Janet de Botton

I don’t mind a bit of carefully controlled nostalgia but when it even nudges mawkishness I’m out. To prove it I am not going to gush and rhapsodise that this is my last column for the Speccie, but I will say that it has been a pleasure and a privilege filing this column every fortnight

I first met Susanna in 1987 when Ed Victor, the late literary agent, invited both of us for lunch at the recently opened River Café. It was love at first sight as she chatted hilariously about her up-and-coming blind date with a rather well-known politician and people we knew, all of whom had something in

England’s ladies bridge has a grand past, with many international titles and gold medals to its name, but obviously the same players can’t go on forever. It would appear that the future may also be looking bright as many girls and young women discover how fascinating and obsessing bridge can be. We have, without doubt,

‘Greed is good,’ announced Gordon Gekko, in what became a definitive clarion call for the 1980s. But as we all regretfully know, greed often ends in disaster. Have you ever sat over a pint after the game with the hand records in front of you and said: ‘Jolly lucky I didn’t double that four spades.

Sometimes the stars align in such a wondrous way that the team they are favouring cannot go wrong. Such a line-up fell upon my team in last week’s World Bridge Tour in lovely Copenhagen. First star that kerchunked into our constellation was that I couldn’t play, which left six professionals with no weak link who

The Chairman’s Cup – the flagship teams’ event of the Swedish Bridge Festival held in Orebro at the end of July – set a new record for the number of teams entering: up 19 to 157 in total. This despite it clashing with the American Summer Nationals, which attracts a lot of the European Pros.

Bridge Scanner is a great website set up about ten years ago by Lithuania’s Erikas Vainikonis, I imagine because it was almost impossible to find the running scores for any of the big tournaments. At the moment the World Championships are being played in Denmark and it literally takes me 20 seconds to find the

I often see players at international events, playing with someone other than their usual partner (or a sponsor) and forming a superstar pair – even if it’s only for one tournament. One of the most exciting pairs at the recent European Transnational Championships in Poland was Norwegian Geir Helgemo, the player widely regarded as the

The newly launched Zimmermann team, relocated from Monaco to Switzerland, were victorious at the European Transnational Championships in Poland in June. The tarnish has been rather rubbed off their many European and World titles when one of his previous pairs, Fulvio Fantoni and Claudio Nunes, were banned for alleged cheating. Pierre is now surrounding himself

A few years ago I went to Dallas with my team to play in the Summer National, the main event being the Spingold, a knockout tournament which attracts some of the best teams in the world. We did rather well and found ourselves in the quarter finals, and our opponents were Marty Fleisher’s team of

‘There are only three kinds of Bridge players; those who can count and those who can’t.’ And there are only two types of reader: those who find this funny and those who, like me, don’t. It’s not so much that it’s hard to count to 13 – it isn’t really – it’s just that there

There are many words in the English language that you need to be Susie Dent* to use correctly. Disinterested and uninterested, elder and older and fewer and less to name three that I struggle with. When today’s hand came up in an EBU online League match I was extremely grateful to have ‘Assumption’ and ‘Presumption’

Counting, counting and counting are the three most important things to consider, whether you are playing in your local bridge club duplicate or the Bermuda Bowl. Counting declarer’s tricks when you are defending is hard when you are very busy counting your own hand and, when dummy goes down, you can start to work out

One FAQ by people who are thinking of learning bridge is: ‘Do you have to be good at maths to become a good bridge player?’ The answer is you don’t need to be Rain Man but familiarity with numeracy will be an asset. Logic plays a big part in making a good player and, if

A couple of weekends ago, the Scottish Bridge Union ran the inaugural British Isles Trophy, a mixed team’s event for the Home Counties. It was played on RealBridge, the website that allows players to both see and hear each other. Bridge, being the last bastion of ‘hilarious’ misogyny, always has an alpha chuckle when somebody

I am sure that readers of this column need no introduction to Victor Mollo’s most famous creation, The Hideous Hog. Bridge in the Menagerie was first published in 1965 and today, Mollo’s stereotypes are as sharp and apposite as they were 60 years ago. And don’t think (as I did) that hogging is an exclusively

Everyone has good days and bad days; no one more than me. I like to think my A game is pretty good but my B game is such a car crash that sometimes I feel like giving up. Great players also have A and B days, the difference being smaller the better the player. Towards

The European Transnational Championships were held last week in Prague, and were won by the gargantuanly strong Zimmerman team, but it was not plain sailing. They appeared to have lost their quarter-final to the Italian team Bianchi, but that doesn’t happen in Zimmerland. Twice during the 56-board, day-long match they asked for rulings against something

The World Bridge Tour had its first event of the year in combination with the wonderful Bridge Festival in Reykjavik. Only team Black, of the four British teams, made the play-offs, eventually finishing fourth, while the event was won by the American McAllister team with – who else – the Rimstedt twins on it. I