Vulnerable in Hearts Page 5
‘Success at bridge, in fact, depends less on winning than on extracting the last ounce of pleasure from losing.’
Success and failure – Kipling’s twin impostors – are old friends to Dad, and he treats them both the same. He thinks, in essence, that you get what you deserve. His favourite bridge book – voted recently by the membership of the American Contract Bridge League as the best bridge book of all time – is S.J. Simon’s Why You Lose at Bridge. ‘Skid’ Simon was one of the creators of the Acol system of bidding and a mainstay of the English game before, during and after the Second World War. An immigrant from the wilder reaches of the Soviet empire (he hailed from Dniepropetrovsk), Simon arrived in London without any visible means of support, graduated from the London School of Economics and earned a crust writing for publications as diverse as Punch and The Economist. It was not long, however, before he ‘found his true metier which was writing, living, expounding and, to an extent, creating contract bridge’. The thesis of Why You Lose at Bridge is that you lose because of who you are. ‘It is true that I do not know the particular individuals in your Bridge Club. But I know them well enough for your purpose. For all Bridge Clubs, from the Portland to the tenth-of-a-cent Suburban, are only reproductions of each other in varying degrees of wealth, with the identical assortment of inhabitants. The accents may vary but, from the Bridge point of view, representatives of the various breeds are found in all of them.’ Victor Mollo characterised them as animals. Simon gives them a human face. His characters are called Futile Willy, Mr Smug, the Unlucky Expert and Mrs Guggenheim. Futile Willy knows too much and understands too little. In trying to do the ‘right thing’ he invariably gets it wrong. Mr Smug plays good bad bridge and usually wins. Mrs Guggenheim is a hopeless case, a deer caught in the headlights every time a card is led. She often partners the Unlucky Expert, who loses because he insists on trying for the best possible contract rather than the ‘best contract possible’. The former is determined by what cards people have. The latter depends on who is playing. For them, as for those in Mollo’s Menagerie, character is fate and, while they can learn to mitigate against the worst defects, they cannot eliminate them. For, as another leading bridge player told me recently, ‘Whatever defects of character you have will be worse at the bridge table. Every chink in your character will be exposed and magnified. Sadly the same is not true of your strengths, although they may, against all odds, still be evident.’
But Dad glosses over this.
‘First question,’ he begins, ‘is, what’s your hand worth? What have you got there? Diamonds or fool’s gold?’ In South Africa, the idea of fool’s gold is very powerful. In our top-heavy, centralised economy more than 50 per cent of the country’s foreign earnings come from gold.
There’s a system for assessing the value of a bridge hand. It was devised by Milton C. Work, the foremost writer on auction bridge in the days before contract bridge existed. Work assigned a value to each of the high cards. This is how the American Contract Bridge League now describes it:
Hand Valuation
The ace = 4; the king = 3; the queen = 2; the jack = 1. In addition to giving points for high cards, points are given for the shape of the hand. A five-card suit = 1; a six-card suit = 2; a seven-card suit = 3; and an eight-card suit = 4. Once you have valued your hand, the next step is to bid according to its strength and shape.
For a time, the Work ‘count’ was replaced by a system devised by a man called Ely Culbertson. Culbertson is known as ‘the man who made contract bridge’ and we shall hear much more about him later. But when in the 1940s Charles Goren took over from Ely Culbertson as the doyen of American bridge writers and teachers, the Work count was restored to its proper place as the best method for assessing the relative strength of a hand. On his count, there are forty ‘points’ available in a pack of cards, made up of four aces (sixteen points), four kings (twelve), four queens (eight) and four jacks (four). An average hand therefore has ten points. A hand with more than ten points is an above-average hand; one with fewer is not.
The following advice therefore applies:
With 0 to 12 points, pass.
With 13 or more points, open the bidding with one of your longest suits.
With 15 to 17 high-card points and a balanced hand (one where all suits are represented with at least two or more cards), open 1NT (no trump).
