Bridge
Table Bridge
Table
Review by Glen Ashton (this link will open in a separate window)
When bridge players get together it isn’t long before somebody writes out a hand. The hand may be of special interest because of the bidding or the defense or the play. It may be a triumph or a problem still unsolved. Occasionally it is a hand with extreme distribution or point count but more often it will be a common hand type with various possibilities in the bidding or play.
Extreme hands are rare, and therefore interesting for their novelty, but they seldom present much of a challenge – the play is typically without interest; the auction too, though there may be some options. For example, suppose you are dealt all thirteen spades. If this happens, you are probably being set up by somebody who has stacked the deck. Nevertheless, you are just as likely to be dealt this hand as any of the other 635,013,558,999 possible hands so let’s suppose the deal is legitimate. The play of such a hand requires zero thought – the cards can be played in any order: if spades are trump you will take all the tricks; if you are on lead against a notrump contract you will take all the tricks; otherwise you will take zero tricks. Your pet raccoon would play this hand just as well as you.
As for the auction, the usual objective, for you and your partner, is to exchange information through a series of bids to discover the best contract for your combined hands. In this case you know, before a single bid has been made, that you want to be in seven spades. Very simple, but be careful. Have a look around the table before you rocket into seven spades. You’ve just been dealt a hand in a trillion. You could play for a million lifetimes without picking up this hand again. It may not be challenging but it is so rare that you will be trotting it out for years to come, so make sure you have a good story to tell. Suppose you open the bidding with seven spades and the next hand bids seven notrump. Your partner is on lead and she has no spades so your trick count just went from thirteen tricks in a spade contract to zero tricks in the notrump contract. The challenge in bidding this hand is to be allowed to play the hand in spades. How do you convince your opposition that you have lots of spades but not all of them? For that matter, how do you prevent partner from converting seven spades to seven notrump?
Your bid will depend on the personalities and the abilities of both your partner and your opponents. If your partner always defers to you and your opponents would never think of bidding notrump without a spade stopper, then don’t fool around – bid seven spades. If you have a reputation for making ridiculous preempts – bid seven spades. Failing that, you might start with a pass just for the hell of it – not my idea of a good time but you are certain to get another chance to bid and an opening pass will make for fun in the postmortem. Other possibilities are one spade, two clubs (forcing), four notrump (ace asking). My personal choice would be to start with three spades – this will tell partner that she can’t count on an outside entry to run the spades and since she has no spades it may prevent her from converting a high level spade contract to notrump. If our opponents have most of the outstanding face cards, they will be in the auction and when I make a competing spade bid, after the opening preempt, it will sound like an undisciplined sacrifice rather than a contract that I expect to make. Chances are good that I will buy the contract for six spades doubled and it might be smart to be satisfied with that rather than voluntarily going to seven spades and having that contract pulled to seven notrump by a defender who twigs to what is going on.
This spade hand does not appear in Deadly Endplay, but there are many hands with more common distributions – hands that are less spectacular but more interesting. This is a novel about bridge players and much of their time is spent playing the game. In order to portray the role of bridge in the lives of the characters it is necessary to show them in action. The difficulty with this is that hand analysis slows down the narrative.
While much of the action in this novel takes place away from the table and has nothing to do with bridge, the game is always lurking in the background. Writers of bridge fiction are faced with a dilemma. On the one hand, we would like as wide an audience as possible. On the other hand, the game of bridge is the reason the characters come together and the way they play the game affects how they relate to one another. Unfortunately, descriptions of bidding and play, followed by discussions between the players about what happened, read like a foreign language to non-bridge-players. Furthermore, not all bridge players like to read about bridge.
The upshot is that this book aims at a narrow audience. If you are a bridge player who likes to read the bridge column in your daily newspaper, I think you will enjoy this little mystery. If you read all of this introduction, rather than skipping to the end, you probably are such a bridge player.
Deadly Endplay is now available from:
Ken Allan,
61 South Bartlett St,
Kingston, Ont, K7K 1X3.
allan@cogeco.ca
Mail order price is $20 Canadian (inclusive) in Canada and $20 US (inclusive)
for USA and for all other countries. That price includes the cover price
of $15 plus shipping (surface mail), handling and taxes. Cash, cheque or
money order (no plastic).
Vince Oddy (in Canada) and Baron Barclay (in the USA) are carrying this book so you should be able to pick it up at the book table at major bridge tournaments for $15.