Susanna Gross

‘Table presence’ is a funny old expression. It sounds as though it refers to a player’s magnetic appeal or domineering personality. But no, it’s more like an extraordinary presence of mind. And it’s about the highest compliment you can pay someone. The Official Encyclopaedia of Bridge has made a valiant attempt to define the term, stating it denotes: ‘instinct’, ‘the drawing of correct inferences from any departure of rhythm by the opponents’, ‘the ability to coax maximum performance from partner’, a ‘poised demeanour that does not give clues’, ‘discipline in the bidding’ and ‘the ability to make the opponents feel they are facing a player of a higher order’. Bring it on!

Bridge isn’t a game you can get good at quickly. It takes years to reach a reasonable standard — far longer if you don’t practice continually. Of course, some people get there quicker than others. Claire Robinson is one of them. I first met Claire about four years ago; she’d only been playing for two or three years — a novice in bridge terms — and I was struck by how good she already was. Since then, we’ve teamed up a few times and she just gets better. What really makes the difference is that she was a dedicated poker player (and casino dealer) before taking up bridge. So she’s not just well-practiced in counting cards and calculating odds — she’s also skilled at ‘reading’ people.

All high-level bridge tournaments involve playing with screens placed diagonally across the table — and there are numerous rules to remember. For instance, only North or South may slide the bidding tray under the screen, only declarer or dummy may remove the tray after the bidding, only declarer or dummy may lift the screen’s flap… It’s easy to slip up, but until a few years ago people were pretty relaxed about it.   Not any more. Ever since the cheating scandal erupted in 2015, this stuff is taken deadly seriously. It’s hardly surprising: a shocking number of world champions were exposed as cheats, starting with the young Israelis Fisher and Schwartz, who did so by altering the bidding tray’s position to convey information.

I’m just back from an exhilarating week in Istanbul, where I was lucky enough to be partnering Tom Paske in the mixed teams and pairs of the European Open Championships. My plan was to stay on an extra day to sightsee, but as I was wandering into breakfast, my friend Debbie Sandford rushed up, ashen-faced. She was due to play with Sally Brock in the Women’s Teams, but Sally had had a horrible fall. She had a gash on her head and nose, and Debbie needed to take her to hospital. She’d be OK — but not today, obviously. Could I possibly find a partner and join her teammates, Marusa Gold and Diana Nettleton?

Bridge is such a complex, multi-layered game that a single hand can be approached in myriad ways, depending on the skill of the player. In fact, peering into the mind of a world-class player is a bit like entering another dimension; there are possibilities you didn’t even know existed.   At a recent pairs tournament, most North-South pairs bid and made 4♠ on the deal below. How, I wondered, did Artur Malinowski manage an overtrick? His answer blew me away:   West (Justin Hackett) led a trump. Artur drew a second round, then ran the ♦9 to  East’s ♦A. East switched to a heart. West won the ♥Q with his ♥K, and returned the ♥J to Artur’s ♥A.

I’ve recently been reading Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca to my children, and while it’s every bit as enjoyable as I remember, I’ve been bristling with embarrassment at the unflattering references to bridge in the first few chapters. The narrator is a paid companion to the grotesquely snobby Mrs van Hopper, who, we are told several times, loves nothing more than passing her evenings with her equally snobby circle of friends playing — well, your and my favourite game.   Yet again, I found myself wishing that I’d chosen the altogether cooler game of poker, which has never suffered such stereotypical slurs. But would I really have preferred it?

The Spring Fours in Stratford-upon-Avon — perhaps the most prestigious event in the English calendar — was as enjoyable as ever this year: a combination of top-class bridge and late-night socialising. My own fun began the moment I boarded the packed train from London, when I managed to bag the last available seat, and then saw Phil King wander into my carriage. Phil is one of the cleverest bidding theorists around and I often badger him for advice. As luck would have it, he got stuck standing right next to me, wedged between passengers, and I managed to quiz him all the way to Banbury, when he spotted a free seat and made a dash for it.

‘You know what people say about you?’ Zia Mahmood told me the other day. ‘You play really well but then go berserk. Good-good-good-berserk.’ He’s absolutely right, and I love him for telling me straight, in typical Zia fashion.   I’ve been struggling for a long time to overcome my sporadic lapses of concentration at the table. Of course, it happens to many of us: we get tired, we lose focus, we do silly stuff. But I’m determined to minimise these blips, and, like several of my friends who play competitively, have decided to take myself off to a sports psychologist.   This will come as good news to some of my partners, who know all too well what I’m talking about.

You’re probably familiar with the old bridge adage: ‘Never put down an 8-card suit in dummy’. If you’re lucky enough to be dealt such a hand — you’d better make sure you’re the one to set trumps. Of course, it does occasionally happen that your partner won’t stop bidding his own suit, forcing you to end up laying your beautiful hand on the baize like a corpse on a slab. In which case, be prepared for much joshing in the bar later. However, I’m hardly one to talk, as the other day I did something far more outrageous with my beautiful 8-suiter — and I haven’t stopped being teased since. The event was the Ian Gardiner Teams of Four, and I was playing with my Scottish friend Paula Leslie.

Each March, a roll call of bridge superstars come to compete in the Vanderbilt Knockout Teams, one of America’s most prestigious tournaments. When the American player and sponsor Jeff Wolfson recently asked Zia Mahmood if he could recommend a pair to join his team, Zia suggested his pal from England, Peter Crouch. Crouch then asked a fellow pro, Alex Hydes. They’d never partnered each other before.   They’re both delightful men. On the surface they don’t have much in common. Crouch (57) is a family man and renowned bridge coach with a measured, methodical approach. Yorkshireman Hydes (38) is a scruffy free spirit who travels the world with his clothes in a plastic bag; few would guess he’s a self-made millionaire.

It’s exceptionally rare to pick up an 11-card suit. You might think it would happen at least once in a lifetime. But according to Tom Townsend, who’s a genius at calculating odds, you can expect to hold one every 2,722,762 deals — that’s once every 287 years if you play a 26-board duplicate every evening. So the hand below was naturally the talk of the recent Lederer tournament. If you had just one guess, who would you say managed to get the best score holding this freak distribution? Of course, that master of mind games, Zia Mahmood:   At every table, East opened 1♠ and South ended up in 6♦ or 7♦ (beaten just once, when Alexander Allfrey found the ♣Q lead against Espen Erichsen’s 7u).

Geir Helgemo is the most revered bridge player in the world — and that isn’t about to change just because he failed a drug test at the World Bridge Series last September. You probably read about it at the weekend; some newspapers found it positively comical that the No. 1 player had been suspended for ‘doping’. Yet ever since bridge was recognised as a sport by the International Olympic Committee in 1998, players have been subject to random drug tests. Helgemo tested positive for synthetic testosterone. There’s no evidence it improves anyone’s game — indeed, no drug has been shown to do that.

Is it my imagination, or are we bridge players far more aggressive than we were a decade ago? I don’t mean our general behaviour — though that’s probably the case too. I’m talking about the way we bid. Finally, it seems, we’ve caught up with what the stars of the game have been doing for ages: fearlessly pushing opponents around when at ‘favourable’ vulnerability (green vs red). Such is the modern game: bid to the hilt and make them guess!   All this wildly aggressive bidding means that when we in turn are vulnerable, we often need to be far bolder than feels comfortable if we don’t want to be bullied out of our contracts. I very much enjoyed hearing about this deal from the recent South West Pacific Teams in Australia.