Evening Star Newspaper, July 5, 1931, Page 66

' THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. €, JULY 3, T198r. — & 7uE BRriDGE Forum * What Kind AreYou? Mere Winning Cannot Produce the Same - What kind of a dummy are you? Do you care not a rap what you do? Do you throw down your trumps with abandon and speed Before your opponent has taken a lead? Do you lay down the other cards any old way . . To bawl up your partner and help him misplay? . Do youka.sk the opponent to give you a pee And cancel your right in discussions to speak? In short, when your turn to be dummy - has come, Do you act like a dummy who really is dumb? T is customary to call a winning session at bridge a successful one. But any sane per- son who had tco consistent a winning record would become bored by the game, just as the other extreme is slightly tiresome, not to say exasperating and expensive. Be that as it may, some kind of laurel wreath should be awarded to R. H. Smith of Dickinson, N. Dak., who is the first known case of a man who quit the game because he won too often. “About 10 years ago,” he says, “I began play- tng bridge. It proved to be the first card game capable of sustaining my interest over any length of time. After playing regularly for about two years the game became so lacking in interest that I gave it up. The reason is a strange one—a run of cards so consistently good that I very seldom was affiicted with the loser's end of the score. For example, over a period of 14 weeks I won first prize weekly at our club tournaments for nine consecutive weeks. The other five weeks showed me second twice and third three times. And so I gave up bridge— rather than lose my friends.” And then he took up chess! No Luck in Chess? *Y have found.,” Mr. Smith goes on, “that chess is one game where alibis count for naught, oluck is non-existent, and the etiquette of the game is far better than any card game.” As for the luck, we once heard of a chess player who accidentally touched the wrong piece when startled by the sound of blasting, was compelied to move it, and so lost the game. In . etiquette and ethics chess is a blank. It is no test of a man's code of honor, or & woman’s, and can never offer the beautiful examples of fair play that bridge providés. In re the alibis, bridge gives us the joy of being human, with human weaknesses. Chess tends to make us thinking machincs devoid of all other attributes. Contract Systems. Tow would you bid and play the following hand, South being the dealer and neither side vulnerable? &Js VKT ¢ 108658 9614 AMAQT52 YVAQJE3 *Q dAS Players who measure everything by honor tricks and who require from four and & half to five and a half of them in order to make a strength showing bid would be obliged to bid one spade on South’s hand. Their theory is that when the bidder has four honor tricks or less, either the partner will have enough strength to bid voluntarily over a one bid or else one of the opponents will be able to overcall it. This quite normal case illustrates the fallacy of the idea that it is safe to depend upon opponents to help you bid a game when you are reasonably sure of one, for the partner will have to pass and the hand gets played at one spade. Those who use their forcing bid, whatever it be—either a two bid, a three bid or an artificial one or two clubs, depending upon the system— whenever they have a hand with which they are willing to take the responsibility of promis- ing & game, will force with this kind ef hand. # After the spades are shown, the partner will keep the bidding open and give the dealer a chance to show his hearts, in which the side will bid four and make five, no matter what is led. How would you bid and and play the follow- ing hand, South being the dealer and both sides vulnerable? a2 PKIT12 ®95 HAKJIOBS 3 NORTH WwAJ1084 |5 ®QJI42 g 76 &Q - 4710987654 ¥ None 2163 & None Thrill as a Keen, Close Contest—Notes on Contract Solitaire—.A New Problem. BY SHEPAI A Law a Week. What occurs in this case? East dealt and bid one heart, South onmne spade, West two heart, South two spades, East three hearts and South three spades. West now said: “Four spades—oh, I mean four hearts.” The bid is four hearts. and there is no penalty for what was plainly a slip of the tonque, otherwise known as a lapsus linguae. The law on this is very clear. It says: “A player who inadvertently says ‘No bid* when meaning to say ‘No trump,’ or vice versa, or who inadvertently names one suit when meaning to name another, may correct his" mistake before the next player declares. A change in the number of tricks bid (except D BARCLAY. to make a bid sufficient), or from pass to