Word: hand
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...million playing-card industry (60 million decks sold last year), the number of bridge players in the U.S. has soared from 22 million in 1940 to 35 million today, not counting the millions who study newspaper bridge columns but never take a card in hand. Over the same span, the number participating in American Contract Bridge League tournaments has exploded from 5,000 to more than 75,000. Having survived the now waning gin and canasta booms, bridge is moving ever-faster out front as the U.S.'s No. 1 card game...
...Mississippi Heart Hand. For bridge's enduring and growing popularity, urbane Novelist William Somerset Maugham has a simple explanation: "Bridge is the most entertaining and intelligent card game the wit of man has so far devised." Of all partnership card games, bridge is the most challenging to the mind. Nobody can become a good bridge player through experience and rule learning alone; the game requires thought. There are 635,013,559,600 possible bridge hands, and the value of every one can be modified, sometimes drastically, by the distribution of unseen cards in other hands. Even an incurably cautious...
...this seeming powerhouse is the famed Mississippi Heart Hand that, according to legend, riverboat gamblers used to deal out to suckers in the days of bridge's ancestor, whist. Far from taking all 13 tricks with hearts as trump, the hand can take only six, because the opponent on the left holds...
...System as Servant. Because the actual trick-taking value of a hand depends on how the other cards lie, the bridge player must strive to 1) infer the contents of the unseen hands, and 2) convey the picture of his own hand to his partner. In these tasks, a bidding system is an indispensable tool-but so are attention, memory, psychological perceptivity and clear thinking, plus that obscure talent called "card sense." In addition, a really good bridge player has a talent that Charles Goren defines as "the ability to make sound decisions under pressure." Rules, he warns, are made...
Leading against the opponents' contract of four spades (i.e., ten tricks with spades trumps), Goren took two quick tricks with the ace and king of hearts. But where could he go from there? From studying his own hand and dummy's, plus the bidding, he was sure that East held the two unseen aces, and probably the club king. A diamond lead would sacrifice Goren's king. A club lead, enabling East to play through North's queen, would establish a third club trick on which East could discard his losing diamond. And a heart lead...