Toledo Blade – 11 Dic 1960
AND THEN we have the player who combines bad bridge with bad manners, and his even more aggravating counterpart, the player who combines good bridge with bad manners. Each is unbearable, and must be dealt with head-on and promptly. A fairly complete primer of bad manners was once compiled by L. B. Gracy:
“Before making a doubtful bid or pass, hesitate. With a good hand, make a snappy bid. Groan and pass very quickly when you hold a worthless hand. Make business doubles in a firm tone of voice. Make weak informative doubles doubtfully. Look longingly at the suit in dummy that you want partner to lead. Glare at your partner when his lead does not suit you. When you play a ‘come-on’ card, slam it down so hard the partner can’t possibly miss seeing it. Criticize freely partner’s bidding and play. Never admit your own mistakes. Credit good playing by your opponents to good luck. Explain in great detail after each hand how skillfully you played it.”
Now we turn to a variant of cheating which is peculiar to bridge it is called coffeehousing and gets its name from the Old English pubs and coffeehouses where perpetual games of whist used to be in progress. In an England where the theft of a heel of bread was a capital crime, who would cheat? Instead, the players engaged in slight unprovable indiscretions which came to he known as coffeehouses, the lifting of an eyebrow or the slamming of an eight on the table to solicit a return.
Women seem particularly inclined toward coffee-housings. Once a coffeehousing female wanted to signal her partner to continue in a certain suit. Her holding in the suit was K-Q-2. If she played the deuce on his ace lead, he would interpret it as a request to change to another suit. On the other hand, she could not bear to part with one of her high honors just for signaling purposes.
So she started shaking her head dolefully, at the same time detaching the queen. She put the queen back, still shaking her head, and detached the king. She put the king back, grabbed the deuce, shook her head in misery and slapped the deuce on the table with a resounding bang. Her partner—not to mention the opponents and kibitzers and the conductor of a passing subway tram got the message.