If there’s one tournament I’d really like to play in, it’s the Cavendish in Monaco, the largest money bridge tournament in the world. Last Sunday, the winners of the main auction pairs, the Bulgarians Diyan Danailov and Jerry Stamatov, scooped the players prize of €16,000, and whoever bought them for €12,000 won €100,000. But it’s
Matthew Sadler’s retirement from full-time international chess is one of the great losses to the British game. Occasionally, the one-time prodigy emerges, usually to make a massive score in a rapid or blitz event in the vicinity of Holland, where he now works and lives. It is also fortunate that he still competes in the
In Competition No. 2986 you were invited to submit a poem about a deadly foodstuff. My inspiration for this assignment was the appalling news that toast can kill you, which is yet another depressing indication that everything good is bad for you. Or perhaps, as Max Gutmann suggests in the closing couplet of his
The unclued lights (one of two words), correctly paired, are of a kind and are defective in the same way. Elsewhere, ignore an accent. Across 1 Indecision of poet shortly to tour America (8) 5 A band restrains it likewise (6, two words) 14 Judge half a fool (3) 16 Shrewd to capture rook
The shared name was PERRY (18), shared by GRAYSON (28) Perry and Perry MASON (2). GP, whose alter ego is CLAIRE (3), is a TURNER (32) Prize winner. PM is a lawyer created by Erle Stanley GARDNER (27); Della STREET (10) is PM’s secretary and Paul DRAKE (37) is his private investigator. PERRY was to
Black to play. This position is from Morozevich-Sadler, Reykjavik 1999, a game from Sadler’s heydey, when he was regularly beating the best players in the world. How did he finish off? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 28 February or via email to victoria@spectator.co.uk. There is a prize of £20 for the first
