Vulnerable in Hearts Page 9
‘It only made the difference of a trick.’
‘A trick? A trick? A trick can make all the difference in the world.’
And that was just auction bridge. In contract bridge, more is at stake as one only scores points for tricks both bid and made. The committee presiding over the publication of the 1917 Rules of Auction Bridge, largely written by Milton Work, had considered and rejected the principle of making the contract rather than the auction the centrepiece of the game. Vanderbilt’s achievement was that he created a package that could be sold, whole, to the public. As a figure of note, his endorsement was a very attractive part of the package.
He goes on: ‘An ideal opportunity to try out my new game presented itself while I was voyaging shortly after completing my scoring table with three Auction Bridge playing friends on board the steamship Finland from Los Angeles to Havana via the Panama Canal, a nine-day trip. At first, we were at a loss for a term, other than ‘game in’, to describe the status of being subject to higher penalties because of having won a game. Fortunately for us, a young lady on board the Finland solved that problem by suggesting the word vulnerable.’
History does not record the lady’s name, although we do know the names of the other three players, through the efforts of Alan Truscott of the New York Times. On the fortieth anniversary of this voyage, he contacted the U.S. Lines shipping company and got hold of their passenger lists. Vanderbilt in his records referred to them only by their initials, but Truscott was able to identify them as Frederic Allen, Dudley Pickman and Francis Bacon. The Finland reached Balboa on 31 October 1925, too late to proceed through the Panama Canal or for passengers to go ashore. Francis Bacon III, in 1975, the sole surviving member of Vanderbilt’s foursome, recalled that on that night the lady who suggested ‘vulnerability’ as an added dimension to the game was allowed to join their game of plafond and attempted to suggest some exotic and impractical changes based on a game she said she had played in China. This so irritated Vanderbilt that, the next day, while the Finland passed through the Canal, he worked out the scoring table for contract bridge which remained virtually unchanged half a century later, except for the points awarded to no-trump tricks (bid and made) then earning thirty-five points each. Today, the first no-trump trick is worth forty points and subsequent ones thirty, meaning that 3 no trump makes 100 points, which is to say ‘game’. On that night, 1 November, the game became contract bridge, scored under Vanderbilt’s new rules.
Vanderbilt ensured it immediately had enough weight behind it to last. He created the first bidding convention. It is one of the peculiar charms of the bidding in bridge that it so accurately reflects real life: ‘everything is about something else’. Bids can and do have a multiplicity of meanings which can only be understood if one knows under which convention the bid is made. Since clubs are the lowest ranked of the suits, the lowest bid one can make is 1 . Vanderbilt created a convention (he called it the ‘Club Convention’, although everyone else called it the ‘Vanderbilt Convention’) that required a bidder with a strong hand of any description to bid 1 . Subsequent bidding would reveal the true nature of his strength. Vanderbilt also wrote the first major work on contract bridge. And he inaugurated the Vanderbilt Knockout Team Championship. He won it twice and endowed it with sufficient cash that today winners still receive a silver replica of the original trophy.
But, of all the many things that Vanderbilt brought to the game, it is the idea of vulnerability that appeals to me most. Alan Truscott, in the New York Times Bridge Book, describes a hand that Herbert Asquith (then Prime Minister) and Winston Churchill (then First Lord of the Admiralty) played while cruising the Mediterranean on board the Admiralty yacht Enchantress in 1912. Whenever he was short of a partner, Churchill would order one of his civil servants to the table. ‘To cut with Winston,’ so Herbert Asquith’s daughter Violet Bonham-Carter later recalled, ‘was to both his private secretaries a severe ordeal. Masterton was a really good bridge player and treated the game with respect. Moreover, though the stakes were low, he could not afford to lose overmuch. He used to sit in agony while Winston declared, doubled and redoubled with wild recklessness ...’