Except, of course, if you play a different system. And, in any case, many strong players will open ‘light’, which is to say with a hand with less than thirteen points and also give much greater emphasis to ‘length’ (that is, the number of cards one holds in a particular suit, hence the valuations given to the count, above) and less to high-card strength. It is not uncommon, for example, to see a player with eleven points and six diamonds open with a bid of 1 . Bidding is not only a conversation with your partner. It is also a battle with your enemies, and the point of bidding is to talk to your partner and to prevent your opponents from talking to each other. You have to calculate the penalties too. In duplicate bridge, you get thirty points for each trick bid and made in spades and hearts, and twenty points for tricks bid and made in clubs or diamonds. For no trumps, you get forty for the first trick and thirty thereafter. One hundred points gives you ‘game’ and game is worth 500 points if you’re vulnerable and 300 if you’re not. The target bids, therefore, are ‘three’ in no trump, ‘four’ in a major suit or – if you really have to – five in a minor suit.
From the beginning, Dad’s bidding is aggressive. He likes to upset the opponents. And he likes to play the hand, even if it means he fails to make his contract. There’s a saying that ‘one down is good bridge’. In my father’s world, two down sounds like fun and three down is positively imaginative. I learn to regard all his opening bids as highly dubious and to listen carefully to his second bid to see whether or not it bears any resemblance to what I might consider to be a rational progression from his first bid and my response.
And it’s not just about point count. ‘Shape’ is also important. Do you have a long suit? Do you have a void? In a trump contract, a void gives you as much ‘control’ as an ace because you can trump anything led in that suit. And – crucially – do you have a fit? Does what you have complement or weaken what your partner has?
‘Because once you have a fit, you’re in business,’ Dad says. ‘Once you have a fit you can tell your partner what you want to do.’
The Role of the Responder
The partners on a bridge team have certain roles to play. The opening bidder describes his hand to his partner. The partner becomes the captain and assumes the role of deciding on the best denomination and the best level for the final contract. The partner of the opening bidder knows more about the combined strength of the two hands after hearing the opening bid and looking at his own hand.
This is a nice idea, but I have yet to meet the opening bidder who thinks he has entirely relinquished the captaincy to his partner. Certainly not Dad. For him, the opening bid was merely a demand that his partner tell him something about his hand so that he would then know what to bid next. But with this information he agreed entirely with Skid Simon, who often said that the key was to ‘Bid What You Think You Can Make’. Do it quickly and cleanly. The moment you know what you want to play in, bid it – and in the process keep your opponents quiet. ‘The fewer your bids, the fewer chances you give your opponents to get together ... Keep your bidding simple. Approach when you must and take the direct route whenever you can.’
‘I think you’re going too fast,’ says Mum.
‘Am I?’ Dad pauses in mid-flight to see the vacant expressions of his children. David has eaten all his food and is waiting to ask for more. Jackie is almost done. Dad looks a little crestfallen.
‘Och, well,’ he says, ‘another time.’ He busies himself with seconds. In this, he is unfailingly polite. He offers each of us in turn before he takes the biggest helping for himself.
In Kidnapped David Balfour and Alan Breck have their falling
out over a game of cards. They have taken refuge with Cluny MacPherson, a Jacobite leader in hiding. Cluny is a good host, but often drunk. ‘We were no sooner done eating than Cluny brought out an old, thumbed, greasy pack of cards, such as you may find in a mean inn; and his eyes brightened in his face as he proposed that we should fall to playing,’ Dad reads.
But David Balfour has not forgotten the lessons of his childhood. He could have pleaded fatigue, but instead he chooses to lecture the old man on the rights and wrongs of gambling. ‘Now this was one of the things I had been brought up to eschew like disgrace; it being held by my father neither the part of a Christian nor yet of a gentleman to set his own livelihood and fish for that of others, on the cast of painted pasteboard,’ David Balfour tells them. Dad is smiling as he reads it. David retreats to his bed where he tries to sleep off a fever. But Breck and Cluny set to playing.
