Where the Auction Is
GUASPARI, DAVID
Where the Auction Is The game of bridge and the human condition. BY DAVID GUASPARI The Backwash Squeeze and Other Improbable Feats A Newcomer’s Journey into the World of Bridge by Edward...
...Bridge will not disappear, but how lamentable if it were marginalized by its virtues—by diffi culty and depth...
...And of course, James McManus had already done the poker bestseller, Positively Fifth Street...
...Of all the top players, says McPherson, Zia has the best time...
...That outcome was never in doubt, and an understanding of computer chess shows why...
...Championship Bridge with Charles Goren, featuring four decorously dressed adults who played for the equivalent of matchsticks, went off the air in 1964...
...It takes guts to “go against the fi eld” and base bold plays on such elaborate counterfactuals—and to weather the occasional catastrophes that result if they prove to be misjudgments...
...Bayone teaches poker, too, because poker is what’s hot...
...Some of McPherson’s anthropology is clich?d...
...In 2004 the Washington Post did report ambiguous news about its potential comeback among the hip set, “along with other retro favorites such as bowling shirts, TV dinners and kitten heels...
...There are two approaches to chess: brute force, following out untold millions of possible lines of play (I do this, then he does that, then I do that, then …), or imagination and insight—which among other benefi ts, reduce to a very few the lines of play worth considering...
...McPherson and Tina fared poorly in Chicago...
...Do not infer from Hamman’s profession that bridge is a contest of actuarial skills...
...Had Drax been a true expert, he’d have known the deck was stacked when he picked up his cards and saw the Duke of Cumberland hand, a famous swindle from the days of whist...
...Advance publicity for The Backwash Squeeze treats Fifth Street as its fraternal twin, a comparison misleading in every possible way—most importantly because McManus, a lifelong amateur player, writes about a mania from within its grip, while McPherson is a novice under no compulsion to play bridge, a bemused anthropologist touring the game’s subcultures...
...Bob Hamman, widely regarded as the best player in the world, is CEO of an appealingly odd company called Sports Contest Associates...
...Polowan rarely plays for cash and never hustles—always making sure that the other players in a money game know just who he is...
...He made a splash in 1981 by leading a Pakistani team of complete unknowns into the fi nals of the world championship...
...How does one market the world’s “deepest and most diffi cult card game...
...Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have stumped up a million bucks to fund bridge clubs in middle schools but found limited interest—in part, it seems, because of prudish panic at the very thought of card playing...
...it’s a beautiful game...
...Computers have succeeded by, in a sense, playing a different game...
...His living comes primarily from fees for partnering others in tournaments, but he deliberately limits that income because too much time with weaker players takes the edge off his game...
...But his descriptions of the stratosphere— the money game at fancy clubs or at London’s raffi sh TGR, the tournament circuit and its stars—are absorbing...
...It takes thirty minutes to teach Texas Hold’em, and in an hour you can be as good as fi fty percent of the people playing the game...
...Rubber bridge” can be played for simple social fellowship or (at tony private venues such as the Portland or New York’s Regency Whist Club) for serious money...
...In April 2005 things looked different...
...But there’s only one way to play bridge, which relies heavily on concealing, revealing, and discovering hidden information...
...All of which made McPherson’s project admirably countercultural...
...Its premiere event, the Cavendish Pairs, begins with an auction to buy one of the invited partnerships ($12,500 minimum) who then play a three-day tournament...
...They play poker, “probably because they’re nitwits...
...Top players develop an astonishing skill at deducing the lie of the unseen cards—not from the fi dgets and tics that poker players call “tells” but from chains of inference such as: If this guy had those cards, would he have played that one given what he knew then—or could he anticipate that I would ask this very question and therefore, to deceive me, played then what would otherwise have been the wrong card...
...The Marx Brothers played enthusiastically, as did Dwight Eisenhower, Wilt Chamberlain, and Mahatma Gandhi— though never, I believe, at the same table...
...Accordingly, McPherson seeks out not only experts but also ordinary amateurs, with an emphasis on spunky old ladies...
...The Cavendish Invitational, a high-stakes money tournament begun in 1975, has been Las Vegasized...
...Is bridge dying...
...Bridge is a game of inference and judgment...
