shanghai photo gallery

October 4th, 2007  ~  Ray Lee  ~  5 Comments 

Canadians in Shanghai

All photos courtesy Michael Yuen — click on thumbnal for larger image

Opening ceremonies

John Carruthers

Joey Silver

Linda Lee

Francine Cimon

Julie Fajgelzon

Sylvia Summers-Caley

Isabelle Smith

Arno Hobart

Boris Baran

Don :Piafsky

Fred Hoffer

Nader Hanna / Michael Yuen

Jeff Smith

John Zaluski

Ray Lee

Vugraph room

Piotr Klimowicz

Waldemar Frukacz

Dan Korbel

Pamela Nesbit

Susie Korbel

Nick L’Ecuyer

Kamel Fergani

Slam dunk

October 3rd, 2007  ~  Ray Lee  ~  No Comments 

Day 4 began in a singularly unpromising way, but finished on a high note, as you will see.  BTW, let me take a moment away from my team to draw your attention to the Canadian Senior team, who are currently in first place.  Fred Hoffer and Don Piafsky are the star performers, and are leading the individual standings.

Our first match was against Brazil, and it was not a day for bidders.  Game after game fell apart amidst a succession of foul distributions.  Meanwhile, the opponents got to a game requiring a tripleton AKQ in a side suit — and it was there.  Yes, I know, I’m whining again…

After that, we needed more than a strong performance against England, who were one of the pre-tournament favourites to qualify.  I’m proud to say that the team rose to the occasion.  This time, it was plaeasure watching the results come in – two slam swings in the first three boards staked us to a quick 27 IMP lead, and we never relinquished it.  In the end, Linda and Pamela bid three slams that were missed by their English counterparts, and made a doubled partscore.  In fact, each of the slams was missed by a substantial portion of the field in all three events, and while I haven’t checked this out, I suspect that very few pairs (if any) bid all three.  So a much-needed 25 VPs.  After this, all three pairs wanted to play the third set, but sanity prevailed: Linda was dispatched to bed with a heavy cold, to rest up for tomorrow’s exertions.

Everyone was up for the last match, and both pairs played solidly to score a comfortable win over Egypt. We’re now right back in the hunt, only 5 VP’s out of a playoff spot with 9 matches still to play.  We have tough teams left in our schedule, but also several who are contending with us, so our fate is in our own hands.  If we can beat them, we’ll be there; if we can’t, we won’t deserve to be.

If you want to know more about the slam hands, check Linda’s blog.  BTW, for those who don’t know this, the Swan Games site carries detailed board by board results from each match as they come in, and is a great place to look at what is going on here in detail: www.swangames.com

The very last board from the third match yesterday was one that caught my eye:

	♠ K Q 10 9 7 2
	♥ Q 7 5 2
	♦ 4
	♣ K 4
♠ —		♠ 8
♥ A 9 8 3		♥ K J 10 6 4
♦ A Q 10 6 5 2		♦ K 8 3
♣ 10 6 5		♣ Q 8 3 2
	♠ A J 6 5 4 3
	♥ —
	♦ J 9 7
	♣ A J 9 7

As you can imagine, this particular deal was responsible for some crazy results around the room, including a double slam swing in one match.  Francine and Julie had doubled their opponents in 5♠ , which made with an uptrick — but it turned out to be an unintentional Stripe-tailed ape double!  Sylvia and Isabelle were the only pair in the VC to bid the cold 6♠ , and we actually gained IMPs on the board!

Better, but not enough better

October 3rd, 2007  ~  Ray Lee  ~  2 Comments 

Day 3 started very well with a big win against Guadaloupe – it looked as though we were finally going to pick up some momentum, with two more tailenders to play the same day.  But a funny thing happened on the way to the scoring table.

First we played South Africa, expecting another decent win.  I was sitting in the press room next to Pony Nehmert, a long-time stalwart of the German ladies team.  I was bemoaning the flat boards as push after push came through.  She was looking at the results from Germany- New Zealand on the same set, with double digit swings on almost every deal. ‘You just have to have imagination,’ she said.  ‘No such thing as a flat set of boards!’

With the score 6-5 against us, and only a couple of play, I complained to Pony again about the fact that we weren’t going to pick up the VP’s I wanted against a weak team.  ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘the South Africans aren’t weak.  What they are is rubber bridge players.  So if the hands are complex, they will get into trouble.  But they’ll bid their games and slams, and when they play them, they’ll make them.’  She was right, and we had to be content with a small win on a very low-scoring set.

