Big-League Bridge

The Italians have made a habit of winning the world championship at contract bridge ever since 1957, when Carl Alberto Perroux brought his then-unknown Blue Team to New York to meet -- and defeat -- the biggest names in bridge. They did it in 1958 and 1959; they did it in 1961 and 1962 -- and they did it again in 1963, just as most of the world expected. This time they won in the tiny Italian resort town of Saint Vincent, while less dedicated mortals strolled on the mountain slopes under a brilliant June sun or played chemin de fer at the casino under the brilliant chandeliers.

It was this same Casino of the Valley that had played host in 1960 to some hundred bridge experts from a dozen countries who had come up for a day from the world championship in nearby Turin. On that occasion Johnny Crawford, least inhibited of the American experts, had walked out with some $20,000 worth of lire bulging from every pocket. This time only four countries were up for the world championship, and there were no Crawfords among them. The pickings for the casino, conveniently across the street from the Hotel Billia, where the nine-day tournament was held, were destined to be very slim.

France, Argentina and the United States, each representing a continent, sent teams to Saint Vincent to play against Italy, which had won the previous year. They found Perroux's Blue Team already in possession, winding up a week of practice.

It was quite typical of the Italians to take an extra week away from their work to train for the nine days that were to come. The food and water might be different from that of Rome and Naples; the altitude was almost 2000 feet. Perroux is father and mother to his team; he takes no avoidable risks with the physical condition of his middle-aged ragazzi.

It was Perroux who had persuaded the management of the casino, which owns the Hotel Billia, that there would be good business and good publicity in furnishing free accommodations to the four teams and a bevy of tournament officials. If the invading bridge experts succumbed to the lure of roulette or chemmy, that was none of his affair; boys will be boys. But Perroux made sure that his boys stayed away from the tables of the casino; their job was at two very different tables across the street.

Perroux, a Knight Commander of the Order of Merit, has earned fame and honors in his career as a trial lawyer and all-round spellbinder, but he would have earned his knighthood just as surely if he had done nothing but bring glory to Italy by captaining the Italian team to six world championships. (Two of his players, Pietro Forquet and Benito Garozzo, as yet unknown except for their prowess at the bridge table, were made Chevaliers of the Order in 1962.) Perroux begins each world championship sadly predicting that his team will finish last and ends by explaining why they shouldn't have won. Between times he keeps a watchful eye on the form of his players, at and away from the bridge table.

Among ordinary bridge players Perroux would rank as a great expert, but to his own team Perroux's bridge is the subject of much irreverent humor. This does not seem to handicap him in his task of judging which four of his six players are equipped to play the next session or which players he will need to keep fresh for the most important match. When Perroux fell ill at Turin in 1960, and the Italians lost the world championship to France, Forquet insisted that Italy would have won if Perroux had been able to stay at the helm.

Forquet, star of the Blue Team, is not the man to give credit lightly to anybody else for the long string of Italian successes. Slim and still boyish at 38, Forquet looks on the heavy-set 58-year-old Perroux as a father whose authority is needed to keep the other children obedient and diligent.

There has never been a conflict between the young man and the old man for primacy on the Blue Team. They compete only in physical distinction -- Forquet with his matinee-idol good looks, and Perroux, a tall man of huge bulk, with his dignity and authority. Forquet is content to overpower his rivals at the bridge table, and at Saint Vincent he encountered perhaps the only player in the world for whom he has an abiding respect -- Howard Schenken.

Schenken, star of the United States team, was once picked almost unanimously by American Life Masters as the partner they would want if they were playing for their lives. Some experts believe that at 59 Schenken is not the player he once was; others, accepting this estimate, think he is still the best player in the world. (The opinion is no longer unanimous: Some Americans would plump for Lew Mathe or Tobias Stone, and most Europeans would name Forquet or England's Terence Reese.)

Four teams seemed to be involved in the struggle for the 1963 world championship. Only two had a real chance. and the soul of each team was its star performer. The world championship at Saint Vincent was actually a contest between the noonday sun and twilight.

• • •

The United States drew Argentina as its opponent for the first day of play, a stroke of luck for the Americans. South America has sent a team to the world championships ever since 1958, but bridge in South America is not up to European or North American standards. Nobody in the World Bridge Federation would be beastly enough to say so, but the fact is that the gallant South Americans clutter up the world championship.

