The Cardturner

by Louis Sachar

  If I'd played the ace of spades immediately, I'd have won that trick. I could then have won the next three tricks in dummy, with its three red cards. But then I would have had no transportation to my hand to play the rest of my good hearts and diamonds. I'd have been forced to lead a black card from dummy. The defenders would have been able to take two club tricks and at least three spade tricks, setting the contract.

  I stared at the cards in disbelief. I had all these high cards and no way to use them. Strange, but the dummy would have been a lot better if it had had the two of diamonds instead of the queen of clubs.

  I have this rule. If you can see that plan A won't work, don't do it, even if you don't have a plan B.

  I suppose experts always have a plan B, and even a plan C, but my rule had worked pretty well when I played in the side game.

  Since I knew playing the A wouldn't work, I ducked. I played the 8.

  The opponents won the first trick. I could only let them win three more.

  My other opponent was on-lead, and he set down the K.

  Again, playing the A wouldn't work, so following Alton's rule, I ducked, playing the 10.

  They'd won the first two tricks.

  My best hope was that my opponent would now lead a red card. I suppose that was my plan B.

  No luck. He led the 3.

  This was what I had left.

  My ace of spades was my last spade, so I had to play it. The guy on my left played the 7, and I was just about to discard the 2 from dummy, when I suddenly spotted my plan C.

  Since I had no transportation to get from the dummy to my hand, I just had to make sure that the dummy hand never won a trick. And that meant discarding the ace of hearts!

  "Ace of hearts," I said.

  A look of surprise came across Toni's face, but dummy has no choice in the matter. She discarded the A.

  I was on-lead. I led the K, and once again had to discard something from dummy. "Ace of diamonds," I said, throwing away a second ace. Next I led the Q and discarded the K. I'd taken three tricks. I needed six more.

  I started with six diamonds in my hand, and the dummy began with two, for a total of eight. That meant the opponents had five diamonds between them. If they split 3-2, I could run off six diamond tricks.

  I led the Q.

  Both opponents played low diamonds. There were three diamonds still out.

  I led the J.

  Again, both opponents followed suit.

  My 10 took care of the last outstanding diamond. I ran the rest of my diamonds, for a total of nine tricks. The opponents took the last two.

  At first glance the hand seemed like it would be a snap. I had more than enough high cards. However, on second look, it seemed hopeless. Strangely, I didn't have enough low cards! I came up with a very unusual plan. Normally you only discard low cards. I discarded two aces and a king!

  Maybe Trapp could have done better, but at least I made my contract.

  "Let's go!" Toni said, jumping up from the table.

  She was right. We needed to check the results and get out of there ahead of Lucy and Arnold.

  When I stood up, I was finally able to hear Trapp's voice again.

  He said just two words to me, but those two words caused me to stop and then grab hold of the top of the chair for support. I was still standing there when Toni returned three or four minutes later.

  "Are you all right?" she asked. "You're trembling."

  I didn't know it at the time, but those were the last two words my uncle would ever say to me.

  He had said, "Nicely played."

  75

  Talk About Wow

  "C'mon, we gotta go!" Toni said to me, grabbing my arm.

  I heard Arnold's voice coming from where the results were posted. "If this is someone's idea of a joke . . . !"

  We hurried across the room, then hid out in the middle of section H. Toni told me that with two rounds to go, Annabel and Trapp were leading with a 64 percent game.

  That was just for their section, and Toni had only looked at the East-West scores. Sixty-four percent was good, really good, but we had no way of knowing if it was good enough.

  "Our last round has to be good," she said optimistically. "First, they were in six clubs instead of six no-trump. And then on that second board, Trapp was amazing! I couldn't believe it when he told me to discard the ace of hearts! And then also the ace and king of diamonds! Talk about wow!"

  I had no reason to tell her differently. Nothing she could say would top my uncle's last two words.

  There were three printers on the directors' table, and they all began spewing out results. Caddies posted the printouts at various places around the room.

