Customer Reviews

Inside the Bermuda Bowl: A behind the screens look at the team trials and Bermuda Bowl events

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I had low expectations for this after reading a couple of reviews on other sites. But I have to say that I really enjoyed it.

Bridge is certainly not my area of expertise; I know how the game generally works, can bid my way into losing 7NT contracts with virtually no effort, and I've even played a hand once or twice. So don't let a lack of bridge knowledge stop you from reading this.

While it's about bridge (and "serious" bridge is a surprisingly cut-throat arena) it's really more about people, and specifically John Swanson's experiences preparing for and playing in Bermuda Bowls during the 1970s.

The Bermuda Bowl, which you've probably never heard of if you don't play bridge, is sort of the World Series of Bridge. Played every two years in random 2.5-star hotels around the world, top teams from around the world get together to slug it out in duplicate contract bridge. (It's called the Bermuda Bowl because the first one was in Bermuda, not because everyone wears Bermuda shorts and sits in a tiny punch bowl.)

And, of course, a few competitive cut-throat bridge players try to cheat. About the only way to cheat at Bridge (other than utterly crass methods such as peeking at hands or stacking decks) is, as the engineers would say, "out of band signalling"--various and sundry methods to tell your partner what your hand is while the bidding is going on.

While they had introduced "bidding screens" in the 1975 event to try to prevent this, no one had considered the possibility of... foot contact.

Well, read the book. It's an interesting, sometimes amusing look at a weird little world, and I think presents the author's viewpoint fairly and reasonably. It's not a "perfect" book--there are a few spelling errors and odd grammatical constructs--but it's really worth a read.

I liked the coverage of cheating in high level Bridge.

Good coverage of some of the strong players of the authors era.
- the sections on Walsh were great
- the author pokes fun at himself
- I think Bobby Hamman has a funnier section on Lew Mathe in his book At the Table


A reasonable selection of hands that went down, were misbid, or well played. Plus a few questions for the reader "How would you play this on a club lead?"

I have known John Swanson since 1977 (the year his team won the Bermuda Bowl) and even helped proof this manuscript (I wish I had done a better job, but you should have seen the "before" version). It's not up to me to review this book as my game is chess, not bridge (and I would be biased in any case).

But I can tell you that John has collected many reviews of this book that appeared in bridge magazines and columns from all over the world in one place:

[...]

These collected reviews are 100% intact, and none that could be found have been left off of this page.

If you want to see what real bridge experts have to say about this book, this is where to go.