Clutterers or not, the U. S. team welcomed them. The American rookies had a few attacks of jitters, as expected, playing some hands like the senior class of a finishing school for young ladies. Fortunately, there were other hands -- not all of the U. S. players were rookies -- and there were always the amiable Argentines. The first session ended with the United States leading by the slightly ridiculous score of 62 to 49 international match points. It was like winning a World Series game by a score of 20 to 15.

Meanwhile, Italy had demolished the French in the first session of their match. 49 to 5. It was a merciless exhibition, designed to put the French in their place. Many bridge journalists had predicted that the French would win at Saint Vincent, but after the first set of hands the smell of roast crow permeated the press room.

Some of the European bridge writers, out in full force at Saint Vincent, gave their readers a scoop: The Italians, despite changes in the make-up of the team, were greater than ever; the Americans were barely able to cope with Argentina; there would be a slaughter of the innocents the next day, when Italy and the United States met for a full day of play.

The rest of the first day lent color to these predictions. Italy continued to crush France, and the United States continued to stumble ungracefully against the lowly Argentine.

• • •

A crowd of some 300 bridge enthusiasts jammed the Bridge-O-Rama room at the Hotel Billia for the beginning of the match between Italy and the United States on the second day of the tournament. The spectator at a world championship watches the lights go on and off upon a large electrically operated board that dominates one wall of the room like the screen of a moving-picture theater. The board shows all of the cards of the hand currently being played, much as they would appear in the diagram of a newspaper bridge column. A loudspeaker blares out each bid and play, spoken into a microphone by a tournament official who sits beside the players on another floor of the hotel.

During pauses in bidding and play an announcer relates what happened when the hand was first played. In all team contests a hand is first dealt and played normally and then sent, with the cards restored to their original positions, to be bid and played at another table by the two other pairs from the opposing countries, with the team that held the weak cards now getting a chance to play the strong ones. In theory, the results at both tables should be the same, producing a tie score for each hand.

The crowd, scanning the cards on the electric board, buzzes excitedly about who should bid what, how good old so-and-so is sure to play the trumps right, and what the score will be if the play takes such and such a turn. The crowd includes many of the most knowledgeable players of the five continents, idle members of the competing teams, coaches and scouts, wives and girlfriends, the leading women players and their escorts, even a few children and an occasional dog. All, including the dog, are willing to sit for hours in a darkened room, speculating endlessly on how things will go or how they should have gone.

It is a situation in which every man is a world champion. Everybody in the audience can see all 52 cards of each deal; the players, looking at only 13 cards during the bidding and 26 cards during the play, must laboriously work out the location of the unseen cards. The kibitzer can select a bid or a line of play, discuss it with a neighbor and then reject it and try again from his starting point; the players, with nobody to turn to for advice or even friendly conversation, must stand or fall on their first bids or plays -- not all their piety nor wit can cancel a played card.

Sometimes the kibitzers, seeing all the cards and knowing the result at the first table, fail to understand how a player can miss the right bid or the best play -- or how a player of established reputation can make a simple human mistake. On one occasion an excited rooter for the Italian team jeered Eugenio Chiaradia in the lobby of the Hotel Billia shortly after he had fumbled a crucial contract. The equally excited Chiaradia, 52 years old and about 110 pounds ringside, drew back a menacing fist but was restrained by obliging friends. Bridge experts, whose only exercise comes from snapping down an occasional ace, are usually careful to telegraph their punches in an incident of this kind, to give bystanders every opportunity of averting violence.

When Italy scored seven points on the first hand of the match, the crowd applauded and settled back to enjoy itself. Silence greeted the next hand, as the United States took the lead, but the crowd recovered its voice on the third hand when 13 points went to Italy. An Italian audience does not attend a world championship to cheer the opponents.

The pace slackened after a few hands, and the session ended with Italy in the lead, 37 to 22. It was not a score to set the Americans to dancing in the streets, but it was reassuring. The Italians were (continued on page 134)Big-League Bridge(continued from page 100) but human, and the Americans were not pushovers.

When play was resumed at 5:30 the Americans sliced four points from the Italian lead. After dinner, America took the lead and ended the day 37 points ahead, giving the Blue Team the worst drubbing of its career.

Back in the press room the American journalists tried not to look smug as they hammered out stories for their newspapers. Then they sat around in the bar to hash over old times with members of the international bridge set.

