Word: hand
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...England from beyond the Channel. Called Russian whist or biritch (soon anglicized into bridge), the new game differed from standard whist in two ways: the dealer named trumps, or passed the privilege across the table to his partner, and the dealer's partner became dummy, laying down his hand for all to see. London whist players who tried the new game soon noted that the exposed hand made possible much greater subtlety and ingenuity of play. In 1903 or thereabouts, bridge-playing British civil servants stationed at a remote outpost in India hit upon the idea of bidding...
...trump suit was decided on by turning up the last card dealt. Edgar Allan Poe wrote of whist: "Men of the highest order of intellect have been known to take an apparently unaccountable delight in it, while eschewing chess as frivolous." But with no bidding and no exposed hand to guide the players, the game was crude and guessy compared to modern bridge...
...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 a bitter quarrel about a bridge deal in which he bid one spade, she jumped to four spades...
...player, Goren published his first book, Winning Bridge Made Easy. In it he prophetically deviated from the Culbertson system. For suit bids, Goren stuck pretty much to Culbertson's elaborate "honor trick" count, but for no-trump bidding he adopted Milton Work's method of evaluating a hand with a point count: four points for an ace, three for a king, two for a queen, one for a jack. Entranced by the point count's simplicity, Goren devoted numberless hours to expanding the idea into a general bidding method. "It took me about 15 years," he says...
Goren speaks of his point-count bidding system as a "back to nature movement," meaning that it makes scant use of artificial conventions, relies on "natural" bids that are logically related to the cards in the hand. In his own play, Goren seldom uses any artificial bids except the Blackwood and Gerber slam conventions...