  Section A was the first one posted, but Toni and I didn't dare go anywhere near it. It seemed to me that we should probably just leave and come back later after the room cleared, but we remained glued to our spot.

  "May I have your attention, please?"

  I could see the head director speaking into his microphone.

  "The winners of the National Pairs Championship are . . . Annabel Finnick and Lester Trapp!"

  Toni and I stared at each other. There were tears in her eyes, or maybe I only imagined them because I was looking at her through the blurriness of my own tears. The next thing I knew, her arms were around my neck, and I was holding her as tight as I could.

  Since you've stuck with me this long, you know I don't do a lot of long descriptive paragraphs. I don't use many similes or metaphors. "A screaming lightning bolt of pain" is the only one that comes immediately to mind.

  What happened next was that Toni and I kissed, and you're going to have to take me literally when I describe that kiss as cosmic. I didn't know where I was. I didn't even know who I was. I can't tell you how long the kiss lasted. Everything seemed to disappear, including time and space.

  When I opened my eyes I looked at Toni looking at me.

  "Talk about wow," she whispered.

  "Was that you and me," I asked, "or Trapp and Annabel?"

  "I think it was Trapp and Annabel," Toni said, then added, "but I liked it."

  "Will Annabel Finnick and Lester Trapp please come forward?" the director called, for what was probably the third or fourth time.

  I became aware that the pain in my neck was gone. It had melted away with the kiss.

  "Annabel and Lester, please come up to the front to accept your trophy and to have your picture taken."

  Toni and I held hands as we left the area. We walked quickly, but not too quickly, down the hall to the hotel lobby.

  We didn't know who might come looking for us. Lucy and Arnold? My parents? A committee from the ACBL? The police? A crazed photographer?

  We kissed again in the elevator. This time, it was just the two of us. Somewhere between the lobby and the twenty-seventh floor, Trapp and Annabel had left the building.

  76

  Philosophically Bent

  Because I am now a member of the ACBL, I receive their monthly bridge magazine in the mail. In the October edition of The Bridge Bulletin, there was a very nice article written by Gloria about Lester Trapp, who during the last year of his life had played the game blind, "but could see the cards better than anyone in our club." The article mentioned that he had died on June 24. Elsewhere in the very same edition, Annabel Finnick and Lester Trapp were mentioned as the winners of the National Pairs Championship. It mentioned that Lester Trapp had reached the rank of Grand Life Master, but there was no accompanying article or photo. Still, you would have thought that some editor would have caught the fact that Lester Trapp had won the event after he had died.

  We saw Lucy, Carl, Arnold, and Deborah the next morning at the sandwich shop. (Where else?) We told them the truth. They had already figured out that we had entered the tournament as Annabel Finnick and Lester Trapp. I called what we'd done "channeling," which seemed more credible than saying I heard my dead uncle speak to me.

  They really had no choice but to believe us. It was
either that, or they had to believe that two people who had been playing bridge for less than three months had outplayed all the best players in the world. The impossible is more believable than the highly improbable.

  Consider the monkey and the typewriter. Imagine you walk into a room and actually see a monkey typing the Gettysburg Address, including all the punctuation and correct capitalization. Would you believe it was random luck, or would a different, totally impossible explanation be more acceptable to you?

  Maybe that's what religion is all about. Is life just a highly improbable coincidence, or does an impossible explanation make more sense?

  I've gotten way off track here. Like Trapp once said, I'm philosophically bent, and more so now than ever before.

  Arnold, Deborah, Lucy, and Carl walked with us to wait for the shuttle bus. There were lots of hugs and a few tears when we left.

  My parents grounded me for three months, but it only lasted about three weeks. They needed me to drive Leslie places, and then Leslie wanted to play at the bridge studio with me, and it would have been unfair to punish her for what I did. Pretty soon the whole grounding thing was pretty much forgotten.