They harked back to 1950, the year of the first official world championship, when an American team led by Schenken won the title in a three-cornered contest against Great Britain and a mixed Sweden-Iceland team. They recalled 1951 when Schenken took much the same team over to Naples to win from an Italian team that included the youthful Forquet.

There had been no match in 1952, but they spoke of 1953, when Sweden won the European championship and sent a team to New York to take an ineffectual crack at Schenken and his playmates. Then 1954, a vintage year, when the U. S. sent three Californians and three Midwesterners to Monte Carlo to show the world that America could win without Schenken and Co. They won the championship and much attention in the French press for their Hawaiian shirts and their casual custom of wearing brown shoes and green Argyle socks with dinner jackets.

The U. S. had won four years in a row, and many American bridge players thought that the best European teams should be invited to play in the American national championships to settle the world title. It was clear that any of a dozen good American teams could beat Europe's best, and it was a waste of good money to send six players to Europe to beat a bunch of second-raters.

Those were the days, and the memories linger on the tongues of the journalists.

They did not linger on the bad days that followed. In 1955 Great Britain sent a team over to lift the Bermuda Bowl from the United States' apparently secure grasp. The next year the U. S. sent a team to Paris but failed to get the Bowl back. In 1957 the Blue Team made its first appearance in world championship competition; they have won ever since, except for 1960.

In recent years European experts sometimes suggested that the U. S. send its best team to play in the European championship to compete for the world title along with Iceland, Spain, Lebanon, and the like. The shoe felt horribly different, now that it was on the wrong foot.

Nobody was tactless enough to renew this suggestion at the Billia bar that night. Instead they wondered whether Schenken would have the honor of taking the Bermuda Bowl back to America after its long stay abroad.

They enjoyed that night in the bar. Eight years is a long time to wait for a chance to howl.

• • •

The schedule now called for a three-day wait before the United States could resume the match against Italy. The match with France came next -- or, more accurately, the match against Pierre Ghestem and Réné Bacherich, the slowest bridge partnership in the world. The individual record for slow play is held by a Toronto expert (he once took three minutes by the clock to put his last card down on the table), but Ghestem and Bacherich have no rivals as a pair. In the 1954 world championship Ghestem took so long to consider a bid that young William Rosen, his American opponent, keeled over in a faint and had to be revived by the tournament director.

It would be unfair to suppose that Ghestem and Bacherich use their Fabian tactics for the sole purpose of wearing out their opponents. They need more than the normal amount of time to choose the best bid because they play the most complicated bidding system thus far presented to public view.

In the Ghestem system a bid seldom has its accepted meaning. Usually a player makes a "relay" bid, revealing nothing about his own hand but asking his partner to supply more information. Sometimes a player makes a "transfer" bid, demanding that his partner bid a suit as yet unnamed. Where ordinary bidding is a conversation in a language that everybody at the table (including the opponents) is expected to understand, bidding in the Ghestem system is a series of messages in code.

Ghestem and Bacherich would take minutes to choose each bid, looking several moves ahead, like chess players. It was not strange in the case of Ghestem, a burly fruit wholesaler who was once world champion at dames, a form of checkers widely played on the Continent. Bacherich, a diminutive textile merchant, has no reputation at chess or checkers but doubtless has some equally good reason for his inability to get past a given point.

Their American opponents would sometimes ask the meaning of a bid in the middle of the auction, but would usually wait until the end of the bidding to find out what each bid meant, using an interpreter provided for just this purpose. (All bids and plays are made in English at an international tournament, but the few words needed for this purpose are the only English words that Ghestem and Bacherich know. The American players knew no French.)

What with one thing and another, the first set of 16 hands consumed the full three-and-a-half hours allowed by the tournament regulations. (In American national championships, players are allowed about one-and-a-half hours, and those who consistently take more time are disqualified.) The second session began an hour behind schedule and dragged on for another three-and-a-half hours. The final session of the day began at 11 P.M. and ran until almost 3:30 A.M.

Penalties for slow play had not been set up, but the tournament director, Dr. Ing. Silvio Carini Mazzacara, addressed an outraged note to players and team captains, warning them not to repeat the offense. Thereafter Ghestem and Bacherich kept carefully within the three-and-a-half-hour limit.

