Bridge

Last year, my new year’s resolution was to make fewer careless mistakes at the bridge table. Easier, surely, than cutting down on chocolate. Alas, not: I’ve spent as much time as ever banging my head in frustration. So I’m making a different resolution this year: I’m going to embrace my careless mistakes. After all, even the best players err. As Dennis Bilde once said: ‘It’s inevitable. We aren’t computers, we’re humans.’

When I’ve done something foolish, I’ll bear in mind these reassurances from the stars. Jeff Meckstroth: ‘What you do on any one hand doesn’t mean anything, because everyone’s liable to do stupid stuff.’ Roy Welland: ‘If you don’t accept that you’re going to play badly sometimes, you probably shouldn’t play.’ John Kranyak says he’s made so many mistakes that nowadays,
when he does something ‘ridiculous’ on Vugraph, his attitude is ‘Whatever’. As for Brian Senior, he’s honest enough to admit to having occasional ‘brain flips’, where he means to play one card but plays another.

Bridge has always been a game of mistakes. I enjoyed coming across this deal from a 1982 international tournament between the fearsome Lavazza team and the Italian juniors (see diagram).

West passed – surely a mistake. North – Belladonna, one of the greatest players of all time – overcalled 1♠️. His partner, Guido Ferraro, splintered. And Belladonna passed! It was a mad moment that would make anybody blush. (Although Belladonna was heard later jokingly telling Ferraro: ‘Can’t you use simpler bidding?’) As it happens, they were saved by their teammates in the
other room. A young Noberto Bocchi, West, opened a gambling 3NT – and scored nine tricks when North led the ♠️J!