Bridge — the card game beloved by geeks and Gates

Bridge is a complicated game beloved of aristocrats and geeks, with a history bedevilled by scandals —mostly to do with cheating. The first treatise on the game was written in 1742 by Edmond Hoyle, though more recent devotees include Claudia Winkleman, who plays every Sunday and has dreams of turning professional; and Bill Gates, an avid player who once quipped that “bridge is one of the last games in which the computer is not better”. If you, dear Times reader, keep up to date with the writings of Andrew Robson — Britain’s most sought-after sensei on the game — you’ll know that to the uninitiated it reads like a mix of the Shipping Forecast and Finnegans Wake. For example: “East held his breath while West decided what to lead. Best would be the two of spades — a suit preference lead, indicating a high club. East would ruff, courageously underlead the ace of clubs to West and ruff a second spade. Down three — in their post mortem dreams. Next best would be a club — the king, followed by a spade, ruffed.”

Nonetheless, it isn’t without glamour. Once, on a long-haul flight, where emergency announcements usually ask if a doctor is on board, on this occasion it was for a bridge player. Up goes the tentative hand of an elderly lady seated in economy, who was retrieved by the flight staff and escorted to first class, where Omar Sharif was waiting with cards out wanting a fix of his favourite pastime. While the person who heard this story (my mother at her bridge club) admits it could be apocryphal, Sharif has form in eccentric bridge anecdotes. In 1973 he bought his dream home in Lanzarote and a few days later lost it to the British player Sam Benady, who, unknown to the Dr Zhivago actor, was European champion. Sharif even came to London with his “Bridge Circus” in order to get people into playing. It didn’t catch on, but then again big bridge competitions are referred to as Olympiads, which at least leaves no doubt as to how seriously people take it. He also once told an interviewer, “The real question is why I spend so much time making movies when I could be playing bridge.”

Robson, who I spoke to just after he had been teaching 120 people, says, “I used to play with Omar — lovely guy but you had to play his way and he’d have a lot of ladies watching him, which made him go in and out a bit.”

Sharif was not the only martinet for bridge. In 1978, when Deng Xiaoping took over the Chinese Communist Party following the death of Mao Zedong, he immediately promoted all his bridge-playing comrades in the politburo to senior roles to help promote the game. He once said: “When the Chinese people see me playing bridge, they are reassured as to my mental health.” That said, health is not a given at the bridge table, as demonstrated by the British player Wendy Brown, who, having been dealt a rare and winning hand, couldn’t handle the excitement and expired there and then.

The 18th century was the heyday of gambling as Europe’s favourite bad habit for the wealthy, so bridge was regularly played in the court of Napoleon, in the clubs of St James’s and, slightly later, during America’s Golden Age. This is why the people who influenced the game often came from well-to-do families. The Portland, one of the earliest bridge clubs, was named after the dukes of Portland, whose family seemed to inherit a passion for the game. The Portland still exists, and while the days of smoky rooms are gone thanks to government intervention, there is still a very British sense of propriety, even superciliousness, enveloping it. It has its own rules that require strict adherence to, and which are completely different to the broader game. One player tells me, “It is bridge’s equivalent of the All-England Club. I would class myself as an enthusiastic amateur, so it can be quite intimidating playing there. You can do yourself some damage at the Portland if you put your mind to it.”

Other noble names include Baron Lyonel Tollemache, who wrote extensively on the topic. In America Harold Stirling Vanderbilt made his mark — his beaux-arts upbringing meant that he had plenty of time on his hands for important things like creating the scoring system for contract bridge that is essentially the template for the modern game. Famous players included Dwight D Eisenhower, Winston Churchill, Gandhi, Buster Keaton and King Edward VII.