  The first time Leslie and I played at the bridge studio, we finished third and earned half a masterpoint. Leslie has gotten her school to start a bridge club, using a bridge teacher who's being paid by Trapp's school bridge fund. Only five kids showed up for the first meeting, but Leslie thinks they'll have at least seven next week. Counting the teacher, that's enough for two tables. The ACBL holds a youth national tournament every summer for people under eighteen, and Leslie hopes to put together a team.

  I haven't heard from my favorite uncle since the nationals, but I think about him a lot. After Annabel's cruel death, his heart turned cold and hard, like a brick, but whatever kindness he did show was genuine. Just a simple "Nicely played" from Lester Trapp meant a lot more than a ton of praise coming from someone else. Each one of our conversations, whether about God or earwax, has a special place in my memory.

  My dad still doesn't have a job. Our backyard is still a disaster area.

  Cliff and I are still friends, but we don't spend much time together. It's awkward, because of Toni and me.

  I cannot tell you the extent of my relationship with Toni. That is unauthorized information.

  I'm working on my college applications, and I've gotten a job three days a week after school at a bookstore, the same bookstore where I dropped Toni off for her rendezvous with Cliff.

  I've made a resolution that I will no longer let Cliff or anyone else manipulate me. Life will deal me many different hands, some good, some bad (maybe they've already been dealt), but from here on in, I'll be turning my own cards.

  APPENDIX

  Deciphering Bridge Gibberish and Other Bridge Commentary

  by Syd Fox

  The kind of bridge you have read about is known as duplicate bridge, because in effect, the hands are duplicated. Everybody plays the same hands. This makes the luck of the cards much less of a factor.

  The other type of bridge is known as rubber bridge or party bridge. It simply involves four people sitting around a table, shuffling and dealing after each hand. They talk and laugh and have a good time, and it's no big deal if somebody forgets the contract or whose turn it is to play a card.

  Such perfectly normal social behavior drives duplicate players up the wall! We don't want to hear about Aunt Mabel's hip operation, or what somebody's precious child said to her second-grade teacher. To us, it's all about the cards.

  Over the years I've played against people from all walks of life; young and old, rich and poor, Nobel Prize winners and construction workers, professional athletes and people who are physically disabled, famous actors and politicians. I've even sat at a table with two men who told me they had learned the game while in prison.

  If you're interested in becoming a part of this amazing game, you can find out more at www.acbl.org. When you first get started, don't worry if you don't know a lot of complicated bidding systems or defensive signals. You will have plenty of other things to think about. Go ahead and make the logical bid or just the one that feels right. If an opponent asks what a bid means, or what kind of defensive signals you use, you can simply say, "We have no agreements." You and your partner are allowed to have no agreements. You're just not allowed to have any secret agreements.

  As you become more experienced, however, you will find that these kinds of agreements are useful. Bridge is a partnership game, and the more you and your partner can cooperate, the more fun you will have and the better you will play.

  I hope to meet you at the table someday.

  A Note on the Scoring

  Some eagle-eyed reader will no doubt notice that, Trapp's opponents scored 420 points for making a four-spade contract. Then, Gloria also made four spades, but got 620 points. There are other apparent scoring discrepancies as well.

  These are not errors. It has to do with something called being vulnerable.

  Just as the board indicates who is the designated dealer for each hand, it also indicates which side is vulnerable. On board number one, nobody is vulnerable. On board two, North-South is vulnerable. On board three, East-West is vulnerable. On board four, both sides are vulnerable.

  If you're vulnerable and go down in a contract, you lose 100 points per trick. If you are nonvulnerable, you only lose 50 per trick. You get a bonus of 500 points for bidding and making game when vulnerable, and only 300 when nonvulnerable. You also get bigger bonuses for slams when vulnerable.

  Duplicate players will often take the vulnerability into consideration when deciding whether to bid or pass.

  Running Commentary

  There were two parts to a bridge hand, the bidding and the play. . . .

