The Lady Was Vulnerable

The log of the S.S. Finland, en route from San Francisco to Havana, recorded that on the night of Oct. 31, 1925 the ship reached Balboa too late to proceed through the Panama Canal and too late for passengers to go ashore. It fails to record that of all the incidents that took place during the voyage, this was destined to be the most memorable, for the delay led to the birth of contract bridge as we know it today.

Probably no game of worldwide popularity can so clearly pinpoint the date of its origination. Whist, from which bridge descends, was first played in England during the 16th century, although not until 1742 did Edmond Hoyle of "according to Hoyle" fame, publish the first book about the game.

Nobody knows exactly when bridge was first played or how it got its name. Its origin is sometimes credited to Russia because of an 1886 pamphlet entitled Biritch, or Russian Whist, but recent research proves the game was played much earlier in Turkey and Egypt. Auction bridge followed shortly, its beginnings shrouded in a mythology that includes an account of three Englishmen stationed in India so far from a possible fourth player that they had to devise a way to play with a dummy hand.

The link between auction and contract was a variant played in France called plafond, but it was unsatisfactory because although successful bidders got credit toward game only for those tricks for which they had bid, the scoring rewards were entirely inadequate. Yet it was a game of plafond played aboard the Finland that Halloween in 1925 that led to today's contract bridge. Francis Bacon III, a 76-year-old retired New York stockbroker, was a participant in the game. Here is his recollection of what happened:

"I am, unfortunately, the only survivor of the quartet which played the first game of modern contract bridge en route from the Panama Canal to Havana. My companions were Harold S. Vanderbilt, our host and the inventor of this game, Dudley Pickman Jr., his classmate and clubmate at Harvard, and Frederic S. Allen. Although it was enjoyable, I will not describe the time we spent riding by rail to the West Coast in a private car, motoring from San Francisco to Los Angeles with some attractive stops along the way and cruising south on the S.S. Finland, because only one incident on this trip was pertinent.

"One evening on board we tried the French contract game called plafond and found it dull. When we reached the Canal we were so late we were denied landing privileges until the next morning. Freddy Allen and I had anticipated an enjoyable evening investigating night life on shore, so we drowned our sorrows with some extras at the bar where we met a fellow passenger engaged in the same pursuit. This lady was not bashful in asking whether she could join our game after dinner. Dudley, the weakest player, was happy to bow out, so we soon found that we had as our fourth a person determined to take complete charge, much to Mike Vanderbilt's annoyance, and show us a game she claimed she had played in China with her brother, a representative of some large oil company. The rules of this game were crazy, the scoring very high except below the line, and penalties for failure of a contract when doubled were way out of line with corresponding rewards. How much she invented on the spot, spurred on by a high alcoholic intake, and how much, if any, she remembered from her alleged games in China we will never know. She did make one lasting contribution, however, which was her use of the word vulnerable to describe the partnership that has made one game toward rubber.

"The next day I was mulling over this strange evening and wondering whether she had not opened a facet which could convert plafond from a dull to an interesting game. Of course, it was Harold Vanderbilt who came up with the answer. By evening he had worked out a mathematically sound scoring system, which remains virtually unchanged today. His scheme included bonuses for slams, heavy penalties for overbidding, especially by a side that was—there you have it—vulnerable. He launched a game which was great fun to play and whose popularity spread like a forest fire in a high wind when he introduced it to the Whist Club on his return to New York."

Vanderbilt's achievement came as no surprise to those comparatively few bigwigs of auction bridge who knew of his skill. For 10 years, until the sensational and still unsolved slaying of J. B. Elwell in 1920, Vanderbilt and Elwell were the strongest auction partnership in America. Vanderbilt was considered an amateur because he did not need to make a living from the game, and the top pros with whom he preferred to compete never for a moment thought that he had invented contract as a more generous vehicle for distributing some of his millions to them. Whatever the stakes, Vanderbilt hated to lose and seldom did. Oswald Jacoby once paid him a rueful compliment: "The son of a gun plays as if he were broke."

Unfortunately, there is no record of any of the hands played aboard the Finland, but here is another, later hand which Vanderbilt viewed with pride. It illustrates the value of his club convention—the artificial opening bid of one club with a strong hand, later added by the Italians to the methods that launched their long string of world championships. This hand was unique:

WEST