On this occasion, Churchill was partnered by Sir Edward Marsh. There was the possibility of what is known as a ‘Sandwich play’, which describes the situation that arises when one’s opponents’ high cards in a suit are ‘trapped’ between a higher and lower card in one’s own hands. The play is sometimes called a ‘surrounding play’, but I prefer the romance of ‘sandwich’ if only because it was so named in honour of the Earl of Sandwich, a previous occupant of the seat of First Lord of the Admiralty. In the hand in question, Marsh failed to spot the play, which meant that, instead of being restricted to eight tricks, the opposition went on to make eleven. Churchill was reported to have been furious and blamed his partner for making what was regarded as a ‘normal’ lead when defending in no trumps, which was the fourth highest card of his longest and strongest suit. In this case, Marsh had no honours in the suit, only the 9 7 6 2 of diamonds. Marsh duly led the two. Nowadays, with such cards most experts would lead the seven, because to lead the two is to suggest some honour strength. In this respect, as in so much else, Churchill was ahead of his time. But what holds my attention is the phrase Alan Truscott uses in partial explanation of the bidding on the hand. ‘Nobody was vulnerable,’ he writes, ‘because nobody would be vulnerable until 1925.’
It was into this newly vulnerable world that Dad was born in the autumn of 1926.
13. Travels with Cal
I KNEW WHERE he was born: Kirkcaldy, on the northern shores of the Firth of Forth, and I knew when. But I had never been there. The opportunity to do so arose when a travel magazine commissioned me in the summer of 2003 to write an article about Kidnapped and David Balfour’s flight across Scotland. My idea was to retrace his route, as it were, and in so doing to learn something of the place from which my father came. Even better, it was to be a father-and-son adventure. Sometime in early August of that year, Cal and I set off to Scotland to begin our quest.
We started on the small island of Earraid where David Balfour was shipwrecked and from where he set off to claim his inheritance. But Earraid has no hotels and so we took the ferry to Iona at the south-westernmost tip of Mull. Iona is now a pilgrimage site for Christians from around the world. Some come to spend time in the religious community that has now made its home in the old abbey first founded by St Columba in the eighth century. The story goes that Columba, who came of noble stock, had committed a grave offence by copying, without permission, a Psalter, which was therefore ‘devalued’. After a pitched battle to recover the stolen copy (in which Columba prevailed), he was forced or decided of his own accord to leave Ireland and not to return until he had converted to Christianity the same ‘number of souls’ as had been lost in the battle over the book. The idea was that he would sail until he could no longer see ‘home’, settle there and continue his missionary work. He arrived on Iona with twelve followers and built his church.
Other visitors, like us, find themselves staying at one of the island’s three hotels. After dinner, therefore, we settled ourselves in the pleasant and light lounge of the St Columba Hotel, watching shades of violet and mauve claim the distant horizons and toying with the pack of cards I had brought.
‘We need two more to make a four,’ said Cal with the confidence of someone who learned the game only months before. We looked about us for likely customers. The honeymoon couple in the corner were too wrapped up in themselves, but two elderly American women sipping tea looked a better prospect. Certainly, they were a better prospect than the group of four or five people pretending to listen to the large man telling them in a larger voice about his close relationship to Downing Street.
‘You ask them,’ I suggested, but this is never a battle parents can win, and so I eased over and asked whether the two elderly women played bridge and if so would they like to play a hand or two with us. Yes, they did play bridge, they repli
ed, but, before they would answer the second question, both looked suspiciously past me to identify my proposed partner. I took this to mean that they had previously been robbed by smooth-talking cardsharps and weren’t about to let it happen again. On seeing Cal, they readily agreed and soon we were seated around the table, cutting for partners.
There was some brief discussion of conventions, as there always is when strangers play bridge, the equivalent of establishing a common language. The metaphor doesn’t quite work, for in bridge it is not necessary for opposing players to speak the same language or to use the same system in their bidding. It is enough only that each should understand the other’s language. And the conventions are more than that, for it is not only about the bidding, but also about how you play the cards and what information your partner will gather from the choices you make. We agreed we would all play ‘five card majors, a strong no trump, weak two bids, Stayman and Blackwood’, which is the minimum one would expect when playing with Americans. All other bids were to be ‘natural’, which is to say that, if you bid, say, hearts, the opponents (and indeed your partner) could reasonably assume you had some of them.