Surely our last match, against tailenders Jordan, would turn out better.  For a while it went as planned.  We were simply outplaying them, an IMP here and an IMP there, building a 10-IMP lead by the half.  Then disaster struck – at both tables.  See Linda’s blog for the full deal, but after a lazy automatic bid, our East-West pair had collected only 500 into their slam.  Even worse, at the other table, the Jordanians bid on to a 40% grand, and with 2-2 trumps it rolled home.  A couple of boards later, a misjudgment at the 5-level cost another 10 IMPs, and the match was over.

We are still only 23 VP’s out of a qualifying spot, and have yet to play man y of the teams above us, so our fate is in our own hands.  Realistically, though, this is a very difficult scale on which to catch up once you start falling behind.  We need to start winning matches.

There’s no doubt that we have not been lucky so far.  But my experience is that good players make their own luck, and it is when you are not playing up to par that everything seems to go against you.

Some days are like that

October 1st, 2007  ~  Ray Lee  ~  2 Comments 

Bridge, they say, is a game of percentages, so even at duplicate there is luck involved.  There are many situations where you need to make a decision that a lot of the time will turn out to be right, but this time it turns out to be wrong.  String two or three of those together, and a lot of IMPs can disappear in a hurry.

In our first match yesterday, against Australia, one high-level bidding decision and one difficult play problem unsolved (see below) turned a big win into a tie.  The second match, against Indonesia, we expected to win comfortably, and would have done so but for two deals, which bore an eerie resemblance one to the other.  In both, the opponents failed to unearth a 6-2 heart fit and settled in 3NT.  On the first deal, the contract was cold because diamonds turned out to be 7-2.  On the second, the opening leader had to decide between ♦ K10xx of diamonds and ♣ K9xx.  She chose diamonds, the suit with the better spots, and a club would have beaten the hand.  Meanwhile, partners were in a normal 4♥ down one in each case.  So that was 24 IMPs out of the window and a disappointing loss to a weak team.

In our third match we were again unlucky, but this time in the sense the late great Edgar Kaplan meant it in one of my favourite bridge stories.  Edgar had just lost an important match, and someone asked him what had happened.  ‘We were very unlucky,’ he replied. ‘They played better than we did.’  That was our fate against USA1, who are now leading the field (actually, the USA 1 teams lead all 3 events at present!).  There were some tough bidding decisions, and most of them found us zigging when they were zagging — zagging being the winning action.  Losing a blitz was a disappointing end to the day, bridgewise.  Tomorrow is another day,however (or today, since R7 has just begun as I write this).  We are playing the 3 lowest ranked teams in the field, and need to pile up a big VP total against them.  If we can do that we can pull right back into  the fight for the playoffs again — not to mention gaining some much-needed confidence.

Dinner after the game was at a nearby Chinese restaurant (What else? you might ask. Actually, the food selection here is very wide.)   Michael Yuen, a Canadian from BC who captains the German Venice Cup team, had recommended it to us, and it turned out to be an excellent choice.  We were served elegantly, and a multi-course repast with drinks, tax and tip cost us a grand total of $13 apiece.  Outside the hotels, which are outrageous, consumer goods and food are very cheap.  I am planning to go shopping for DVD’s later in the day, and have my eye on the Complete Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes collection — about $150 at home, and maybe $30 here (the real thing, not a knockoff).

OK, now the declarer play problem.

	♠ K 4 3
	♥ K J 9 8 3
	♦ 7 4 3
	♣ A 4
	♠ Q J 10 8 7 6 5
	♥ A 7 5
	♦ A 2
	♣ 10

The auction, with Both Vul.:

                           West             North                East                 South

                                                                                                1♠

                           2NT*             3♦**                 5♣                    5♠

                           all pass

                           * Unusual, for minors

                           ** Limit raise or better in spades

They lead the ♣K — how do you play?

Without sufficient entries for an elimination, it’s important to draw some inferences about the distribution.  Clubs are likely to be 5-5, while West is likely to have either 5 or 6 diamonds.  He should surely have the ♠A.  East, for the jump to 5♣ vulnerable, seems likely to have a diamond honour, and probably the ♥Q.  So assuming the defense shifts to a diamond at their first opportunity, what kind of major-suit layout will allow declarer to make it?