It is interesting to note that Baron Robert de Nexon, captain of the French team, put Ghestem and Bacherich in against the United States for the first eight of the nine sessions played by the two teams, relenting only on the last session of the last day when it was obvious that nothing could affect the final standings. He played Ghestem and Bacherich in only five of the nine sessions against Italy and only four times against Argentina.

Slowpokery got the French nowhere at Saint Vincent. The United States won the first two sessions and tied in the marathon session that night, ending the day with a lead of 132 to 76.

So far, so good. The U.S. had played one full day against each of the teams, reaching the one-third mark. It was well ahead in each of the three matches, and it looked as though America had at last picked three pairs that could bring home the bacon.

Schenken's partner was Peter Leventritt, with whom he had played in the 1961 world championship at Buenos Aires, taking the customary second place to Italy. They had been partners through a dozen or more American national tournaments, in many of which they had played Schenken's new bidding system.

Robert Jordan and Arthur Robinson were the work horses of the team. Both young (Robinson celebrated his 27th birthday the day before the tournament began), they had the stamina and patience to play world-championship bridge for ten hours a day if necessary. Both played well and steadily, and Jordan was often brilliant.

G. Robert Nail and James O. Jacoby were the partnership least favored by the American captain, John Gerber. They had been playing with great success in American tournaments for more than a year, but Gerber thought that young Jacoby (son of Oswald Jacoby, leading American tournament player) needed more seasoning. This estimate was to result in the most dramatic incident of the tournament a few days later.

• • •

The second set of three days produced no change in the standings. The U.S. pulled away from the Argentines, leading by 347 to 177 at the two-thirds mark, then dropped half of its lead against Italy, but still led them 216 to 196. The Americans crawled through three more sessions against France to lead 249 to 196.

It was on the second day of the match against the United States that Forquet gambled on a grand slam for which he had only an even chance. It boiled down to finding the king of spades in one opponent's hand rather than in the other's. Leventritt held the king, and Forquet made his grand slam. If Schenken had held the king, Forquet would have gone down and the U.S. would have won the world championship (as it turned out) by six points.

It reminded the harassed Americans of a hand on the first day, when Forquet had bid another grand slam, this time with the odds slightly in his favor. Luck had been with him then, too. The world championship would have gone the other way if either grand slam had failed.

The Italians reached another grand slam on the second day of their match with the United States, largely because Giorgio Belladonna cannot bring himself to pass if any bid is conceivable. Perroux once remarked ruefully: "Some teams have trouble with a prima donna. We have Belladonna."

This time Belladonna's optimistic opening bid influenced his partner, Camillo Pabis Ticci to bid a grand slam. It was a sound contract, and luck did not seem to be a factor. Still, if anybody but Belladonna had been dealt those very same cards...

• • •

When the United States began its last day against Argentina, Gerber broke up the partnerships, pairing Schenken with Nail and Leventritt with Jacoby, ostensibly to let the players relax in a match they couldn't lose. Actually, the American captain had another project in mind: If conditions seemed to warrant it, he could play Nail with Schenken against Italy in the crucial match scheduled for the next day.

By this time the scores made it clear that the world championship could be won only by Italy or the United States. The winner of their match was sure to win the title, and with 48 hands to be played, the U.S. had a lead of 20 points.

The first of the three final sessions against Italy brought to mind the story of the crapshooter who ran a two-dollar bet up to a million dollars and then lost it all on the next roll of the dice. "How did you make out?" a friend asked.

"Nothing much happened," the gambler replied. "I lost two dollars."

America gained only one point in that set of hands, but quite a bit happened. The hands shown in the Bridge-O-Rama room told only part of the story. Much of the drama took place behind locked doors.

The two teams seesawed for the first 13 hands. On the next, hand 110, Chiaradia decided against bidding a slam with Forquet. As it turned out, the slam was there for the taking. Forquet silently lit a cigarette and hurled the match savagely against the opposite wall. Chiaradia kept his eyes carefully away from his partner.

When Forquet began to play in international tournaments in his mid-20s, Chiaradia was Italy's greatest player. When Forquet became the great star of the Blue Team he avoided playing with the older man. Now Forquet plays by choice with Garozzo, a 36-year-old Naples businessman.

