A Fine Italian Hand

It is a well-known fact that Americans are the best bridge players in the world. In any major tournament they are going to walk off with the top prize. And if, by some chance, they are nudged out of first place, it can only be by reason of some fluke, some tough break in the cards. This is an article of national faith.

Well, there have been a lot of flukes and tough breaks lately in the fortunes of American bridge players. Five times in five years the giants of American bridge have been whipped by a European team in the annual tournament for the World Con-tract Bridge Championship. For the past three years it has been the Italians that have done us in. And they haven't "nudged" us out of first place, either — last February they flattened us by a whopping 50 International Match Points.

How can they do this? The "fluke" theory collapses under analysis. Year after year these six Italians — two Romans and four Neapolitans — are playing better bridge than the best teams this country can field. And the main secret of their success is the new and revolutionary systems of bidding that they have evolved: the Roman Club system and the Neapoli-tan Club system. These techniques — highly complex, highly artificial, and miles away from anything played in this coun-try — make possible contracts of almost unbelievable accuracy. Again and again in the international tourneys the Americans were left at the post at one table while the Italians romped home to game at the other.

A good illustration of this was provided by Board 94 of the 1959 match in New York. Here are the hands:

North

[Black Spade Suit] A J 10 8

[Black Heart Suit] K 8 7 6

[Black Diamond Suit] A K Q 5

[Black Club Suit] –

West

[Black Spade Suit] K Q 7

[Black Heart Suit] A 10 9 4

[Black Diamond Suit] 9 4 2

[Black Club Suit] 10 7 8

South

[Black Spade Suit] 9 5 4 2

[Black Heart Suit] –

[Black Diamond Suit] 8 7 3

[Black Club Suit] Q J 8 6 5 2

East

[Black Spade Suit] 6 3

[Black Heart Suit] Q J 5 3

[Black Diamond Suit] J 10 6

[Black Club Suit] A K 9 4

In international tournament play the same hands are played simultaneously at two tables, with the country playing North-South at one table playing East-West at the other. On this deal, at the table where the American pair (Lazard and Fry) played North-South, North opened the bidding as fourth hand with one heart and everyone else passed. Result: down one. At the other table the Romans (Belladonna and Averelli) got to game as North-South, and made itl Net result: a gain of 6 International Match Points. The bidding went:

East

Pass

Pass

South

Pass

2 [Black Spade Suit]

West

Pass

Pass

Pass

North

2 [Black Diamond Suit]

4 [Black Spade Suit]

This feat was achieved by virtue of a specialized Roman bid, available in no other system: the opening two diamonds. It shows a three-suit hand, either 5-4-4-0 or 4-4-4-1, and a high-card strength of 17 or more (using the 4-3-2-1 Goren count). With fair support (7 to 9 points), South would answer two no trump, asking North to show his singleton or void, so that South could then take his pick of the other three suits. With his bust hand, South showed the higher of his two possible suits, spades; he could show clubs later if he happened to hit North's short suit. But that was not necessary: the fit had been found. North jumped to game in spades, and the partnership actually made five by using all the trumps separately plus the three top diamonds.

It was the accumulation of such occurrences as this that, during the 1958 match on Lake Como, actually impelled one of the American players to accuse the Italians of cheating. He was severely disciplined for the discourtesy, and must have been hard driven to commit it. Needless to say, systems that can elicit such rage and bafflement from an expert have built up a tremendous head of interest among American players in how these systems work and how they can be put to good use.

The American Contract Bridge League has provided a par-tial answer to the latter question: it has forbidden their use in all tournaments that they sponsor. On first inspection this looks like a classic example of an orthodoxy (American) put-ting down a heresy (foreign) by brute force. But an official of the A.C.B.L. explained it this way:

"The thing about those Italian systems is their complexity and their artificiality. Mainly their complexity. We have 30 million bridge players in this country, and lots of them get a bang out of having a go at a local or regional tournament. If we expose them to the necessity of learning these systems, we destroy their enjoyment of the tournaments. Because they won't learn them — they're just too damned complicated — and a few zealots will walk off with all the prizes.