The Turkish campaign was a disaster for the Allies in the First World War, but one small victory was banked by the Americans, latecomers to the war, and it was over a game of bridge. The USS Scorpion had been interned in Constantinople in 1917 as it had been attached to the US embassy there. Turkey’s ally Germany had plans for the ship as a decoy and wanted it turned over to them, but the Americans fancied that it remain under control of the Turks — and Talat Pasha, then minister of the interior in Turkey, was an acquaintance of the Scorpion’s captain, Lieutenant Commander Herbert Babbitt. He challenged the minister to a game of bridge with the ship’s fate as the stake. Babbitt emerged triumphant, so the ship remained in port and was returned to the United States at the Great War’s conclusion.

Cheating and scandal has long been rife in the game. In 1836 at Graham’s Club, which was popular because it allowed for play in the morning, there were whispered suspicions of cheating by Lord de Ros, the senior baron of England and chum of the Duke of Wellington. His unorthodox dealing led to more audible accusations and de Ros sued for libel, with England’s attorney general-acting as his lawyer. The weight of evidence against him provided by members was such that the jury found for the defence and de Ros had to leave Britain for the Netherlands in disgrace. He died three years later, aged only 46.

In 1965 there was the Buenos Aires affair. The British player Terence Reese was accused of signalling illegally to his partner Boris Schapiro. This resulted in subsequent forfeits, disqualifications, boycotts and general hoo-ha, with the conversation continuing for several decades. In 2005 the bridge journalist David Rex-Taylor said that Reese had confessed to the cheating many decades earlier, but the confession had been embargoed until both men were dead. And of course, who can forget James Bond exposing Sir Hugo Drax as a bridge cheat in Moonraker, with M’s greatest line, “Don’t forget that cheating at cards can still smash a man”.

Cheating is not a thing of the distant past, most notably the Fisher and Schwartz scandal in 2015, the former was known as the Michael Jordan of Bridge. But the scandal was such that someone decided to make a documentary on the topic called Dirty Tricks, released in 2021. ” Robson says of the cheating that, “we knew they were cheating but we just didn’t quite know how. There were also a pair of Italians, the coughing doctors, a pair of Poles. One should say ‘allegedly’ but they were definitely cheating.” He did add that since these events the game has been cleaned up immensely.

Things can take a dark turn. In 2010 Stephen Green murdered his wife, Carole, after an argument about her play. According to witnesses he had publicly criticised her whenever she made poor decisions at the bridge table and there was a series of heated arguments.

So, as for the lay of the land today? When you ask around, there are points of interest. If you fancy a foreign excursion, while Patmos provides a spiritual retreat for recovering alcoholics, then Biarritz seems to do the same for bridge players. For many it is an annual pilgrimage, which comes with sightseeing or golf in the morning and then bridge and booze till late.

There is also one name that keeps cropping up: Zia Mahmood, a bridge celebrity who has enjoyed something of a jet-setting lifestyle owing to his proficiency. One player told me that he has it on good authority that “either Warren Buffett or Bill Gates” sent a plane and flew him across the Pond (he lives in Clapham) to play bridge. Someone who plays at the Portland tells me, “The way it works is that if you are Bill Gates and want to play tennis with Roger Federer, it would be an utterly pointless exercise because you wouldn’t get a point. If you are very rich and want to play with the best bridge players, you can still do that, because while you won’t win, you will enjoy yourself.

This is not uncommon. Robson says — emphasising that he does not do this himself — it is “a bit like the patron system in polo. There are, probably in the low hundreds, bridge professionals who will go from tournament to tournament and be paid to play.” There is one notable example of how far people will go, he says, citing “a Swiss property developer called Pierre Zimmermann, who has housed a top Polish pair and top Dutch pair in Switzerland and who represent Switzerland. Now it has gone from being a very weak country, who normally finish near the bottom of the European Championships, to winning every time.”

Robson feels optimistic about the lay of the land at the lower echelons: “I run bridge events, mainly for charity, in halls for around a hundred players. It is absolutely thriving. Yes, they are mostly older people, but whole rural communities are bound together, especially in winter, by bridge.” While it may be something that a younger generation might file under “later”, at some point we inevitably fancy a bit of ruff.

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