It is – as Stevenson well knew – a familiar tale of woe. At first, Breck wins, but soon he is gambling away the little money he and David have saved from the shipwreck. David wakes from his fevered sleep and suspects the worst, which Breck confirms.
‘David,’ says he at last, ‘I’ve lost it; there’s the naked truth.’
‘My money too?’ said I.
‘Your money too,’ says Alan, with a groan. ‘Ye shouldnae have given it me. I’m daft when I get to the cartes.’
Dad is many things, but daft at cards isn’t one of them.
7. Capsizing an Optimist
THE ‘GOLDEN AGE of apartheid’ – in that terrible and ambiguous phrase – coincides with my family’s moment of greatest cohesion. We three children attend our local school, to which we walk, footloose and fancy-free. Our weeks are full of sunshine and friends. Each evening we eat our meals round the dinner table at which Dad invites us to ‘bat that one around’. ‘That one’ seldom includes South Africa’s politics. In these matters my mother is liberal (with a small ‘l’) and Dad is conservative with a marginally larger ‘c’. In any case, it is not something they like to discuss. Where could such discussions lead? It is better to say nothing. With my globe I indulge in imaginary travel. I climb the Andes and float across the Serengeti in a balloon. I read Swallows and Amazons and The Hardy Boys. Pietermaritzburg seems like a little island in the ocean of my imagination. It has no connection to the rest of South Africa. My reference points are a world that comes to me from books. The books are published in New York and London. Very few of them come from Johannesburg or Cape Town.
It is also the time of the grand gesture. Dad likes to make them just as he makes speculative leaps at the bridge table. There was the trip to Europe. There is the Optimist. On a whim, Dad decides to build a small dinghy on which we will learn to sail. He clears a space at the back of the house and orders a ‘build it yourself’ kit from the manufacturers. And one Friday evening he settles in to build the boat. David helps, while I watch. The size of the challenge just about matches the powers of his concentration and later it occurs to me that for him this is part of the appeal of bridge. A hand of bridge takes perhaps six minutes to play. Some may take a little longer, others may be quicker. In simple hands, the declarer may ‘claim’ his tricks after the first few tricks have been played. It is a curiously satisfying experience. The bidding has been fierce. You’ve arrived in a contract, which may or may not ‘make’. You set off hesitantly, not sure which is the best line of play to follow. But the tricky questions resolve themselves easily. West’s singleton king (known in bridge parlance as ‘stiff’; a singleton three is merely single, but singleton king or queen is always ‘stiff’) falls to your ace. The finesse you take on trick three works. The contract is secure and you can spread your hand with a flourish and claim. Of course, you need to be pretty confident you are right before you do this. If you claim and the opponents do not accept your claim, they can force you to play out the rest of the hand with your cards exposed.
Dad is confident he is right.
Tournament bridge can be a gruelling affair. National or World Championships may take a week or two and by the end of them the winners have played as many as several hundred hands of bridge. It is exhausting. Dad played tournament bridge before I was born, but really he had no patience for it. But for the length of each hand his concentration is complete.
To watch him pick up a hand is like seeing a hawk in the sky. He hovers above the play, taking it all in. Nothing escapes his attention. He knows that each hand is a story and that the action is only now about to begin. It starts with the first bid; it ends only with the last card. And so he floats on the thermals, watching the layout. He knows what he has; there are only thirty-nine more cards to discover. The first bid will show some of them. He owns the table. He can wait.
At the bridge table, for example, Dad is happy to make any number of safety plays. A safety play is one where declarer maximises the chances of making a contract by forgoing the possible opportunity to make one or more overtricks. A common safety play involves giving up an early trump trick in order to be sure of retaining control of the trump suit later in the hand. It means, for a moment, that declarer no longer has the lead, but it is done secure in the knowledge that the lead will return.
