Bridge Players Bid for Ego, Fame, Pride

Zia Mahmood, the scion of a wealthy Pakistani family, smiled slightly as he described an experience of pure beauty, a moment of everlasting joy, that he knew several years ago.

He drew a diagram to explain. He was playing bridge, and he led, you see, with his unprotected king. His opponents failed to make their six-spade bid.

Oh, you say.

Nevertheless, it is beautiful bridge moments like that--allowing a public display of his boldness, courage, cunning and imagination--that have driven Mahmood, 40, to forsake his family business and social politics for the life of an itinerant tournament bridge player. And then, he added, there’s the other thing.

“I want to win everything,” he said. “Mostly, winning is that moment of beauty.”

He did not smile.

Mahmood, who numbers among the lions of the bridge world, is competing against the best of the 7,500 players gathered at the American Contract Bridge League’s 10-day Fall North American Bridge Championships that ends tomorrow at the Anaheim Hilton and Towers.

In duplicate bridge--a trick-taking card game that in its short 62 years has developed a circuit board of bidding codes, strategies and counterstrategies--it’s not how well you do on cards that counts, but how well you play compared to everybody else. Everyone plays the same hands.

Mahmood said he started playing bridge when he was 23 because he wanted to have an affair with a married woman. The only place the Pakistani woman was allowed to go unescorted was to bridge tournaments.

In a few years, he was so good that he offered $1.5 million to anyone who could program a computer to beat him at bridge. Nobody took him up on the offer, and it’s still good, he said.

Leadership for Team

In 1981 he led an unknown Pakistani team to the Bermuda Bowl and finished second only to a team from the United States that has won every championship since 1976.

What’s at stake for him and others in big-time bridge is not money but master points, ego and fame. The winners of the main event, the Reisinger Cup, will qualify as contenders for the next world team championships, the Bermuda Bowl, scheduled for 1989 in Perth, Australia.

The Reisinger Cup, which concludes Sunday, is the “longest, toughest, most grueling day in bridge” according to Bob Hamman, 45, of Dallas, the world’s top-ranked player.

“Everybody is chasing the Holy Grail. They all want to be world champion. They can’t have it! I have it!” His fist slams against the table where he sits in the Hilton bar.

“I’m the Minotaur at the gate to the labyrinth. It’s my job to show up and swat them down.”

This year, the league’s good-will committee is trying to calm those passionate egos with the motto: “Good will is contagious, catch it and pass it on.”

‘They’re Animals’

But outside the ballrooms where the major events are being played, the tender of a portable bar indicated that the effort is not working. “They’re animals,” he said.

Mahmood has never slugged a partner, he said. But when he finds it necessary to pump up his partner’s “purity of pride” and dedication to “excellence,” he admitted bridge can turn him “emotionally violent.”

At 11 p.m. Wednesday, he and his partner, Jaggy Shivdasani, had just qualified for the finals of the Blue Ribbon Pairs. Mahmood lectured Shivdasani, 29, a certified public accountant from Bombay, in Urdu, the official language of Pakistan. His hands went up high, they came down hard. They ranged wide. Shivdasani pulled his fingers through his hair.

The day before, Mahmood “berated me for two hours,” Shivdasani said. “That’s the kind of guy he is.” Their arguments are no different from others, which usually sound like, “Why didn’t you lead a spade?” or “What did it mean when you bid two diamonds?”

In July, Shivdasani became the first non-American to win a national bridge title, the Spingold.

Hamman used to cultivate abuse toward opponents at the bridge table. Once he punched an opponent. He was justified, he said, because Hamman had lost a bet and the guy rubbed it in.

A Switch of Identity

He stopped being mean, he said, because in the inbred world of tournament bridge, opponents began showing up as partners.

Now, he said, “the best way is totally business.”

He was not playing for pay at the tournament, but top players sometimes play “professionally.” Professionals, paid by clients to be their partners, can earn up to $15,000 for the three-day Reisinger event.

“Some people have a few extra hundred thousand dollars and like to pay a professional to play bridge,” said Michael Lawrence of Berkeley, a lesser-known professional who makes most of his money writing such books as “How to Locate Your Opponents’ High Cards.”

Helene Gingiss of Chicago, who married into the family that created Gingiss Formal wear, said her full-time pro spent two years and turned her from a “newborn baby into at least a graduate student” in bridge.

“Many people say, ‘You’re buying your points.’ I don’t have to spend money to win. No pro is good enough to win with a client who can’t play.”

Cost Estimated

Gingiss wants to put together a team to win a world championship. And she wants to be on it. Insiders figure it will cost her $30,000 to $50,000.

Bejeweled Sue Cutler of Fort Worth made it to the Blue Ribbon Pairs finals with her pro, Paul Soloway. “He’s precious and darling and fun,” she said. “My husband gave him to me as a Christmas present.”