Of the tension behind locked doors the audience in the Bridge-O-Rama room knew nothing. They maintained a tense silence when Italy missed the slam, but roared with delight on the next hand, the turning point of the match. The announcer had told them the result in the first room: Jordan and Robinson had gone down one trick at six hearts. The audience cheered when Forquet and Chiaradia stopped at a comfortable contract of four hearts. The word buzzed round the audience: Italy would pick up ten international match points by staying out of trouble on this hand.

But the bidding wasn't over. Leventritt doubled the "unbeatable" contract of four hearts. "Redouble," Forquet barked. The cheering was loud enough to start an avalanche on the slopes of the Matterhorn, 16 miles away.

Gerber strode out of the hall and beckoned to Sam Kehela, a young Canadian expert who was serving as team coach. "Get hold of Nail," Gerber snapped. "He's going in with Schenken for the next session."

The decision brought to mind the switch Gerber had made in the 1962 world championship when he had put Nail in with Mathe in a desperate attempt to stop an Italian victory. Then also he had broken up two partnerships, but the situations were not exactly alike. Nail had no bidding problems with Mathe, whose bidding methods are very natural; it was asking a lot of him to use Schenken's new system with so little practice with it. In 1962 the Americans were behind when the switch was made: this time they were leading, with only 32 hands left to be played.

Gerber thought that Leventritt had made a bad double and that perhaps he was cracking under the strain. Gerber was right about the strain, but wrong about who was cracking.

Chiaradia, five times a world champion, was trembling with excitement and nervousness. He had dropped his cards several times, he had bid out of turn once, and was upset over missing the slam on the previous hand. Leventritt doubled not because he was sure he could beat four hearts, but because he was sure he could beat Chiaradia.

Leventritt was right. Chiaradia, shaking violently, adopted a strained line of play, miscounted the hand at the tenth trick, and found a way to go down.

It was a deplorable performance and may well mark the end of Chiaradia's great career as a member of the Blue Team. The day after the tournament ended, Perroux paid tribute to "dear old Chiaradia, who has done so much for us all," at the banquet that was supposed to bind up all wounds; but Chiaradia was significantly absent from the feast.

If Leventritt had passed, the U.S. would have lost ten points on this crucial hand. His double, and Chiaradia's lapse, turned the loss into a four-point gain. This brilliance earned Leventritt only a rest on the bench for the second session of the day.

The switch was disastrous. The Blue Team scored 44 to the Americans' 5, taking an 18-point lead. Time was running out, for only 16 hands remained to be played.

It was clear that Gerber cared nothing for the factor of partnership. The Europeans, successful in world championships since 1955, make up their best teams of pairs who have played hundreds of sessions together. Gerber, a tough-minded man who has won several national championships in the United States and knows the game thoroughly, may not mind the fact that few experts would agree with him.

With the horses well away, Gerber locked the stable door for the final session, putting Leventritt back in with Schenken. Italy won the session by one point, ending the match with a final score of 313 to 294 international match points. The margin of 19 points in a match of 144 hands was a clear victory for Italy, since even one point would have been enough, but experts agreed that it was barely more than a tie.

As play began in the last hand, and it became clear that Italy could not lose the match no matter how the hand turned out, Perroux assembled his ragazzi outside the locked playing room to greet Forquet and Garozzo when they emerged. There were embraces, tears, exclamations, and flashes of light from a photographer. Forquet brushed the embraces aside impatiently. It was the sixth time for him: what was all the excitement about? The result of the match had not been announced, but Jacoby and Nail, watching silently from the open doorway, did not need to be told what the excitement was about.

Perroux and his squadra italiana gathered at the head of the stairs and walked slowly down the wide marble staircase to the lobby. It was past one in the morning, but almost all of the spectators had stayed. They stood silently at the foot of the stairs until the Italian team appeared; then they applauded with hands held high in the air as their champions made the slow descent. It was a very moving, if slightly theatrical, scene.

• • •

Ernst Heldring, secretary of the European Bridge League, commented on the sportsmanship of the Americans. "They were full of praise for the Italian players," he said. "What graceful losers they are!"

It remained for the Italians to show how gracefully they can win. After the cups had been presented to the winners at the banquet on the final Monday night, Perroux called Gerber to the dais and presented his precious cup to "the greatest captain of the greatest team that Italy has ever met." One by one, each Italian player called to an American player and presented his cup with a smile and a handshake.

Forquet found a few significant words as he gave his cup to Schenken. "If I had played against four Schenkens," he said quietly, "I could not have won."