‘Bidding is the language of bridge,’ says the ACBL site. ‘The players, through bidding, decide whether the deal is to be played in no trump or in a particular trump suit. The dealer has the first chance to bid ...’
With a pack of fifty-two cards there are something like fifty-three octillion possible deals. And yet there are only thirty-eight possible bids (1 to 7 of each suit and no trump; pass, double and redouble). It is not a lot. The number of bids is hopelessly inadequate to the task of describing so many possible deals. Over the years, different bids have taken on a complexity of meaning to cope with this. These bids – which say one thing but which may mean something quite different – are known as ‘scientific bidding’. In this sort of bidding, each bid is invested with a variety of meanings depending on other factors – sequence, vulnerability, what the opponents have said and so on.
‘A bid is a number combined with a word’, the word refers to the suit or no trump in which the player hopes the contract will be played. The number refers to the number of tricks the partnership is willing to commit to over the book of six. 1 is a commitment to take 6 + 1 = 7 tricks, and a suggestion of spades as the trump suit. If 1 is the final bid, it would be the contract.’
This is all very well. At the ‘one level’, nothing very dramatic is going to happen. But what if you want to make a slam bid? How do you find out how many aces your partner has? You may have thirty-six points between the pair of you, but you’re not going to make 7 if you’re missing the ace of trumps. The most commonly known scientific bid is ‘Blackwood’. It was invented by Easley Blackwood, an insurance salesman from Indianapolis (and later executive secretary of the American Contract Bridge League) who wrote to The Bridge World in 1935 with an article describing his newly devised system for ‘checking’ whether a ‘slam’ is available and therefore worth bidding. The Bridge World was controlled by Ely Culbertson and its endorsement could make or break a new convention. And Culbertson was very careful about whom he gave his endorsement to.
And bridge players had a problem. When a partnership had very strong hands and wanted to bid a slam, there was no easy system for establishing whether the partnership held key cards, particularly aces. Blackwood worked out a series of artificial bids that would enable one partner to ‘count’ the number of aces held. After you have agreed a suit, a bid of 4NT is ‘asking for aces’. A response of 5 means you have no aces, 5 means one ace, 5 means two aces and 5 means three aces. It is unlikely that your partners has no aces in his hand, but, in the circumstances that you have all four aces, you would also bid 5 . In the event that the partnership is missing two aces, it is possible to settle in a final contract at the five level (requiring that eleven tricks be made) rather than ‘go’ for the slam.
Blackwood was a shy man. In his letter to The Bridge World, he asked that the convention be ‘credited’ to a pseudonym, Ernest Wormwood. Albert Morehead, who was editor at the time, initially declined to print Blackwood’s article for the simple (and expedient) reason that ‘our subscribers are too prone to accept anything printed in The Bridge World as a recommended change in the Culbertson system ...’ For three years, Culbertson continued to reject the Blackwood convention but, by 1938 (in a new edition of his Gold Book), Culbertson admitted that, even without his endorsement, it was gaining strength. Even so, it was not until 1949 that Culbertson acknowledged the superiority of the Blackwood Convention to his own system (known as Culbertson Four-Five) and announced to his subscribers that ‘when a pair announced it was playing the Culbertson system, it should be assumed that the Blackwood Convention was being played’. Blackwood (the convention and the man) never looked back and it is now the most widely played (and widely understood) bridge convention.
The original version of Blackwood is still in use, although in recent years many players prefer an adaptation of it known as Roman Keycard Blackwood. In this case the king of the agreed trump suit is counted as a ‘fifth’ ace (or key card) and the response to 4NT of 5 usually shows zero or three key cards and 5 shows one or four key cards. This being bridge, of course, even this is not agreed and some partnerships ‘do it the other ways round’ with the 5 bid showing one or four key cards and the 5 showing zero or three.
Commenting on this story some years later, Blackwood framed it in political terms. ‘Everybody was against me,’ he said, ‘but the people.’
