I used to play whist with my gran when I was very young and read about bridge in a book. I didn’t actually play until one day at school when it was raining. Four of us decided to play cards and it turned out we all thought we knew how to play bridge. I played a lot of bridge at school with Steven Brown (note spelling) who played for the University in the Wessex League for a while and also Martin Jones who has gone on to rather better things.

First I should say that I don’t really remember doing anything particularly good at the bridge table although I have made many hideous carves. Over the last few years my two fairly regular partners have been Keith Bennett and Suzanne Cohen and there is one hand with each of them. Keith will tell you I am the most unlucky player in the world and incapable of guessing a queen. Also if ever I try some clever cunning move it goes horribly wrong. Strangely on this hand with Keith I tried to be cunning and in the end, at least, it worked. It comes from the Ranked Masters Pairs in 1998. Keith and I were playing in the bottom category so perhaps Unranked Masters would have been more appropriate.

I held the North cards and Keith opened one spade on the South cards after East had passed initially. I was not sure how to respond to this as even though the spade opening promised five, it looked quite possible that we would want to play in notrumps, so I decided to bid two diamonds to ensure that we did not get a diamond lead. Keith raised to three diamonds and this gave me a problem. After my offbeat choice of bid on the first round it was now very hard to have a sensible auction because Keith was never going to be able to judge how well the hands fitted. Slam seemed a strong possibility but it was unclear whether to play in spades or notrumps. In retrospect 6NT seems better given the likely rounded suit lead which would suit me very well, but at the table I bid 6 spades (anyway Keith likes playing slams!).

Now suppose you are on lead with the West hand. The opponents have bid and raised the suit in which you hold four cards to the ace, so you would cash the ace and give your partner a ruff wouldn’t you? Fortunately the lady on lead had been watching the auction and she decided to lead the ace of diamonds. With the 3-3 break in clubs, the contract was now cold. So my anti-lead-directing bid turned out to attract a theoretically killing diamond lead which turned out to be the only one to let the contract through!

The second hand has left me mentally scarred for life! Fortunately I was playing with Suzanne at the time, otherwise I might have been physically scarred as well. The nice thing about playing with Suzanne is that, as well as being a first class player, she seems quite oblivious to some of the dreadful and all too frequent errors that happen on the opposite side of the table. This hand comes from a Wessex League match against Swindon in 1997 when the University was near the top of a tight Wessex League and every VP was vital.