There seems to be no sensible lie of the cards where declarer can succeed by playing on hearts first — there is no re-entry to dummy after the hearts are established without letting the defenders in with a trump trick or a ruff to cash a diamond.  There’s no sure tricks line, but the percentage play seems to be to play West for a singeleton heart honour, or the doubleton ten — so lead a heart to the king and run the jack.  But perhaps that’s easy to say when you’re looking at all four hands, which are as follows:

	♠ K 4 3
	♥ K J 9 8 3
	♦ 7 4 3
	♣ A 4
♠ A		♠ 9 2
♥ 10 2		♥ Q 6 4
♦ K J 10 6 5		♦ Q 9 8
♣ K Q 9 8 2		♣ J 7 6 5 3
	♠ Q J 10 8 7 6 5
	♥ A 7 5
	♦ A 2
	♣ 10

Only about two-thirds of the declarers in the three events here got it right, so if you did, take a bow.

A matter of technique

September 30th, 2007  ~  Ray Lee  ~  1 Comment 

There will no doubt be many fascinating deals in Shanghai over the next 2 weeks.  This one, from Round 3 yesterday, was the first that has caught my eye.         

	♠ K 10 6 5
	♥ A Q
	♦ Q 10 8 7 6
	♣ 9 3
	♠ Q 8
	♥ J 7 6
	♦ K J 9 2
	♣ A K 10 7

You are in 3NT, after West has opened 2♥, and the lead is the ♥5.  How would you play?

It may seem that the key question is which ace does West have, assuming he has one.  If he has the spade ace, you want to play spades before diamonds, and vice versa.  But there is more to it than a 50% guess; indeed, out of over 50 declarers in the three events here, only 6 contrived to go down – although one on Vugraph misplayed the hand badly, and got away with it after two poor defensive plays.

The point, it seems to me, is that you need four diamond tricks and only one spade trick, after the heart queen holds at trick one.  Playing a spade now from dummy has two upsides: 1) you may have guessed right – West may have only the spade ace, and you have removed his entry oto the heart winners; 2) East may well duck the spade ace, in which case you’ll switch to diamonds and romp home with nine tricks.

I know the statistics are flawed, because some of those 2♥ openings may not have happened, and some may have shown a 2–suiter, etc. etc.  But it’s interesting that such a large preponderance of declarers got the 50-50 guess right, suggesting that they may well have followed my reasoning.  Certainly, whole lot more than half of the field played on spades first.

I wonder what would happen in a club game?  This is a deal highly reminiscent of the kind that Mark Horton included in his recent book, Bridge Master versus Bridge Amateur – the kind of situation where the experts always get it right, and the amateur frequently errs.

The full deal:

	♠ K 10 6 5
	♥ A Q
	♦ Q 10 8 7 6
	♣ 9 3
♠ A 2		♠ J 9 7 4 3
♥ K 10 9 5 4 2		♥ 8 3
♦ —		♦ A 5 4 3
♣ J 8 6 4 2		♣ Q 5
	♠ Q 8
	♥ J 7 6
	♦ K J 9 2
	♣ A K 10 7

Day 1 — off and running

September 30th, 2007  ~  Ray Lee  ~  7 Comments 

I’m beginning to wonder whether anyone is reading this — Linda’s getting all kinds of comments posted on hers, and no-one seems to want to add anything to what I put up there.  Sigh.  Ah well, blog on regardless…

A somwhat checkered day for our VC group.  A hard-fought 21-9 loss to USA2 was no surprise to start with, and no great tragedy either.  On this VP scale, where it’s hard to catch up if you slip behind too much, the name of the game is not to get blitzed.  You want to get 10 or so VPs out of your losses, beat up the tailenders badly, and (you hope) beat the 2-3 teams that are competing closely with you for a playoff spot.  This was followed by a good win over the Phillippines in Round 2.  This match was memorable as Linda and Pamela’s first ever session together at the bridge table, and they produced a very solid game — the pair that might well have been very much our weakest link has started well.  The evening was not so good — a loss to Denmark, whom I regard as one of the 3-4 teams we need to beat out for a playoff spot.  But still 10 VPs, so 41 on the day, only just below average.  We have a similar schedule tomorrow — a strong team, a weak team, and a competitor, so I’m again looking for average or a bit better.  Day 3 will be moving day for us, as we have three relatively weak opponents.

At this level, though, you should never discount anybody.  Our Open entry got off to a roaring start, then fell afoul of Egypt and Pakistan, both teams I suspect they were expecting to do well against.  As I told my team yesterday, this is a marathon, not a sprint, and 1 match above average is usually enough to Q.  Plenty of time yet before anyone starts panicking.