Bridge requires both fire and patience. In some of the great partnerships, the qualities are supplied in different measure by each partner. Rixi Markus, one of the greatest players ever to grace a bridge table, had a highly tempestuous relationship with Fritzi Gordon, a fellow Viennese who later came to England. The two were ‘fire and ice’. Victor Mollo wrote of them that, ‘Few men played as well as Fritzi Gordon. No woman plays better. But it is with men, rather than with the women, that she should be compared for Fritzi’s bridge is intensely masculine and he-man stuff at that. Where Rixi Markus is fiery, Fritzi Gordon is icy cold.’ It was a partnership that worked. It was not necessary for them to be the same, as long as they worked together. In playing together Markus learned a truth with which most bridge players will agree in reflective moments, but which many are prone to forget in the heat of the moment: ‘I have learned by bitter experience that, unless you treat your partner as a good friend, you will not achieve results. It does not matter how little or how much he knows about the game: it is up to you to make him feel safe and confident in order to get his best game from him. Allow him to take part in the bidding and the play, and do not treat him with disdain or indifference even if he is far below your own standard.’
The same sort of dynamic appears to have been true of one of the other great British partnerships. Terence Reese and Boris Schapiro first played together in 1944 and continued to do so for many years. ‘They hit it off immediately,’ John Clay writes in his Tales from the Bridge Table. ‘At the card table, Reese was more like an academician, studious and diligent, reminding people of the classical scholar he had been. He was always strong on logical analysis. His single-minded concentration at the table was famous and all his energies were bent to the task in hand.’ Boris Schapiro was born in Lithuania in 1909. He came to Britain after the Russian revolution and first played bridge at the Doncaster Conservative Club while he was an engineering student in Sheffield. ‘The central core of his personality is aggressive self-confidence,’ Guy Ramsey wrote of him. ‘The compact body is held with a certain arrogance of posture; the regular features are embellished with a small, almost foppish moustache ...’ Like Markus and Gordon, these two were ‘fire and ice’. Where Reese was calm, Schapiro was ebullient; where Reese was rational, Schapiro was impulsive. John Clay concludes of him that he was ‘an instinctive player, able to do the right thing at the right time without needing to know why. But they played together for many years, with extraordinary success, notwithstanding the accusations of cheating that were to blight their later years.’
Zia Mahmood, one of the few superstars of the modern game, has a more inclusive approach to partnerships. He has played over the years with almost every player of international standing, but he acknowledges Michael Rosenberg, a New York-based options trader, to be his
favourite. Together they have won many honours. Nevertheless, Mahmood appears to like playing with a variety of people. It enables him to avoid falling into routines. Every hand becomes even more of an adventure. In Bridge My Way, he writes, ‘rather than worry about individual bidding-system preferences, I preferred to know the individual characteristics of my partner. Was he cautious or aggressive? Was he a good declarer or a good defender? Modern or old-fashioned? Just knowing these things would be a huge advantage. But it was a lot to find out in one minute.’
Or a lifetime. Mahmood and Rosenberg know each other’s game intimately. And yet sometimes even they misunderstand each other. At the United States team trials in the spring of 2005, for example, they played together as part of the Welland team. Rosenberg, sitting West, held a very strong hand:
A K Q
A K Q J 7 4 3
Q 4
7
The opponents opened the bidding with 1 . The question is what does Rosenberg bid next? He has ten certain tricks with hearts as trumps. Equally, unless his partner has a couple of aces, he has three certain losers. The right contract is 4 . But how to get there? And how to be sure not to miss out on a slam? If his partner has an ace or a void, there might well be a slam available. At the other table the bidding went 1 , Double, Redouble (showing four or more diamonds), pass, 1 . At which point West bid 4 and everybody passed. The contract is unbeatable – but nor are there any other tricks available and 4 is the best contract on the hand. It gives a plus score (East-West were vulnerable) of 620 points.