Word: contractive
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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...
Scramble of the Experts. The U.S. took up contract bridge with wild and alarming enthusiasm. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, newspapers reported bridge divorces, bridge assault-and-battery cases, even bridge deaths. Cartoonist H. T. Webster recorded bridge players' foibles in a long and memorable series. A North Carolina addict swore to shoot the next man who dealt him a bad hand, dealt himself a bust-and promptly shot himself to death. In Kansas City, Mo. in 1929, Housewife Myrtle Bennett committed one of the decade's most headlined homicides by shooting her husband after...
Along with divorces, homicides, quarrels and bad bids, contract brought the lasting war of the bridge experts. Contract made the expert indispensable for the run-of-living-room players: arriving at game and slam contracts with even reasonable safety required standardized communication between partners. In the scramble of the experts to cash in, the man who emerged on top was slender...
Russian-born Ely Culbertson, gifted with a real talent for cards and an absolute genius for personal publicity. His Contract Bridge Blue Book leaped to the bestseller lists in 1931, sold more than 1,000,000 copies within a few years...
...Point Count. By the early 1930s, having switched to contract along with everybody else, Goren ghosted for ex-Mentor Milton Work's syndicated column. Work got about $20,000 a year out of the column, paid Goren $35 a week-a disparity that Goren still resents. A talented and proud writer with a flair for gently whimsical humor, Goren vividly recalls that Boss Work would invariably "edit out the brightness...