any bid, may not be made. By ‘inadvertently’ is meant s slip of the tongue, not a change of mind. Except as above provided, a player may not change his declaration, and if he attempts to do so the second declaration is void and may be penalized as a bid out of turn.” What occurs in this case? The dealer, heri- tating opver his hand, drawls “Oh, I'l—" whiie the player at his left, expecting him to pass, 3 preparing to say “So will 1.” The dealer atf this stage quickly says “—bid a cludb” The next player, in careless fashion, promptly says what he expected to, “So will 1, and then, realizing his opponent had bid instead of pass- ing, immediately corrects himself with “Oh, I mean I pass.” Has he made an insuficient bid of one club, or has he passed? OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN Continued from Eleventh Page like a battle between steam riveters and rapid- fire guns, because seven or eight boys were scooting round and round as usual in their little motorboats. Tt was remarkable how they could come back to this form of activity day after day, breath- ing a good deal of carbon monoxide and im- pairing their hearing, with so much enjoyment, but of course Mark Twain was right and a large part of the pleasure in the average boy's life is “showing off.” If there hadn’t been any other boys to be outspeeded, or any spec- tators, I doubt if any boy in the lot—just left alone with no one looking on or anything— would have kept it up very long. Little Paulie, in his boat, went roaring by me, close up to the wharf, and gave me & condescending wave of his hand. His expres- sion was a good deal like Napoleon's and you couldn’t doubt he felt perfectly grand. Yol could see how it would have astonished him if he’'d known that the spectators were muttering words that really ought never to be applied to minors. He almost hit a canoe that had a man and his family in it and he probably thought they admired the masterly way in which he contrived to miss them, for he gave them a condescending wave of the hand, too, and was wholly unaware of what they shouted after him. After awhile I heard a kind of moan behind me. It was from Mr. Carmichael, and he came round and sat beside me. “Sickening, isn’t it?* he said. “All the parents of these boys say it’s so nice because they can always tell just where the boys are, So can the rest of us tell just where they are, heaven help us! It strikes me as a little self-centered to force a whole community to know just where a boy is when it would a good deal rather not have the information.” His voice got fiercer as he asked me the question, “Do you know the last thing those people have been up to?” “You mean Mr. and Mrs. Timberlake?"” «I certainly do! The Timberlakes’ cottage is between the MacGregors’ and ours. Early this Summer the MacGregors had a house party of young people and Mrs. Timberlake made her husband write a note to Mr. and Mrs. MacGregor asking them not to allow their phonograph or radio to be played after 8 o'clock in the evening, because 8 o’clock is little Paulie’s bedtime. Now, the MacGregors prac- tically live at a camp back somewhere in the woods on acoount of little Paulie and his friends’ motor boats, but that's not what I'm talking about. My little daughter Helen took a fancy to a rooster a farmer brought us and we didn’t have him killed because she wanted him for a pet. Well, Timberlake and I have quit speaking, but do you know what he had the nerve to do? Wrote me a note yesterday intimating .he’d hire a lawyer if we didn't get rid of that rooster, because it usually happens to crow under Mrs. Timberlake's window about daylight. What do you think of that?” I just made a kind of helpless laughing sound. I knew I couldn't tell him, because if I hadn't happened to go thinking a while about the mother of the boy on the bicycle, that Enid and Eddie had almost hit, nobody'd have been able to teil me—not so I could have un- derstood. I couldn’t answer my own question about what the children themselves actually were—that was beyond me-—but I did com- prehend the meaning of my remarkable new discovery, which is that we ourselves are just as stupefied by being parents as other chil- dren’s parents are. I don't claim it's original, besause anybody’ll tell you it’s a discovery most likely made for the first time at least 6,000 years ago, and a good many people must have been making it about that many times a year ever since; yet the way we all act nobody ever does seem to meke it. Why we don't is just about the troublesomest puzzle in the whole world. (Copyright, 1981, by Booth Tarkington.) The Saga of the Saddle Continued from Second Page Laramie