...In 1999, the mainstream press noticed his offer of a million-dollar prize for any computer program that could beat him, followed by his clobbering of the seven that were tried...
...He presents the professional Michael Polowan, for example, as an artist for art’s sake...
...So did James Bond, who cheats the villainous Sir Hugo Drax in a high stakes game at Blades Club...
...And after I fi nished The Backwash Squeeze, I went to my shelf of bridge books and, for the fi rst time in 30 years, opened one...
...You’ll have to fi nd out for yourself...
...You’re the only person in the world,” she once says, “who knows this much about me...
...Now, says Jeff Bayone, bridge is dying...
...In 1999, Zia Mahmood offered a million dollars for any computer bridge program that could beat him, followed by his clobbering of the seven that were tried...
...That would take years of study in bridge...
...The reason...
...And vignettes of “ruthless” old ladies at an afternoon tournament and “brilliant” play by the author’s friend’s nonagenarian grandmother raise the question: How would he know...
...A younger generation of players “DOES...
...When asked to name his most memorable hands, Hamman demurs, because the ones that stand out are “the shipwrecks...
...Prominent among those is Tina, an octogenarian in his beginners class who became his regular playing partner...
...BY DAVID GUASPARI The Backwash Squeeze and Other Improbable Feats A Newcomer’s Journey into the World of Bridge by Edward McPherson HarperCollins, 368 pp., $23.95 Harold Stirling Vanderbilt, yachtsman and socialite, invented contract bridge on a cruise ship waiting to transit the Panama Canal...
...And just what is a “backwash squeeze,” anyway...
...Duplicate bridge” is the format for tournaments, which are mainly contests for glory and rankings...
...David Guaspari writes from Ithaca, New York...
...The million or so in auction money is pooled and paid out to the owners of the highest fi nishers...
...Its specialty is providing insurance for blockbuster promotions, such as a sports arena’s offering some randomly chosen fan $1 million if he can sink a half-court shot...
...The book’s slender narrative chronicles their growing friendship...
...Humans play chess with imagination and insight, and computers attempting to mimic that have always failed...
...Increasingly, both forms are played online, where one might fi nd oneself at a virtual table with enthusiasts Bill Gates (screen name Chalengr) or Warren Buffett (T-Bone...
...Four players partner one another in turn, which demands fl exibility and a “table presence” attuned to each player’s strengths and weaknesses...
...The American Contract Bridge League has a lame website for kids...
...Celebrities no longer play bridge...
...The underwriting procedures, Hamman says, involve “some adjustments, some computations, and some unscientifi c wild-ass guesses...
...Blades is modeled on the world’s oldest bridge club, the Portland, to which Ian Fleming belonged...
...EXIST...
...That territory is varied...
...A pair’s score on any hand is determined by how well it did in comparison with those who held the same cards...
...McPherson quotes, for comic effect, the opening lines of a technical description and gives himself a pass on understanding it...
...Despite that showing, and the hellish travel foul-ups they suffered (fl ight delays and lost reservations), Tina declares, “I’d do it again...
...The year was 1925, and by the end of the decade bridge had become— for all segments of society, high, low, and Hollywood—the most popular card game in America...
...That story concludes with their trip to Chicago, full of trepidation, to enter a beginner’s event at the North American Bridge Championships...
...It reduces the luck of the deal: Partnerships are fi xed, and the hands are dealt once and circulated, to be played repeatedly by different competitors...
...When Edward McPherson proposed to write a book on bridge, Jeff Bayone, part owner of the Manhattan Bridge Club, told him he was nuts...
...Zia Mahmood is perhaps the most famous world-class bridge player, and certainly the most presentable: a charming egotist, always elegantly dressed, often surrounded by female kibitzers...
...The percentages” are easily learned, and won’t get you out of the novice class...
...Poker is easy to follow on TV and the cable networks can’t seem to get enough of shaved heads and wraparound shades and the soul-stirring drama of money changing hands...
...Do we need yet another comic take on fl abby vacationers in a tacky American tourist town...
...A good decision...
...Reserved, intelligent, with a dry sense of humor, a season’s subscriber to several off-off Broadway theaters, Tina is the sort of person about whom there seems always something new and surprising to be learned...
...Let’s not bother our purty little heads about that...
Vol. 13 • December 2007 • No. 15
