Word: partnerships
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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AFTER spending several hours kibitzing while Bridge Expert Charles Goren and Partner Helen Sobel played against another expert partnership, TIME Contributing Editor William Bowen and Correspondent Jack Olsen sat down to get their story firsthand. On the first deal, everybody passed. On the second, Sobel bid and made two spades. "Well.'' said Olsen, "we can always say that after spending a whole bridge evening with Goren and Sobel, we were only 60 points behind." For the results of that evening and countless other hours of digging by a task force of staffers who have now lost their amateur...
Problems of Partnership. Much of bridge's complexity-and fascination-derives from the fact that it is a partnership game, requiring that North and South, East and West inform each other of their card holdings through bidding. The 1929 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica warned that contract bridge, then in its infancy, was "not a good game for the club cardroom" because "coordination between two partners is very necessary" and "not always easily obtained." Nearly all experts agree that bidding is the really important and difficult part of bridge. And even Goren's bitterest enemies in the cutthroat...
...Mississippi Heart Hand. For bridge's enduring and growing popularity, urbane Novelist William Somerset Maugham has a simple explanation: "Bridge is the most entertaining and intelligent card game the wit of man has so far devised." Of all partnership card games, bridge is the most challenging to the mind. Nobody can become a good bridge player through experience and rule learning alone; the game requires thought. There are 635,013,559,600 possible bridge hands, and the value of every one can be modified, sometimes drastically, by the distribution of unseen cards in other hands. Even an incurably cautious...
...height of auction's popularity in the midigsos, the keen card mind of famed Yachtsman Harold S. Vanderbilt focused on the game's essential defect in comparison with present-day bridge: overtricks in excess of the bid counted toward game, just like bid tricks, so that a partnership could make a game without bidding it. Card Buff Vanderbilt found in the French variety of auction called plafond (ceiling) an innovation that he liked: only tricks bid and made were scored toward game, over tricks counting as above-the-line bonuses...
...calculating care for boats. Son of a prosperous Bronx coal dealer, he completed one year at M.I.T., got jaundice, never went back to college. Instead, he studied ship design so thoroughly by himself that when he was only 19 Marine Architect Drake H. Sparkman asked him to form a partnership. Later, Architect W. Starling Burgess invited Stephens to collaborate on the J-Boat Ranger, the fastest yacht in history,* which defended the America...