Bridge 24 was set up seven years ago by four Polish internationals who wanted to bring the glory days of the Eighties and Nineties back to Polish bridge: teach kids, organise seminars and start winning medals again. They have succeeded magnificently. Poland are the reigning world champions and Michal Klukowski, at 17, became the youngest
‘Ducking is for experts. Don’t try it.’ So says my partner Artur Malinowski every time I duck a trick in defence and let the contract through. Nice to know that experts also get it wrong, as was spectacularly demonstrated in the semi-final of the Vanderbilt Teams held in Kansas City recently. The two Davids (Bakhshi
Tournament bridge players do not expect, or get, much in the way of luxury. I have played in some of the scuzziest venues imaginable (don’t get me started on Tromso’s Portaloos or Menton’s suffocating heat), so it is a rare treat that sponsor Simon Gillis’s Lederer Memorial Trophy is held at the super elegant RAC
February is probably the most exciting and glamorous month in the bridge calendar. A couple of weeks ago, über-sponsor Pierre Zimmermann held his Cavendish Monaco Teams and Auction Pairs tournament, which attracts the best players in the world, all vying for a chance to pick up the big player’s pot or score in the auction.
What can be more regrettable than picking up a huge hand and landing in the wrong contract? It happened to me recently in a Hubert Phillips match. I had a 3-3-5-2 twenty-four count, all Aces and Kings, and my left hand opponent opened 3♠ which was raised to game on my right. I gave
Not surprisingly, Reykjavik has become a tourist destination again. Delicious restaurants, all those geysers and, if you’re lucky, the Northern Lights come out to play. But for bridge players there is another incentive to get out your warmest parka — possibly my favourite bridge tournament of the year held on the last weekend of January.
The Friday night IMPs game at the Young Chelsea is still the best game around. Some of yesterday’s internationals may have been replaced by tomorrow’s, but it remains pure, unadulterated fun! The newest superstar in town is French Junior sensation Christophe Grosset, married to our very own Alice Kaye. On today’s hand, he refused to
Simon Gillis’s team has had a very successful year. They won the Gold Cup (for the second time), they joined the Premier League in the second division and got promoted, and they won the team’s event in the 2015 London Year End congress. This year the congress went slightly askew for him. His 16-year-old son
Simon Cochemé, whose witty column appears monthly in English Bridge magazine, celebrated his 70th birthday with a knees-up and duplicate at Young Chelsea at the end of November. The hands were ‘prepared’, each containing a problem of one sort or another, some well-known, others less so. The question was, would the players reach the intended
When I first started playing bridge, in the late Nineties, the Young Chelsea marathon was a continuous 24-hour tournament and the stories that came out of those events are legendary: Richard Selway, late, great host at TGRs, winning and going straight to work afterwards. A Norwegian pair, who had not slept at all the night
The last three weekends have not been relaxing for those of us playing the Premier League, with all its attendant dreams of promotion and nightmares of relegation. Last year’s winners were relegated to division two and Alexander Allfrey’s excellent team won. Today’s hand features (immodestly) moi and came from the second weekend in Manchester: First
The Gold Cup Finals were played in London this year and proved to be very exciting but ultimately unsuccessful for my team. We played David Mossop’s squad on Friday in the quarter-finals and had a rather magical match where everything went our way and we won easily. Next day we played Simon Gillis’s band of
The Hubert Phillips is one of the EBU’s quirkier knockout tournaments. Firstly every team must contain (and play) at least one male and one female, changing partners after each 10 board stanza. And secondly the scoring is by total aggregate, honours counting, meaning a big swing can easily wipe out all the other results in
TGR’s rubber bridge club is a bit like the set of your favourite soap. You have the regulars, of varying abilities and temperaments. You have the stars. You have the guest appearances, characters who come and go and shake up the cocktail. And then you have the total strangers, who walk in from nowhere and
The 15th World Bridge Games (formerly known as the Olympiad) began on 3 September in Wroclaw, and is providing more thrills than Captain Poldark’s ever-disappearing shirt, which I fear is in danger of being written out altogether. In the Open section, three groups of 17 teams played a full round robin within their group, the
By the time you read this, I will have (hopefully) played my first hand of bridge in five weeks. No bridge and very little BBO vugraph of interest — the withdrawal pangs were coming with painful regularity, so to take the edge off I turned to reading. Bridge Tips by World Masters, in which Terence
Bridge players love going on about system. Some want every bid to have a conventional meaning and some want to play ‘naturally’. Personally I like a few conventions but not so many that judgement becomes redundant. Norway held its weeklong Bridge Festival in Fredrikstad this year which kicked off with Mixed Pairs. It was won
Martin Hoffman is a hero. Now in his eighties, he can still analyse a hand faster than most people can sort their cards and he still plays at the speed of light. For many years he was considered the best Pairs player in the world, splitting his time between Florida and London where he played
Summer finally appeared like magic on Saturday, 16 July. Did I fire up the barbie? Did I relax with a Pimm’s soaking up a few rays? Did I go for a gentle walk? Did I heck. I went to play the London Congress Swiss Pairs tournament and found myself, along with 160 other whey-faced bridge
The magnificent English Ladies have won another gold medal at the Europeans in Budapest. They have won medals in the past six Euro and world championships making them the most successful team we have ever had and one of the best of all time. They were lying third with one day to go. The team