"Of course," he added, "there's nothing we can do to pre-vent private players from boning up on either of these systems and clobbering their friends."

There's the cue for you guys or couples who would like to see your bridge game coruscate and are willing to invest a few hundred hours in redecorating your bidding. The information is available in Edgar Kaplan's The Complete Italian System of Winning Bridge, now a Signet paperback; if you want to learn the Neapolitan system alone, get Charles Goren's The Italian Bridge System, a Bantam paperback. Four of the Italian players will appear this month on three successive Sunday afternoons (December 6, 13, 20) as part of the Cham-pionship Bridge series now being carried over Abc-TV.

But before you decide to master an Italian system, it wouldn't hurt you to have some idea of what you'll be getting into. American players are used to the concept of artificial bids — like the Blackwood four no trump and the one-club convention for a weak no-trump distribution — but are not at all pre-pared for the degree of artificiality that characterizes the Italian systems. They are riddled with conventions, cue bids, asking bids, cockeyed inversions of the normal order, and artificial responses. To take one small fragment of the Nea-politan Club system as an example, an opening bid of one club means a hand with 17 or more high-card points; it says nothing about clubs as such. Any other suit bid indicates length but not strength in that suit, and the weaker of two suits is usually bid first. One no trump and two clubs are used to indi-cate a bona fide club suit.

Partner's first response to one club is equally artificial. It conforms to a step system similar to Blackwood and shows "first-round controls" — aces and kings. Two clubs, for instance, shows three controls: an ace and a king or three kings.

But here the complications set in. If your opponents interject a bid, your schedule of responses is transposed higher, and each opposing bid requires a different schedule. Right away you have four or five times as much memory work as with our old familiar Black-wood. With every step of the bidding the complexities increase; and of course there are all the other possible opening bids that we haven't even mentioned yet.

At about this point in your tentative love affair with an Italian system you may begin asking yourself whether it wouldn't be possible to graft just one part of the system onto your regular bidding habits, which are probably Goren — that nifty one-club opener, for example. The answer is an emphatic No. Because what do you do when you have a real one-club bid in a hand worth less than 17 points? You need another artificial convention to cover it and you are back in the Neapolitan sys-tem again, which by its very nature is going to move in 100% or not at all. And the same is true for the Roman.

Having made this categorical state-ment, we will now back away from it. Both of these systems have, in addition to their highly artificial basic structures, even more artificial superstructures for particular situations; and a couple of these superstructures can be grafted onto garden-variety Goren. As it happens, both concern slam bidding — the area in which the most splendiferous results can be obtained, and in which Ameri-can Standard bidding is least efficient. If you want a relatively painless means of souping up your game, this is where you should start paying close attention.

The Roman Club has evolved a major improvement on Blackwood, and Edgar Kaplan has already sponsored it for play in this country. It reveals not only how many aces the responder holds, but which ones. After the four-no-trump asking bid, the response convention is:

5 clubs: no aces or three

5 diamonds: one ace or four

5 hearts: two aces — both red, both black, both major, or both minor

5 spades: two aces — different in both color and rank of suit (i.e., either the aces of spades and diamonds, or the aces of hearts and clubs)

The same responses at the six level in-dicate kings after an asking bid of five no trump.

The advantages of this convention over Blackwood are obvious. Take the following pair of hands:

Opener

[Black Spade Suit] K Q x

[Black Heart Suit] K

[Black Diamond Suit] K Q J x

[Black Club Suit] A Q J x x

Responder

[Black Spade Suit] J 10 x x x

[Black Heart Suit] A x x

[Black Diamond Suit] A

[Black Club Suit] K 10 x x

The bidding: Opener

1 [Black Club Suit]

4 NT

5 NT

6 NT

Responder

3 [Black Club Suit]

5 [Black Heart Suit]

6 [Black Diamond Suit]

Pass

When responder bids five hearts, opener knows (since he holds the club ace) that responder holds either the spade and heart aces (both major) or the heart and diamond aces (both red). In other words, he is sure of the heart ace, and that is the one he is worried about, to protect his singleton king. His five no trump gets the information he wants about the missing club king and he goes to the almost laydown six no trump.

