Word: sobel
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...NORTH (Sobel...
...suit and South the high-card strength, few partnerships would manage to arrive at a grand slam on this deal. The Irish partners playing the identical hands at the other table stopped at six hearts. With two biddable suits and rosy game prospects, Goren opened one club to give Sobel a chance to reply at the one level in case she held a weak hand. His second-round jump, displaying a good spade suit and extra high-card strength, committed the partnership to game, so Sobel could afford to say three hearts (rather than jump to four), permitting inexpensive exploration...
Goren saw that with Sobel's club ace, the texture of his own club suit gave the combined hands extra strength that Blackwood signaling could not indicate. So instead of giving the five-heart response to show two aces, he jumped to six clubs. To Sobel, the Goren message was clear: I have the missing aces and the king of hearts, but I also have solid honors in clubs, so go ahead and bid seven if you've got the hearts. She went ahead and bid seven. With Goren's club tricks available for discarding two diamonds...
Goren's six club bid was unorthodox but brilliant. It was just the sort of bid a bridge player can make with a partner like Helen Sobel-if the player himself happens to be Charles Goren, king of the aces...
RANKING up with Partners Goren and Sobel in the Big Four of U.S. bridge-as judged by master points piled up in American Contract Bridge League tournaments -are Sidney Silodor (4,479½) and John Randolph Crawford (4,383), longtime teammates with radically different bridge-table styles. Philadelphian Silodor, 51, who makes a comfortable income as a society bridge teacher, is perhaps the slowest player in top-level bridge, infuriates opponents with long spells of fierce, immobile concentration. Suave, dapper New Yorker Crawford, 43, Main Line Philadelphian by origin (he claims to be the only bridge master in the Social...