Word: carding
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...slam in order to get a slam bonus (in both plafond and U.S.-British auction, the bonus was awarded whether the slam was bid or not). The mechanics and scoring of the new game-with slam bonuses increased tenfold and more-were worked out by Vanderbilt and three card-playing friends on a cruise to Havana in November 1925. Contract was born...
Billed as the "Bridge Battle of the Century," the four-week Lenz-Culbertson match was the most publicized card joust in history. The wire services had top reporters covering the match from start to finish, papers put out extras on results, and readers who could not tell a doubleton from a double followed the daily point score. Lenz and Jacoby got off to an early lead, but at the end of the 150th rubber the Culbertson partnership was ahead by 8,980 points, and Lenz paid up. That ended any small remaining doubt about whether Culbertson...
...girl laughed at him-and thin-skinned Charlie Goren, late of Philadelphia's slums, was no man to be laughed at. "It was like putting a knife through me," he says, "and I took an oath that I was never going to sit down at a card table until I knew how to play bridge." Goren returned to Philadelphia, bought a copy of Expert Milton Work's book on auction bridge, and studied it daily for nearly eight months. "If they had destroyed the plates of that book," he says, "I could have reconstructed it from memory...
...Goren system revolves around the fact that there are 40 high-card points in a deck. An opening suit bid requires 13 points, a bid is mandatory at 14 points, a partnership with 26 points should make game in a major suit (29 are needed in a minor suit), partners with 33 points should have a little slam, and 37 is the magic number for a grand slam...
Beyond its tremendous advantage of simplicity, the Goren method was more reliable than Culbertson's. Ely's honor-trick count tended to undervalue kings, queens and jacks, overvalue the ace and the A-K combination. By bringing high-card valuation more into line with play-of-the-cards realities, Goren saved bridge players countless set contracts, especially at no trump. Another virtue of Goren's method was that it supplied a practical way of taking distribution into account: on suit bids (but not on no-trump) it adds one point for a doubleton, two for a singleton...