featured, as is the norm these days, some hyper-aggressive bidding from both sides.

Bridge Scanner is a great website set up about ten years ago by Lithuania’s Erikas Vainikonis, I imagine because it was almost impossible to find the running scores for any of the big tournaments. At the moment the World Championships are being played in Denmark and it literally takes me 20 seconds to find the results in all the different tournaments that are being played simultaneously. England have a team in all four categories but only two qualified for the knockouts. The Open and the Seniors. The bidding is fearless, When you bid as much as the Polish top players, you have to be able to perform the odd miracle in the play.

I often see players at international events, playing with someone other than their usual partner (or a sponsor) and forming a superstar pair – even if it’s only for one tournament. One of the most exciting pairs at the recent European Transnational Championships in Poland was Norwegian Geir Helgemo, the player widely regarded as the best in the world, playing with Zachary Grossack, at only 28, the youngest Grand Life Master in the American Contact Bridge League, and already the winner of several world titles. The two could hardly be more different: Geir a quiet introvert and Zach an exuberant extrovert. Together they worked magic.  Here’s Zach at the helm in their round-of-64 knockout match.

The newly launched Zimmermann team, relocated from Monaco to Switzerland, were victorious at the European Transnational Championships in Poland in June. The tarnish has been rather rubbed off their many European and World titles when one of his previous pairs, Fulvio Fantoni and Claudio Nunes, were banned for alleged cheating. Pierre is now surrounding himself with the top Dutch pair Brink–Drijver, as well as three of the best Polish players around: Kalita, Nowosadzki and Klukowski. Here’s Michal Klukowski – youngest ever World Champion in the World Open Pairs, and in the same year winning the Polish Junior Championships – in the quarter-final against Bulgaria. ‘Kluk’ was sitting South, having arrived in the thin game after a typically aggressive auction.

A few years ago I went to Dallas with my team to play in the Summer National, the main event being the Spingold, a knockout tournament which attracts some of the best teams in the world. We did rather well and found ourselves in the quarter finals, and our opponents were Marty Fleisher’s team of world champs. Marty plays with Chip Martel, and before we started he announced that he thinks for a few minutes when dummy goes down, even if it’s a simple hand, to work out his plan. What a good idea, I thought. The next thing I knew, I went 4 off vul in an unusual NT auction, my partner telling me I could make it if I had come up with a plan: any plan would be better than none. Imagine you’re sitting East and your partner leads the ♣️Q. What’s your plan?

‘There are only three kinds of Bridge players; those who can count and those who can’t.’ And there are only two types of reader: those who find this funny and those who, like me, don’t. It’s not so much that it’s hard to count to 13 – it isn’t really – it’s just that there are so many things to keep track of; trumps, side suits, points and shapes. And of course, the main one which is easy to forget – counting your tricks and those of your opponents. West started with Ace and another Diamond. South ruffed and played a top Heart, West winning and persisting with a Diamond. With an unexpected second trump loser, it appeared to Declarer as if she had to get a Club away on the Spades.

There are many words in the English language that you need to be Susie Dent* to use correctly. Disinterested and uninterested, elder and older and fewer and less to name three that I struggle with. When today’s hand came up in an EBU online League match I was extremely grateful to have ‘Assumption’ and ‘Presumption’ explained so clearly: West elected to start with the ♣️8 to the Queen and Ace, and South decided to take an immediate Diamond finesse. This was a good play for several reasons: you find out where you are on the hand, and it opens up some later possibilities of putting West on lead to play Spades. East won and played back the ♦️J.

Counting, counting and counting are the three most important things to consider, whether you are playing in your local bridge club duplicate or the Bermuda Bowl. Counting declarer’s tricks when you are defending is hard when you are very busy counting your own hand and, when dummy goes down, you can start to work out partner’s  point count and distribution until you have enough information if you have a critical decision to make. This deal from the European Transnational Championships in Budapest earlier this year saw one declarer do everything possible to prepare for his ‘crucial decision’. He forgot only one thing: he was playing against one of the strongest partnerships in the world – the Rimstedt brothers.

One FAQ by people who are thinking of learning bridge is: ‘Do you have to be good at maths to become a good bridge player?’ The answer is you don’t need to be Rain Man but familiarity with numeracy will be an asset. Logic plays a big part in making a good player and, if all that fails you, there is the greatest asset of all – table presence! That virtually unnoticeable nanosecond’s hesitation or a slow player playing faster than normal at a crucial moment. But since lockdown a lot of matches are being played online: no table, no table presence. This was a match on RealBridge I played last week: Our team mates had also been in 5♠️x, down one after the lead of a top club and the natural Diamond shift. At this table I was West.

A couple of weekends ago, the Scottish Bridge Union ran the inaugural British Isles Trophy, a mixed team’s event for the Home Counties. It was played on RealBridge, the website that allows players to both see and hear each other. Bridge, being the last bastion of ‘hilarious’ misogyny, always has an alpha chuckle when somebody says, and somebody always does: ‘There isn’t a good pair in the room!’ I asked  my friend Nick, who ironically always plays with his preferred partner, Nathalie Shashou, if any good hands came up played by a woman. ‘That might be a struggle,’ he smirked but proceeded to give me this one played by Ceri Pierce for the winning Welsh team. This was a huge hand for Wales, who won the trophy by one VP ahead of the EBU team.

I am sure that readers of this column need no introduction to Victor Mollo’s most famous creation, The Hideous Hog. Bridge in the Menagerie was first published in 1965 and today, Mollo’s stereotypes are as sharp and apposite as they were 60 years ago. And don’t think (as I did) that hogging is an exclusively male prerogative; I’ve seen women bid their five-card major three times rather than let their partner near the cards. And what about trick hogging? If the worst and most annoying thing is  your partner overtaking your trick with no clear plan as to where to go next, a close second is when they overtake in order to ‘steer’ the defence – and let through the contract in the process.

Everyone has good days and bad days; no one more than me. I like to think my A game is pretty good but my B game is such a car crash that sometimes I feel like giving up. Great players also have A and B days, the difference being smaller the better the player. Towards the end of last year I was thrilled with my game: defences seemed to go swimmingly, ditto bidding and even my declarer play was unusually successful. Sadly it went crashing down to B with no explanation. Today’s hand came up towards the end of my A streak. North’s 2♣️ was Landy showing both majors. I was West and started with the ♦️K. South won and ran his singleton Jack of Hearts. When it lost, he looked so disappointed I nearly apologised.

The European Transnational Championships were held last week in Prague, and were won by the gargantuanly strong Zimmerman team, but it was not plain sailing. They appeared to have lost their quarter-final to the Italian team Bianchi, but that doesn’t happen in Zimmerland. Twice during the 56-board, day-long match they asked for rulings against something the opps had or hadn’t done and twice the director ruled against them. They then went to appeal on both rulings and eventually won both sometime around midnight and emerged the winners by one IMP! Their star player Michal Klukowski would get many votes as the strongest player in the world today. Just see how effortlessly he dealt with the following hand.

The World Bridge Tour had its first event of the year in combination with the wonderful Bridge Festival in Reykjavik. Only team Black, of the four British teams, made the play-offs, eventually finishing fourth, while the event was won by the American McAllister team with – who else – the Rimstedt twins on it. I don’t know who coined the term ‘Nutmeg’ (a football term meaning playing the ball through an opponent’s legs) – but I heard about it probably ten years ago and wrote it up in this column at the time. I heard it again in the break between matches in the WBT round robin. This was the auction at one table, but obviously there were variations. About half the field was in 6NT, the other half in the safer 6♣.