Soloway was available at the last minute because his previous buyer, a Florida landlord, needed emergency surgery and couldn’t come to the tournament. Soloway said the man paid about $15,000 for him and others to play with him in the Reisinger competition, a four-person team event. The man must still pay the players who are all on contract, Soloway said.

Limited to champions, the three-day, 23-hour Blue Ribbon event culminated on Thanksgiving, but no one seemed to care.

“This is my family,” said Bart Bramley, 39, of Chicago, one of an estimated 100 bridge players who have become options traders because of the similarity in strategy.

‘Turkeys Upstairs’

“Who cares about Thanksgiving when there are turkeys upstairs to beat?” Hamman said.

Inside the ballroom, 156 people produced a steady hum, punctuated periodically by “Director!” a call for the referee. Paper cups, bottles and glasses piled up on the floor. Mahmood, known by colleagues as “one of our jet-setters,” and a player with flair, was surrounded by kibitzers watching him play. Immaculate in cashmere and tinted glasses, he took his time, thinking.

Shivdasani had laid down the dummy. Mahmood was devising his strategy to play the hand. He folded his cards, fanned them, folded them again. He shook his head. He hunched over the dummy. He leaned back.

One kibitzer closed his eyes and his jaw dropped. Another yawned.

Finally, Mahmood asked Shivdasani to play a jack. Each player in turn, turned over a card. No one speaks.

While nothing much can be done about players who cheat by snapping a card down with extra enthusiasm or making prearranged eye gestures, blankets covered the mirrored columns on the wall and bidding boxes were used to replace oral bidding--a common practice in all national events. When a player turns over a card with the symbol for one spade, for example, there’s no opportunity to say it “ONE SPADE!” “ONE spade!” or “One SPADE!”

By this time, most players had been playing for five days, day and night--sometimes past midnight.

Outside in the hall, Rick Zucker, 35, a professional player from New York, listened to George Winston piano music through earphones encircling his ponytail. Others were taking shots of vodka straight. A woman slumped, sullen, against a wall while a man yelled, “I thought you played beautifully, and you got all over my case!”

Wandering the Halls

Others wandered the halls muttering to themselves or arguing with partners in the hall.

(The winners of the Blue Ribbon Pairs, announced Thursday at midnight, were Stevie Weinstein, 23, and his stepfather, Fred Stewart, from Accord, N. Y. It marked the third national title for each, all in partnership.)

The tournament drew rookies and novices as well as experts. Glen Anderson, a cattle and grain farmer, came from Busby, Canada. Father Thomas Kemp came from Silver Spring, N.Y., for a vacation. Mark Hunsaker, a graduate student at Brigham Young University, came to the tournament instead of studying for finals.

The biggest problem with big-time bridge these days is that there’s no new blood, Hamman said. “I keep beating the same old dogs year after year,” he sighed.

The American Contract Bridge League, marking its 50th anniversary, has embarked on an education campaign to attract younger players. Many people still consider bridge to be an old person’s game.

“It used to be,” said Jaggy Shivdasani, 29. Then, after a rebuke from Mahmood, he decided it still might be.

“I am getting older here,” he sighed.

COMPETITION BRIDGE AT A GLANCE

EVENT: The American Contract Bridge League is holding its three-times-a-year (spring, fall and winter) competition in Orange County for the first time. The 10-day tournament is under way in three ballrooms at an Anaheim hotel.

HISTORY: Bridge’s late 17th-Century parent game, whist, evolved under names trump, triumph, ruff and honors, whisk and swabbers, until bridge or bridge whist was introduced in 1894 in London. The basic rules of the modern game, contract bridge, were set by a group of card players, including yachtsman Harold S. Vanderbilt, on a steamship voyage from Los Angeles to Havana in 1925.

PLAYERS: The American Contract Bridge League has 186,000 members and 4,200 bridge clubs nationwide. League officials say 5 million to 6 million people regularly read the bridge columns in daily newspapers. The league, formed in 1937, is celebrating its 50th anniversary.

REVENUE: Tournament players have booked 1,000 of the Anaheim Hilton’s 1,600 rooms. The International Assn. of Visitor Convention Bureaus estimates that each player will spend about $700 during a visit.

GAME TYPES: Contract bridge, in which partners bid competitively to ensure that the one with the strongest hand names the suit to be played as trump; auction bridge, in which all four players bid for the right to name a trump suit; and duplicate contract bridge, in which competitors receive same cards, playing identical hands, eliminating element of luck.

POSSIBILITIES: There are 635,013,559,600 possible bridge hands.

Source: The American Contract Bridge League and “Basic Bridge in Three Weeks” by Alan Truscott.