On the Tuesday before Christmas, we held a special competition. Hands 1-24 were selected from a famous 1933 bridge match between the USA and Great Britain. The USA team was led by Ely Culbertson, and the British team by Colonel Beasley. Our organiser (John Edwards) then set bidding targets for each board to see how well the two original teams did, compared to our pairs.

Overall our best pair was Arthur Hughes and Rod Hose playing EW, who just kept ahead of 3 NS pairs.

However, one of the original British pairs (P Tabbush & B Morris) did equally as well as our best, and overall the 1930’s teams had a clear advantage over the average results of our best 6 pairs in each direction. This is very surprising, given the primitive nature of bidding in the 1930’s – no Blackwood, no Stayman, no standard points count.

If you think we should repeat the exercise next Christmas, so we can get our revenge, and show this was a freak result, please let John Edwards or Barrie Partridge know.

NB The scoring system was necessarily somewhat subjective. Straightforward auctions were assessed using expected card distributions (rather than actual hands). Competitive auctions were more difficult – for example, did pair A overbid of their own volition, or because pair B pushed them up?

In the Results section, you will see not only the normal results for our Patterson Trophy, but also the results with those from a 1930s Culbertson International match included.