Bridge Board

Spectators at a card game are usually obliged to lean over the contestants' shoulders, to snoop stupidly around the table. Because spectators are apt to make revealing exclamations, they are regarded as a nuisance and scornfully called kibitzers (Yiddish colloquial term). Not so were spectators at a game of contract bridge played last week in the ballroom of Manhattan's Hotel Roosevelt by four experts, under the auspices of the recently organized Bridge Headquarters, Inc. The experts--Willard Karn & fat Philip Hal Sims v. David Burnstine & Oswald Jacoby --played six prearranged hands and a five-game rubber. The 450 spectators, who had paid $1 each to be admitted, sat in comfortable chairs, watched the play on a Scoreboard erected near the bridge table.

On the Scoreboard, which resembled a baseball play-by-play tally, official scorers --U. S. Army officers--marked the hands dealt to each contestant, the number of tricks taken by each team. The scoreboard was out of the players' sight; but they did not need to see it. Sniggers and snorts from the audience, when someone played the wrong card or tried to finesse, were as explanatory as a peek at an opponent's hand. Observers wondered whether, by imposing strict rules of silence on spectators, or by enclosing the players in soundproof booths, bridge could be made into an indoor spectacle, like prize fighting, wrestling, billiards.

Home last week from Russia, Mr. & Mrs. Ely Culbertson, handsome young exponents of a bidding system of their own,* reiterated their disdain for Bridge Headquarters, Inc., called it a "merger of has-beens and never-wases." Said facetious Expert Culbertson: "When I was arrested for speaking Russian with suspicious fluency, I offered to play the head of the secret service a [Sidney] Lenz problem in order to prove that I was merely . . . Culbertson. . . . But the chief could not find a deck of cards with kings or queens in the pack. . . . Even with the provisional deck he agreed . . . that I was neither [Milton] Work nor Lenz. . . ."

No date has been set for Ely Culbertson & wife's grudge-game against any two experts selected by Bridge Headquarters, Inc. for $1,000 a side.

*In the Official System, a one-trick bid signifies an ordinary hand; a two bid signifies a medium strong hand, a game invitation bid; a bid of three, or a two-club bid signifies an extraordinarily strong hand. In the Culbertson System bids of one have the same significance; a two bid signifies an extraordinarily good hand.

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