Aside from a few system downages, the computerized line-up system is working quite well.. The same cannot be said of the recording system — no-one has yet seen any play by play records.  The best place to see what is happening is still Swan Games — you can follow the play as the results come in board by board.  You can look at how a particular team is doing, or you can look at a particular board and see how everyone in the field did on it.  For hand records and more detailed play by play, go to the 3 BBO feeds.

For me the evening concluded with a ‘welcome banquet’.. This involved team captains (66 in theory, but due to the fact that the whole thing happene din the middle of the 3rd match, only about 30 showedO), WBF officials (seemed like about 150), Chinese Bridge Association officials (about anotehr 150).  The meal as far as I saw it (I had to leave part way through for our compare) was fascinating.  All Chinese food, of course.  Hors d’oeuvres of various kinds were on the table when we sat down, and while we helped ourselves to those, waitresses kept our glasses full of Chinese red win e(about which the less said the better) and Tsingtao beer (now you’re talking!).  The menu listed 10 or so courses, of which I stayed for maybe half.  It included chicken with chestnuts, garlic shrimp, a puff pastry filled with turnip, and a cheesey seafood dish that and Newfoundlander would recognize as ‘cod au gratin’.  Bet you didn’t know that had a Chinese origin!  The whole affair took place in a magnificent round hall, with huge picture windows overlooking the river, and looking across to the neon advertising signs and skyscrapers of Shanghai downtown.

So now my team has headed across to the Super Mall to pick a spot for dinner, while I retire to the room to blog, try to find the Women’s world cup final on TV, and look at the hand records.  A captain’s work is never done.

Open for business

September 29th, 2007  ~  Ray Lee  ~  No Comments 

All quiet now — it’s 3.45 am local time, I’ve had seven hours sleep and I’m wide awsake.  Actually, with a 12 hour time difference, a 4-hour dislocation isn’t bad at all after 2 days.

There was a somewhat stormy captain’s meeting this afternoon, mostly centred around the new computerization for this event.  First, the days of submitting your lineups for each match in writing to the officials are over: there is now a secure intranet, each team has its own password-protected page, and that’s where it all happens now.  You can access it via your own laptop, or from one of 9 workstations set up for the purpose.  We were all concerned about the prospect of 66 team captains arriving at the workstation at the same time, all with a deadline to meet, but the process seems to be quick and easy, and will likely work well. The system also serves as a messaging system for the team captains.  Once both teams have entered their lineups for a match, it is possible to see the names of all four players, and know who is opposing whom at each table.  This information becomes public, and can be seen on a large plasma screen in the lobby of the convention centre outside the playing room.

More potentially fraught is the recording system. For the last tow years, the Bridgemate system has been in use for electronic recording of results as each board is played. At each table sits a records who entered the contract and result in something that looks like a large calculator.  That’s how the results are sent to the scoring system and thence to the Internet as soon as each board is completed.  The difference this time is that recording the details of the auction and play, previously also a pencil and paper task, will be done via the same system.  Thus in theory the play of every card at every table will be available for inspection on the net – certainly here internally, and possibly more widely too.

There will be 5 Internet feeds from each session: 3 will be carried by BBO, including the official Vugraph match here onsite.   Swan games will concentrate on matches by Scandinavian teams, while Our Game, a Chinese site, will (I believe) carry all matches played by the host country.  So you can look for Canadian teams live on the Net on several occasions, it appears.

Shanghai is a sporting hub right now — the final of the FIFA Women’s Wold Cup goes tonight here, while there is also a special Olympics meet.  Many of us travelled on planes with the some of the SO teams — on ours were Canada, Argentina and St Kitts/Nevis.  The Chairman of the Chinese Olympic Committee attended our Opening Ceremonies last night, no doubt thinking ahead to 2008, when Beijing will host not only the Summer Olympics, but the 1st Mind Sports games.

After all the welcome speeched from various dignitaries, it was (as always) exhilarating as the teams from each country were introduced.  Seated alphabetically in a large auditorium, each group stood up in turn to receive applause from the other competitors.  I’m sure like me we all felt proud when ‘Canada’ was announced, and four rows of us stood and waved — my team resplendent in their neat uniform jackets.  Bridge teams, probably for financial reasons haven’t really gone the whole hog with uniforms yet for the most part — a jacket, or matching scarfs, are often as good as it gets.  The Indian ladies, as always though, were unmissable in their magnificent dress saris. For some reason while this was going on, the sound system was playing ‘The Stars and Stripes for Ever’ — stirring music, yes, but one wonders if anyone had paid any attention to the title of the piece?

