Bridge Players

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 520, 24 November 1928, Page 22

Bridge Players

Chatty and Otherwise

Tricks of the Table

“A clean hearth, a bright tiro and the rigour of the game/* was Mrs. Battle’s recipe for a good game of whist. Modern women demand only a table, cards and a good four, for a game of bridge at any old hour. Bridge is an excellent name for the most popular game of the moment. In the past quadrille was so named, because it took four people to play; bridge is aptly called so, for it bridges strangeness between players old and young, and those awkward moments of silence, because people who are gathered together may not have any mutual interests. The fortune-telling pack is no less revealing tljan the bridge hand. There is the grumbler, who has a “hoo-doo,” 'and makes a regular oratorio of her bad luck. The arithmetician, who is so wanting in the power of keeping her score correctly that she always queries every marking; the player who gives withering glances, because her partner has not played up to ftie “‘Campbell Convention”—which is a sin—or, perhaps, some new convention, that is a new one to the player. It is curious to note most men play a little slower than women; but then women are more reckless in their calling than men. Those women who play a sound game look upon “Chatty Bridge” as the greatest, sin in the calendar. So far, bridge is the only power which has managed to silence women’s tongues—even for a little while. Half the horror of a tedious day in the train is robbed of its boredom when a couple of packs of cards are Captain and Mrs. Cunningham Retd —with her sister, Lady Louis Mountbatten, Mrs. Reid was one of the inheritors of the Cassell millions —h«ave just christened their first baby. The small sou, Michael Duncan, made his first public appearance in the Crypt Chapel of the House of Commons. Captain and Mrs. Reid passed through Auckland on their honeymoon tour» round the world.

produced and a "keen game of bridge makes ,the hours fly. Bridge is one of the greatest time-killers ever Invented. It is strange in how many different ways 'people gather up their, tricks; some make an untidy pile—then you know that either you are playing with an artist, or a woman who keeps her dressing table with all its implements in a heedless disarray, and in the kitchen the wrong pots are used when cooking: other women arrange their cards in a criss-cross fashion—they have usually criss-cross minds, and their temper is usually an unpleasant factor in family life; the woman who puts her tricks so that they are easily counted shows an orderly mind —she would tabulate everything in life in its correct form. There are people with trick deals, who seem to flick the cards off in to four neat piles; others who shuffle the cards with a masterly movement.