and when the giant figure of “Portu- guese” Phillips came through the door a gay Christmas ball was in full swing. The besieged folk at Fort Phil Kearney were saved. Phillips was paid $300 for the ride “and various other scouting duties.” The Sioux swore to pay him back for the victory he had beat them out of, and six years later they killed all his stock—his whole property. In 1883 he died in Cheyenne, penniless. Thirty-iwo years after his ride the “grateful” democracy of America paid his solitary and destitute widow $5,000—to settle the claim against Indian dep- redation. It is said that no monument marks his grave. No classic celebrates his ride. “Por- tuguese” Phillips was just one of the riders that won the West. The story of his ride is just a detail in a riding tradition that neither automobile nor airplane can every entirely run away from. And so the stories go on. The American saga of the saddle has only been suggested Copyright, 1931, by J. Prank Doble. “Contract Solitaire.™ Thomas Shepard Southworth writes in that he is one of those who play what he calls “contract solitaire.” This name, he says, is his own “and not copyrighted.” By it he means dealing contract hands, bidding them, and “mentally rather than actually playing them.” He has shown this to various beginners, who are often “panic-stricken” at the idea of play- ing a dummy hand in addition to their own. “They know,” he declares, “that every mistake made is exposed to the silent criticism of the opponents—and kibitzers. They quickly lose this fear after playing contract solitaire. *“As it happens,” he concludes, “I know no one, except, of course, experts, who do it.” That, it may be mentioned, is one of the chief reasons why experts are experts. They learn much of what they know from dealing hand after hand alone and noting the way some theory works out in various circumstances be- fore even considering a trial of it at the bridge table. I7Al 5is 4 The Official Laws. “I have been following your ‘A Law a Week,*® says K. M. Lansing. “Have you the laws com- piled in book form? They include penalties usually not found in the books I have and which seem to be very necessary.” All of them can be found in the “Official Laws” of the game adopted by the Wplst Club in New York and by other recognized clubs in all parts of the country. They are published in “The Contract Bridge Guide” and prac- tically every other book by any authority. The parsgraphs to which the correspondent refers are interpretations of those laws put into non- technical language, and in some cases showing how the laws apply to complicated situations. Problems of Pla'&.' Having bid both hearts and diamonds, Soulll plays this hand at five diamonds, doubled by West, who leads the three of trumps. How can South make his contract? 4QJ98 Vve32 102 hKQ54 NORTH 410763 & w1086 § e876 SOUTH e aA2 YAQS54 ®AKQS54 Hhb62 The contract cannot possibly be made against proper defense by West. South, when this hand was played recently, was the keen Col. Sydney L. Smith, who realized his plight and also sized up the left-hand adversary as one who might help him make the contract if afforded an opportunity. So, after taking the first trick with his diamond queen, he led the deuce of clubs. This enabled West to co-op- erate to the queen’s taste. If West had played low to this trick, South would have to lose two hearts, a spade and a club. West, however, took the trick with the ace, and. of all things, instead of a second trump, returned the four of spades, perhaps imagining that his partner might have the ace. The jack won this and made a perfect squeeze, play possible. The spade ace took the next trick, then the last four trumps were run. This made a total of eight tricks played, leaving five cards in each hand. In trying to protect his hearts and spades, West had to discard clubs on two tricks, leaving him only the king of spades, his hearts and the club jack. Now the club six was led and three club tricks run. On the second of these West dropped his heart seven and on the third had to choose between the king of spades, which would make North's queen good for the next to last trick, and the jack of hearts, which would enable the colonel to take the last two tricks with the ace and queen of hearts. Thus six-odd were scored. P. S—When you know you can't make your contract unaided, give your friends, the en- emy, a chance to help. The New Problem. North having made a& semi-forcing bid e@ two hearts and South having gone immedi- ately to seven no trumps, how can the latter make his contract against a lead of the dia- mond three? 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