Theo Todman's Bridge Background

(Text as at 10/10/2019 23:58:34)

• This Note provides some background to how I learned to play bridge, and what I did prior to playing in Essex from December 2007 onwards.
• I learned to play bridge at school back in the Autumn of 1972 when I should have been preparing more diligently for Cambridge entrance. Playing bridge and blitz chess in the prefects' room seemed so much more entertaining than ploughing lonely furrows in maths, physics and chemistry.
• I was captain of the county junior chess team, and consequently found the rudiments of bridge easy to pick up. A few weeks after I'd learned the rules of the game, good fortune had it that Cheltenham Bridge Club had an "outreach" evening where pupils from local schools played with a club member. I didn't even know Stayman until instructed prior to the session by my friendly but (I later discovered) distinctly non-expert partner. Anyway, we won. It's amazing what a bit of confidence and a considerate partner can do! I then played at Cheltenham twice a week until going up to King's in the autumn. I (like to think that I) was one of the better players at the Club within a year of learning the game, so thought I had some natural aptitude.
• At Cambridge I played on and off most of the time I was there, though my main non-academic interest was rowing. I had the honour of partnering Richard Granville in the King's team. Richard was something of a prodigy, was captain of the University team, and played with Richard Fleet for Cambridge and the England U26s, though he gave up serious play in his mid-20s in favour of Go and Backgammon, though he’s now returned to the game. With Richard Fleet he'd developed an inordinately complicated version of Precision, which I foolishly tried to burden myself with, so that after a number of disasters we kept having to revert to Acol.
• In my first year₁ I played in the King's team that came runners up in “Cuppers”, the Inter-Collegiate knock-out. My first partner (Mark Statham) sadly died of leukaemia over the Christmas period, and thereafter I partnered my maths supervisor. We repeated the feat in my third year, when I partnered Richard. Neither of these successes was down to me, I might add. Playing with a partner so much brighter and generally skilled at the game than oneself can be a scary experience. Cambridge was a remarkable place for bridge at the time – a whole bunch of then current or future internationals were there – Graham Kirby, John Armstrong, Brian Callaghan, David Burn, Steve Barnfield, Rob Cliffe – amongst other expert players who either didn't persist or weren't quite in the same league. Training sessions in such company were rewarding, if occasionally humiliating, experiences. I rarely had a regular partner, but did play for Cambridge University "B" on occasion with my school friend David Turner, and once won the 30-table University duplicate partnering some random "townie" I'd not met before. But it was all very amateurish, basically involving turning up and having a go.
• Anyway, for a year or so after leaving Cambridge I played occasionally at the Young Chelsea Bridge Club and other London Clubs (including rubber at The Acol Club), but then dropped out of the game.
• I made an attempted return to the Young Chelsea in 1990, and had an occasional on-line game at OK Bridge in 1999, but had probably only played 20 sessions between leaving Cambridge in the summer of 1976 and returning to the game in December 2007, when I decided to make a determined effort to see if I could become any good at it.
• For up-to-date information, see (or return to) my main Bridge Page², which has everything anyone might want to know, and much else besides.