la
comédie humaine
Bernard Marcoux, Montréal
The French novelist Honoré de Balzac has
enchanted many years of my life: just read Le Père Goriot,
Illusions perdues, Splendeurs et misères des
courtisanes, La Duchesse de Langeais, César
Birotteau, Le Cousin Pons, La Cousine Bette,
etc., all astonishing works, riveting novels, worth reading and
reading again.
I hear you, I hear you: «Balzac? Not for
me! Never ending descriptions, pages and pages of details, I
would give up after 30 pages …»
You don't know it yet, but you're with me.
If you give up after 30 pages, isn't it
like leaving the bridge table while the cards are being
shuffled? Will you quit bridge because shuffling takes too much
time? No. Shuffling the cards is the same thing as reading the
first 30 pages of a novel by Balzac.
An expert on Balzac once compared all those
descriptions and all those minute details to a spring that you
slowly rewind. The spring gets tighter and tighter, and when it
gets to the maximum tension, you let go and the reaction just
hits you, unavoidable result of an inner necessity.
Bridge is the same: once the cards are
shuffled and distributed, there is no more luck. Let us
be clear: there is no more luck because the distribution of the
cards is now fixed, petrified, and unchangeable.
On one hand, the good player, anxious for
order and harmony, respectful of the environment, will look for
this primordial order and try to imagine it.
He will build a hypothesis that will let him
make his contract like without touching anything, without moving
things, without making noise, without even scratching the
surface of things. Advocate of ecology, humble before the
universe, the good player is like the palaeontologist who, upon
discovering the smallest hint of a dinosaur, takes out his
little brush and sets about to delicately dust off this huge
piece. With utter patience, love and persistence, he dusts,
brooms, polishes, washes and reveals the original beauty of the
structure.
On the other hand, the bad player believes
that there is luck, not only during shuffling, but also during
play. His postulate is then crystal clear: the cards move
around during the play. And his experience proves it, day after
day: his finesses always fail, he often goes down in cold
contracts, gets nailed for 800 and sees the opponents pick up
his stiff king. «I'm never lucky», can you hear him complain to
his partner.
In fact, the bad player, by playing without
thinking, without counting, without imagining, reintroduces luck
where there was none no more. He «modifies» the event, like
they say in modern science. His absence of plan, his
incoherence, smashes the primordial order, destroys the primary
structure that had nothing left to do with luck. It is not
surprising that, in these circumstances, the Kings, Queens and
Aces seem to change places: the bad player creates anarchy.
By the way, most recent bridge softwares
imitate this disorder created by a bad play. With these
softwares, if you don't make the right play, the cards really
change places, strongly suggesting the existence of an inner
order, of a primordial structure, of an original «necessity»,
unique and unchangeable, that you need to discover.
Dummy
xx
Q10x
KJ10642
K7
You
AQxx
--
73
AJ109842
You're in 5,
after LHO overcalled 1,
raised to 2
by RHO.
The lead is a small heart.
First question: where are
all those hearts? The opponents, with ten of them, were quite
tame in the bidding. You call the 10 from dummy, East plays the
Jack. What do you know? East probably has AJ of hearts (West
did not underlead his Ace).
How many hearts has East? Probably
4. With 5, he would have bid more. West thus has 6 hearts to
the King and East has AJxx.
Where is the Ace of diamonds? Again, take
out your little brush and continue your dusting: with AJxx in
hearts and the Ace of diamond, East would probably have found a
cue-bid. Therefore, the Ace of diamond is probably with West.
After ruffing the first heart (did you see far or did you suffer
from myopia?), you play a diamond, West plays low and, backing
your brooming and dusting, you go up with the King which holds.
You play back a diamond and East wins with the Queen.
East thus
has AJxx in hearts and Qx in diamonds; West has Kxxxxx in hearts
and Axx in diamonds, you know 9 of his cards.
One question
immediately jumps out: why did West, with 6 hearts to the King,
a raise from his partner and 3 diamonds to the Ace, give up so
early? Which weakness has his hand to make him decide to pass?
With a singleton somewhere, he might have bid more. Your little
palaeontologist's broom goes back to work and you extrapolate
that he probably has 2 spades and 2 clubs. East plays back a
heart and you ruff.
You can consider two lines of play: diamonds
or spades.
Can you establish dummy's diamonds? First, you have
to go to dummy in order to ruff one diamond, and then you have
to go back to dummy to enjoy those diamonds; where are your two
entries? The first entry could be the 7 of clubs (did you see
far or did you suffer from myopia back there? Did you ruff with
the 2 and 4 or with the 8 and 9?), placing the Queen with West,
and the second entry is the King of clubs (with clubs 2-2).
Let's examine the spades now. Where is the
spade King? Probably not with East; that would give him 10
points and, with 4 trumps AJxx, he probably would have made a
cue-bid. You are thus practically sure that West has the spade
King. And since clubs have to be 2-2 to make your contract (you
have to ruff one spade in dummy and then pick up the trumps),
West has to be 2632; if you play Ace of spades and another
spade, the King will fall and you still will be able to ruff
your losing spade in dummy (even if West switches to a trump)
and pick up the trumps.
The East-West dinosaurs should therefore look
like this:
West
East
Kx
xxxxx
Kxxxxxx
AJxx
Axx
Qx
?x
?x
You play Ace of spades, spade. Like you had
visualised, West's doubleton King wins and you make 5.
At the heart of Le Père Goriot and of
La Comédie humaine, we find Vautrin's famous speech (that
you did not read because you gave up before) to Rastignac, the
young man recently arrived in Paris.
In this piece, Vautrin
explains life in society, the lies, the intrigues, the
betrayals, the me-myself-and-I rule:
«There are no principles, says Vautrin, there
are only events; there are no laws, only circumstances.»
The
superior man is the one who «follows events and circumstances in
order to guide them».
The superior bridge player, profoundly
political, accepts reality as it is and tries to take advantage
of it.
The superior player does not believe in luck, nor in
error.
Luck is the science of the bad player, error is the
excuse of the incompetent.
The superior player hates mistakes more than
he likes luck.
Luck can defeat him, but he believes he will
never lose because of a mistake.
In the end, the superior player, emulating
gods, plays in order to marvel at his own perfection.
Junkie of
the intelligence, the superior player plays to be able to say,
like Paul Valéry:
«Day after day, I enjoy the power of my own
brain.»
|