Dad liked Blackwood, both the story and the bid. He too commonly felt that everyone was against him, not least the people. Although, of course, in our discussions we tended not to mention the people. There were too many of them and they were black, which made any conversations about popular support difficult.
But he liked the bid because it was clear and it worked.
On Iona we settled round a makeshift card table. ‘Where did you learn to play?’ Betty asked Cal.
‘I always knew,’ he replied with his trademark smile-and-side-ways-glance, an answer that he knew not to be true, but which charmed both them and me with its insouciant confidence.
‘Always?’ Mary asked.
‘Ever since I was little,’ Cal agreed. ‘My dad taught me.’ There was no suggestion from anyone that this might contradict his earlier assertion.
‘When was that?’
‘You won’t remember, I don’t think,’ Cal replied.
‘Well, then,’ she replied. ‘You had better deal.’
But Cal was suddenly overcome with shyness and it fell to me to deal the cards and make the first bid. Everybody deals differently. I think of my friend Mark who thumps every fourth card down like a man challenging for a duel or of the man at the club where I sometimes play who taps the top of each card as though trying to divine which it is. There are those who count each card as they deal it, those who talk as they deal and those for whom dealing is a reverential act, like painting the lines on a playing field or feeding a clean sheet of paper into the typewriter. For, at that moment, the moment before your cards are revealed, anything is possible. The stage is set, but the action has not yet begun.
We hadn’t cut for partners. It seemed safer to assume that Cal would play with me and that our opponents would be Mary and her sister Betty from Toledo, Ohio. Mary was the elder, and the leader and it was she who regarded Cal shrewdly and calculated when the right moment was to ask our story and what brought us to this remote western corner of Scotland. She was pleased that I should phrase my explanation of our journey as a ‘quest’, and was delighted with Cal’s rider.
‘Also we get to eat whatever we like,’ he said, which he knew to be only partially true but which he no doubt intended as a marker, lest I forget that travelling companions may have different agendas.
As dealer, I opened the bidding, and the game began while the shadows melted into the gentle evening air. Betty may have been the younger sister, but she was the better bridge player. She knew, for
example, not to lead away from a tenace. Tenace is a lovely bridge concept. It means a situation where one hand has two high honour cards in a suit separated by two degrees. King and jack for example, or ace and queen. The word comes to us from the Latin ‘tenax’, meaning tongs. A tenace is weak if one has to lead from it, but strong if one’s opponents have to lead up to it. Leading through it enables one to take a finesse. And Betty more-or-less ‘counted the hand’, which is to say that she not only looked at the cards in her hand, but used them and the bidding to work out what each of the other players must have held in their hands. It’s a question of pattern. The most common pattern for a hand of thirteen cards is 4-4-3-2, which means that a player has two four-card suits, a tripleton and a doubleton. Other common patterns are 5-3-3-2 and 4-3-3-3 and these hands are known as ‘balanced’. The more unbalanced a hand is, the less frequently that pattern will occur. A hand with 5-4-2-2 or 4-4-4-1 is slightly unbalanced – but a more frequent occurrence than a hand with 6-4-2-1 distribution. As Alan Truscott puts it, ‘These patterns should become old friends. An inexperienced player should think about the pattern whenever he picks up a hand. He should reach the point at which an unfamiliar pattern will cause him to know immediately that he has the wrong number of cards: Somebody has dealt him 12 or 14.’
Neither Cal nor Mary ‘counts’ the hand. Cal bids with gay abandon. He is mindful of many tales of his grandfather’s ability to conjure tricks from nothing (tales told entirely by his grandfather), and believes firmly, but wrongly, that bidding is only a phoney war before the real action begins. Mary, brought up in the ‘proper’ school of bridge, bids cautiously. Betty and I try to restore a little order to events. She overbids to compensate for Mary. I put on the brakes to avoid too much damage from Cal’s wild calls. We adjust our play, but we do not try to ‘correct’ theirs. Both of us have read S.J. Simon’s Why You Lose at Bridge. We know that it is hopeless to instruct your partner in the middle of a game. ‘It can only confuse them. And there is no one more difficult to play with than a willing, but confused, partner.’