Then onwards to what was announced as cocktail party, but turned out to be a magnificent buffet for 500-odd people.  This included hand-rolled Peking duck, and hosts of other fascinating dishes, not all of which were familiar to us.  Everything was labelled in English and Chinese, though, so no worries. The only negative was the ‘wine’ — quote marks deliberate.  If you can imagine a sort of red, sweet vinegar — well, enough said.  Fortunately there were copious amounts of orange juice (the juice here is very tasty, but not as sweet as we’re used to — personally I like it a lot).

So today the play starts — as the great chess master Thchigorin once commented, looking at the playing hall before a tournament ‘The mistakes are all there, waiting to be made’.  As the event unfolds, that room is going to witness triumphs and disasters, with everything in between.  We just don’t know yet which teams will have which experience!

From l to r: 

(back row) Pamela, Isabelle, Sylvia,

(front row)  Francine, Julie, Linda

(obvious) Ray

Ready for launch

September 29th, 2007  ~  Ray Lee  ~  No Comments 

Well, we’re here and settled after a 19-hour journey from home to the hotel.  The first impressions of Shanghai are quite astonishing — 50+ story buildings everywhere you look, and many more under construction.  The architecture is very modern, but has a faintly alien feel to it — more ornamentation on the top of the skyscrapers.  And what a joy to walk into a shopping mall that isn’t a clone of every other shopping mall you’ve ever been in!  This is a bustling modern city, thronged with crowds of young well-dressed people looking like a consumer society anywhere in the world.  I’m not sure what I imagined, but this is not it.  However, remember we are in Pudong, the newest most commercial part of the city.  Later we plan to explore the older areas, which I think will be more evocative of the mysterious East, the Opium wars, Franch colonialism, and everything else that represents the past of Shanghai.

Back at the bridge, I had a fascinating breakfast with Bobby Wolff and his wife Judy, discussing some of the details and content of his new book (see my last but one post, ‘The Lone Wolff’).  It was definitely the table to be at in the breakfast room — everyone who was anyone dropped by to say hello, from WBF President Jose Damiani to Kathy Wei, who was able to fill in some details for the book of a trip Bobby had made to China in 1993.

Then on to sort out Ray Leeistrative issues for my team —  we have two new partnerships, which means getting new systems approved and filing new convention cards.  We’re ready to do that now, and I’ll be meeting with the WBF Systems boss shortly to get them okayed.  We have had to bring 21 copies of each, one for each opposing team.  In fact, what with our sets of convention cards and defenses to 63 opposing systems, I have an extra suitcase entirely dedicated to paper!

Getting acclimatized is important, and all six of my players are right now doing — guess what? Yes, playing bridge!  There is an impromptu 12-table game going in the Convention Centre, so people can get used to the screens and the playing area and just get their heads into what they are here for.  For Linda and Pamela, it is a precious chance to play a few boards before they start a world championship — they will probably still set a record for the pair who plays in a Venice Cup having played the fewest number of deals together first!

The captains’ meeting is in an hour, followed by our team meeting, at which I’ll distribute the hospitality kits, team badges, etc., and make sure everyone knows how the event works and what is expected of them.  Then we’re off to the opening ceremonies; considering how well the Chinese usually handle pageantry, I expect this to be something special.

More later…

Becoming a turkey

September 25th, 2007  ~  Ray Lee  ~  No Comments 

There is an old aphorism that illustrates the difference in meaning between the words ‘involved’ and ‘committed’.  It says that at Thanksgiving, the chef is involved, but the turkey is committed.  It’s a transition I have just undergone myself with respect to the Venice Cup which starts next Monday.

For the last couple of weeks I have been watching Linda’s preparation for the event as the Canadian team captain, and even helped with some of the analysis of the opponents systems and conventions. I was definitely involved, but that was all.  J’avais d’autres chats a fouetter, as the French so colourfully put it.  No more.  With the news yesterday afternoon that Rhoda Habert had come down with pneumonia, we launched into 12 hours of frenzied team discussions which ended with Linda being drafted as a player, and my replacing her as captain (I was going anyway, so already have a plane ticket and visa).  We did try contacting several other possible players, but the likelihood of anyone being able to drop everything and fly to Shanghai at a moment’s notice was never high, especially when you consider the time required to get a visa for travel to China.  So in the end,  it was the only sensible solution.  In Linda, the team is adding someone who’s played in the both of the most recent Olympiad and Venice Cup events, finishing 5th-8th in the latter. I have attended many world championships, and at least know the ropes fairly well from the Ray Leeistrative side.

