Saturday 8 June 2013

A STORY TO CAPTURE THE IMAGINATION OF ALL.... ( By Bridgemeister Gibson ) 

In the late 1940s a deranged, bridge-loving professor set the mother of all problems, by devising a hand where 12 tricks could be made, but only if one could discover the infinite improbability squeeze. Despite attracting the attention of the world's leading experts, no one could ever get close to finding that elusive 12th trick, by spotting or recognising this aptly named squeeze.
As bad luck would have it,  the insane professor died without ever leaving a written copy of the solution, and so the secret of unlocking this conundrum went with him to his grave. Since then the best bridge brains in the world have tried in vain to solve the mystery of bringing home the slam from a diabolical misfit hand,  which was so dastardly concocted the devil himself might well have been the creator.
Yet remarkably, a student of Bigot-Johnson's bridge academy classes found the answer. He had been given the problem by Bigot as an example of just how difficult and hard declarer play can be. Nevertheless, the young man thought to himself : " Well, if making this contract requires an infinite improbability , then logically this means there is a finite possibility.......and so all have to do is perm all the possible play of the cards to find the one that delivers 12 tricks."
So a software programme was quickly written up to do just that, and when the young student pressed the " start " button he got his answer within seconds. As it happened,  one infinitely improbable line of play involved amongst other things,  a cleverly engineered throw in at trick 9, which forced the unfortunate defender to squeeze his own partner on the very next trick. 
However, what shocked him even more was the worldwide publication of his solution, the WBF's decision to give him an immediate place in the Hall Of Fame, and a $100,000 prize for his extreme cleverness. Sadly, he never got round to spending the money after being hunted down and lynched by a baying mob of bridge experts, organised and led by the infamous Bigot-Johnson. Apparently, they had all comes to terms with the fact that they couldn't stand to be beaten by a smug, young pretentious, smart-arse.           

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