  There's also a third part, the post-mortem. That's when you try to justify all the mistakes you just made, or better yet, blame them on your partner.

  the "Are you sure?" hand:

  This was the spade situation described in Trapp's rant:

  Put yourself in the declarer's shoes. You lead the 2. Gloria plays a small spade. You play the K from dummy, and Trapp plays the 4.

  Now you return to your hand in another suit, and lead the 3. Again, Gloria plays a small spade. What card do you play from dummy?

  There's no easy answer. It all depends on the location of the A and J. If Gloria has the A and Trapp has the J, you should play dummy's queen. On the other hand (pun intended), if Gloria has the J and Trapp has the A, you should play dummy's ten.

  How do you know? You don't.

  Except earlier, when Trapp told Toni to play the 4, she asked, "Are you sure?"

  Now you know Trapp has the ace, so you play dummy's 10.

  This is what had Trapp so steamed. It was why he and Toni got into a fight, and why Alton became his new cardturner.

  "I'm the only one to bid the grand, which would be cold if spades weren't five-one."

  "Unless you can count thirteen tricks, don't bid a grand."

  "I had thirteen tricks! Hell, I had fifteen tricks, as long as spades broke decently."

  That last comment was a joke. You can never take more than thirteen tricks. Bidding a grand means bidding a grand slam. The speaker claimed he would have made it if the spades had been divided more evenly between his opponents.

  If you are missing six cards in a suit, they will divide 5-1 or worse only about 16 percent of the time. So it does sound like bad luck, not bad bidding.

  "Trapp!" she demanded. "One banana, pass, pass, two no-trump. Is that unusual?"

  It sounded unusual to me.

  "That's not how I play it," said my uncle.

  You can't bid one banana. It isn't a suit. "One banana" simply means the bid of any suit except no-trump. One spade, one heart, one diamond, or one club—it doesn't matter.

  "Is that unusual?" refers to a common bidding convention used by most duplicate bridge players, called the unusual two no-trump bid.

  The unusual two no-trump
bid is usually made directly after an opponent bids. Most commonly it shows the two lowest-ranked unbid suits.

  So if an opponent opens the bidding with one heart and you bid two no-trump, you're telling your partner you have a hand with at least five clubs and at least five diamonds. If an opponent opens the bidding with one diamond, a bid of two no-trump would show five hearts and five clubs.

  In the situation described here, the bid of two no-trump isn't made directly after the bid. There are two passes in between.

  One banana—pass—pass—two no-trump.

  Trapp indicated he would not take that as "unusual," and neither would I. In this instance, it would be the "usual" two no-trump bid, showing about twenty points including one or two high bananas.

  She was nicely dressed, as were most of the women in the room. It was mostly the men who were slobs.

  I have a theory about that. Bridge requires such a high degree of concentration, you want to be comfortable so as not to have to think about anything else. Women feel comfortable when they're confident about the way they look. Men feel comfortable when they're . . . well, when we're comfortable.

  Not every man, and not every woman, of course, but it occurs often enough for Alton to have noticed.

  the skip:

  It was like some sort of odd dance, with the people moving in one direction and the boards moving in the other. After the seventh round, every East-West pair skipped a table to avoid playing boards they had already played.

  When there is an even number of tables (fourteen, in this case), a skip is needed to avoid playing the same boards twice. If there is an odd number of tables, no skip is necessary.

  Pages 40-41:

  One time it lurched a bit, and almost died, but I doubted Trapp noticed. We were driving back to his house after the Wednesday game, so his mind was on some bridge hand.

  He would think not only about what he should have done differently, but also about what the opponents should have done, and what he would have done if they had done that. I could have driven into a ditch and he wouldn't have noticed.

  Bridge players are famous for getting lost in their thoughts, especially when driving. Once after a tournament I drove forty-five miles past my exit before I finally looked around and thought, "Where am I?"