Note that Blackwood would not have done this good a job for him. Respond-er's five hearts, showing two aces, would have left him in doubt about the heart ace: he could not bid six no trump but would have to bid six clubs, settling for the lower score value and running the risk of a spade ruff. Note also that the Roman Blackwood provides its ad-ditional knowledge to only one of the enemy, the man with the fourth ace, who may or may not be in a position to use it.

Another device that you can borrow from the Italians — but a riskier one — is in the field of asking bids. These are jump bids to a new suit after trump is established. They ask for controls in the suit jumped to. "First-round controls" are an ace or a void; "second-round controls" are a king or a singleton.

Opener

1 [Black Heart Suit]

5 [Black Club Suit]

Responder

3 [Black Heart Suit]

The responses are by steps and show increasing degrees of control:

One-step (in the example above, five diamonds): neither first nor second-round control.

Two-step (five hearts): king or singleton (second-round control).

Three-step (five spades): ace or void (first-round control).

Four-step (five no trump): ace and king (first- and second-round control).

An example of how the asking bid can keep you out of trouble:

Opener

[Black Spade Suit] A K J x x

[Black Heart Suit] Q x x

[Black Diamond Suit] A K J x x

[Black Club Suit] —

Responder

[Black Spade Suit] Q x x

[Black Heart Suit] x x x

[Black Diamond Suit] x

[Black Club Suit] A K J x x x

The bidding: Opener

1 [Black Spade Suit]

2 [Black Diamond Suit]

4 [Black Heart Suit] (?)

Pass

Responder

2 [Black Club Suit]

2 [Black Spade Suit]

4 [Black Spade Suit]

Opener is thinking of slam possibilities and asks about those weak hearts. The one-step reply tells him a slam is out and still keeps him at the four level. (A two-step reply — four no trump — would have forced him to five spades, which he would have had the combined strength to make. Any higher response would have indicated slam.) Observe that with this hand he would not bid the Italian Blackwood four no trump: finding one ace, which might be (and was) the ace of clubs, would not help him any.

And here is an example of how an Italian asking bid can get you into slam position:

Opener

[Black Spade Suit] K Q x

[Black Heart Suit] K Q x x x

[Black Diamond Suit] x

[Black Club Suit] Q x x x

Responder

[Black Spade Suit] A x

[Black Heart Suit] A x

[Black Diamond Suit] Q x x

[Black Club Suit] A K 10 x x x

The bidding: Opener

1 [Black Heart Suit]

4 [Black Club Suit]

4 [Black Spade Suit]

Pass

Responder

3 [Black Club Suit]

4 [Black Diamond Suit] (?)

6 [Black Club Suit]

After opener supports clubs, a slam ap-pears likely unless the opponents can cash two diamonds, and so responder asks about them. Opener shows his sin-gleton, and six clubs is virtually assured. Neither Blackwood nor Italian Black-wood could have developed the neces-sary information.

The danger to watch for in using these asking bids is that the response may, in conveying its information, push you over the contract that can be made with that information. You must not ask for more than you can handle.

And in general these Italian refine-ments call for great caution, precisely because they are so finely tooled and make such demands on the memory. They leave great scope for human falli-bility. You would be foolish to try them in serious play before you had submitted them to a thorough trial with a steady partner. But if you take reasonable pre-cautions, and find that these innova-tions lend zest to your bidding with a partner similarly indoctrinated, be in-formed that this short survey has pro-vided hardly half the wisdom that the Italians offer in the matter of slam bid-ding. The Neapolitan declarative-inter-rogative (D.I.) four no trump and the Roman grand slam force are also avail-able to you. The latter is not earth-shaking and the former is too involved for treatment here, but Kaplan's or Goren's book will give you the lowdown.

And, of course, if you really want to dismay and annihilate the other half of your regular bridge foursome, get one of the Italian systems down pat.