Our first problem, of course, is pairing and system changes.  After some discussion, it was agreed the best way to proceed was for Sylvia and Isabelle to resume their old partnership, and for Linda to play with Pamela.   That means intense and rapid system discussions for the latter pair, and filing the two new systems with the WBF for approval and circulation to the other 21 teams.  Fortunately, we think they will both end up playing something very similar to what has already been filed, so it isn’t likely to be a problem.

However, if you’ve looked at any of the systems posted on the Ecats web site, you’ll know that filling out the WBF card takes more than a few minutes; detailed notes must be attached in many places also.  So we all have a lot of work ahead of us.

Meanwhile everyone’s preparation has been blown apart by this sudden turn of events, and my first job will probably be to help them get their focus back on playing.  After all this time of looking forward to it, we leave Thursday (several of the team are on their way tomorrow in fact), arriving in Shanghai Friday.  We’ll have a little under 48 hours to try to relax and get over the jet lag before the Opening Ceremonies on Sunday night.

I had been planning to blog from Shanghai anyway, but from the ‘involved’ point of view.  Now I’m ‘committed’ instead, my blogs will probably have a little different flavour.  Meanwhile, Linda will be describing the event from a player’s perspective, not something she had planned on!  Stay tuned.

The Lone Wolff

September 20th, 2007  ~  Ray Lee  ~  2 Comments 

I’ve spent much of the last three weeks
editing a remarkable book — Bobby Wolff’s autobiography, which is
appropriately entitled The Lone Wolff.  I get to read a lot of
bridge books, as you can imagine, so it takes a lot to keep me glued to my
seat.  However, when this manuscript arrived, a few weeks ago, I found I
just couldn’t put it down.  Even more surprisingly, since in many areas
she is apt to lose interest very quickly, Linda had the same reaction.

There’s very little that Wolff hasn’t seen
or done in fifty years of top level bridge.  Multiple world champion,
President of the WBF, Appeals guru, ACBL Board member, etc. etc. He was part of
two of the great teams of the last 40 years: the Aces and the Nickell
team.  And he’s still going strong at age 75 — he’ll be heading for Shanghai next week to represent the USA in the
Senior Bowl.

So no one is better placed to talk about
bridge over the last half century — the triumphs, the scandals, the politics
behind the scenes, the heroes and the crooks.  It will surprise no one who
knows him to learn that Mr. Wolff pulls no punches in The Lone Wolff.  He
calls them as he sees them, and he cares not whose ox is gored. 

I’m going to give you just a glimpse of the
book itself here — the part where he talks about why he wrote it.  For
most of the rest, you’re going to have to wait until February.

"I started writing this book in
1994, and on and off it has occupied much of my spare time during the years
that followed. As we are winding down, though, many of you must be wondering
— why did I write this book and what was I trying to do? 

You probably know me well enough by now to know that I would have been inclined
to the last option in any event. However, what convinced me to choose it was a
phone call I received from a concerned Alan Truscott some years ago, when he
informed me that many of the players and Ray Leeistrators who were our
contemporaries were either dead or simply not interested in chronicling what
had transpired. He felt strongly that before he and I checked out, we had a
responsibility to all bridge devotees to share our up-close and personal
knowledge of the history of the game. Sadly, Alan is now gone and since there
is probably no one else left who has had the good (or bad) fortune to witness
as many key events as I have, I considered myself elected to that task, keeping
the vow I made to him.

Remember,
too, that I was born and bred in San Antonio, Texas, where in 1836 the Battle 
of the Alamo was fought (a battle in which
every real or adopted Texan present was killed).  I have always found it
sad that the most important single historical event ever to be associated with
that city has no accurate contemporary documentation whatsoever. From that war,
when Texas was still under the Mexican flag,
came the following familiar quote:  ‘Thermopylae had its messenger of
defeat, the Alamo had none’.

I was
inspired by that sad realization to try to assure that, at least for bridge,
history did not repeat itself."

Stay tuned to
this site for more excerpts as publication date gets closer — and a chance to
exchange ideas with Bobby Wolff himself as his own weblog gets under way.