Like, I suspect, most solvers of the Listener, I usually get my fix by downloading a pdf of the puzzle online. On the rare occasions I’ve bought a dead-tree Times — manly on the days when I have set the Listener, letting me keep the page for posterity — I noticed it has a next-door neighbour: Andrew Robson’s Bridge column.
Aficionados assure me the Times bridge column is excellent. But even for an intermediate player such as myself, most of its contents are little more than gobbledegook. As, presumably, is the Listener, for those who have just opened the relevant page for the bridge or chess columns.
Would it be possible to combine the two?, I wondered. To have the Listener crossword set a bridge problem which the solver must answer; as though some Times printer’s devil had inserted the contents into the WRONG COLUMN? (The idea also seemed appealing as a sequel to my previous published Listener, 4864 “Board of Trade”, based on the rather different game of Monopoly).
The “bridge problem” would clearly have to be a simple one. I discarded the exotic oddities considered by Mr Robson in favour of widely used, and easily verified, bridge conventions.
The first that came to mind was “high-card points”. Under this convention, the three picture cards and ace are awarded points, enabling players to asses their strength of hands in a consistent way. (There are forty points in a pack, so an average hand has 10 points; anyone with more than that is, in general, entitled to open the bidding). The fact that the number of cards in a hand — thirteen — is the same as the number of cells in a typical row or column made me think one could represent the other.
The second: the Jacoby transfer, one of the first conventions taught to new bridge players, and (as far as I can tell) still widely used. If your partner opens the bidding at One No Trump, you respond with the suit below the one you wish to be trumps — which must be at least at the level of two of the suit, since the auction must always proceed upwards. (“Below” here means based on the strength of suits: C – D – H – S).
This allows your partner to “transfer”, or correct back, into the desired suit. It means the player who opened 1NT, who probably has the stronger hand, controls the ensuing play. In theory one could do this with any suit — in practice, it’s used only for higher-scoring “major” suits. This is why the six adapted clues all involve D going to H, and H going to S, but not (say) C going to D.
The main technical difficulty in designing the grid was stuffing in plenty of Js, Qs, and Ks, to make the endgame fun — a constraint which led to a few obscure and not always very satisfying words (KSARS, JOSIE). I also had to ensure that no row or column comprised an “impossible hand” of more than four As.
The instruction given by down clues — to find a row or colum with SIXTEEN POINTS FROM AKQJ — may have proved confusing, to those who took it to imply that the row or column must contain each of the four. That was not my intention. “Points from AKQJ” was my shorthand for points generated by high cards — since under some systems you can also assign extra value from having, for example, a long suit. It’s clearly possible to have a 16-point hand with no Queens, though I understand the confusion.
In many games, there are as many rulesets as players. In Monopoly, everyone has their own rule about the FREE PARKING square; and bridge is no exception. Some solvers tell me firmly that NO BID has for many decades been long superseded as a call by PASS. I definitely used the former when I first learned the game about 30 years ago; though I learn this piece of news with chagrin, as PASS would fitted far more easily into the grid. Others note they associate JACOBY only with a completely separate convention, a 2NT response to a major opening.
Bridge seems a more divisive topic than Monopoly, which cruciverbalists seem to unanimously accept as tedious. There appear to be two categories of solvers: those who enjoy bridge, and those who have vowed not to.
For the latter category, I hope it proved solvable and not too traumatic. For digital solvers bamboozled by the title, my apologies.