Week 5 – The Overnight Expert

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The Overnight Expert

• MARCH 27, 2013
•  THE FIFTH ESTATE
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• ON THE OVERNIGHT EXPERT

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Manoj Kumar Nair (B.Tech/EE/1990) recollects his experiences of first playing Bridge at IITM, and how the game has helped shape his life and career.

My dad had a book called ‘5 weeks to Winning Bridge’ which I had seen lying around at home. Being a voracious reader as a kid, I would read anything at arm’s length. This book, however, proved undecipherable despite my best efforts. No wonder that I had never played card games before in my life. I did not even know the contents of a pack of cards! I had seen my parents play occasionally, but was always shooed away from the table, for cards were “not appropriate for children”. My dad used to get old cards from his club, and my sister and I used to bend them for playing “line ‘em up” in very creative ways, even up a flight of stairs!

Joining IITM, I was fortunate to be in a hostel wing with seniors right from day one. Freshmen were usually given the ground floor. “Why didn’t you return the Jack of diamond?” That kindled my interest in Bridge – to one day find a crowd of seniors gathered around a line of open cards on the narrow ledge of the first floor wing in Narmada, near room numbers 104 through 108 (at that point Narmada still followed the British style of numbering: 0-1-2). Sometimes they would lay the cards down at the edge of the table inside one of the rooms. Now I realise that these ‘seniors’ were not very good at the game, but only pretended they were. During my first year, I attended a formal class on Bridge taken by Prof. A Venkatesh and Prof V Sriramulu from the Mechanical Engineering Department, arranged by the then institute captain Madhu (He is now Professor Madhubalan Vishwanathan at the University of Illinois Management School, winner of Bharat Gaurav award in 2009, and still an active player of the game in US). I saw the notice too late and missed the first class, and walked into the second class, only to find myself in the middle of what to me seemed like gibberish.

Opportunity came again, late during my second year holidays. I stayed on to do a summer course and found a lot of time on my hands. I got around to watching a regular Bridge-playing crowd in the hostel. Occasionally I would be called in to fill up a fourth spot, but that would be accompanied by groans of everyone around as I was clueless. I used to get doubled regularly, since we never played for stakes, and there was no pressure to do well. In a few months of getting exposed to the game, I started understanding bidding. For me, card play was challenging, having never played cards before. So I was marked down as an ‘over-bidder’, and not too reliable a card player.

It all changed – almost overnight. After the holidays, I brought the Bridge book from back home, but it was lying unread in the shelf. Then came a “dire crisis”, for it could only be called that. Our hostel was seriously in the running for Schroeter Trophy that year. All hands were called in to contribute. Bridge was a part of Schroeter in those days (I am told it is not so now). I was already in a few teams including chess, which meant a lot of mugging up. Never in the reckoning for the hostel Bridge team, I was called up to play all of a sudden. The most experienced player in the team could not play. His family member had been taken ill and he would not be available during the two weeks when matches were scheduled.

The hostel captain, a B.Tech Aero senior who had stayed on to do an MS in CS, called me. I still recall the meeting. With a characteristic smirk and a crooked smile, he said, “I never thought I would have to say this, but you need to play for the hostel team.” He was known to be a sarcastic fellow. I nodded my head bravely, but the enormity of the task did not escape me. My feeling of being overwhelmed did not escape him either. “I will try my best to teach you what I have been playing with my partner,” he said. “We will have to do the best we can. We were sure of a silver, but now, I hope we will qualify for the knockouts.”

Such words of encouragement plunged me back into the depths of despair. I decided to put in my best. We had two days before the game and 48 hours for me to understand their system. It turned out to be full of bells and whistles. Despite this, I got my hands around it with a fair amount of confidence. My instructor, despite his scorn, had cut down on his sarcasm realising that he needed me. We finished the system on the first day “putting a night out” with loads of tea from ‘Tarams’. That was to be a brief respite. “If it were not your bidding, I would have asked you to bring your brains back from your room!” I had gone down in a sure contract again. The practice sessions the next day brought out some choicest words from my partner. “Even Mangudi (the portly hostel cook) would know that he should have returned a SPADE!” I had fluffed a defence again.

I crawled back to my room for the night faced with the daunting prospect of playing the hostel match the next evening. The first match would finish before the OAT movie. Looking around in despair, my thoughts went to the book I had brought from home. With shaking hands I extracted it from the shelf. I sat down, determined to get as much I could from the book. I did not know at that time that what I had in my hands was an all time classic in Bridge literature by Alfred Sheinwold, a World War 2 veteran who served as a code and cipher expert. Fortunately for me, his writing was lucid and humorous, and did not need any decoding. The play part of the book gripped me, and I was down for the second all-nighter in a row. I found the basics of card play that I had missed knowing – the simple Holdup play, simple Throw-in, Ruffing finesse, then slowly to fascinating areas that I never knew existed. Trump Coups, Vienna Coups in play, Merrimac Coups and Crocodile Coups in defence – I devoured the names and plays with equal fascination as they whizzed by. The mysterious “Squeeze” spoken of reverently was explained in black and white. Almost all aspects of card play were touched upon. The next thing I knew with a couple more chapters to go, sunlight poured in from the open window. I took an early breakfast of bun omlette from Tarams (as was usual for those “putting a night out”) and slept most of the morning. “You were mugging the whole night AFTER A QUIZ. I have never seen you mug so much FOR A QUIZ!?” said my wing-mates, doubting my sanity when I got up groggily for lunch.

Match-time was 4:00 pm, so I had some time after lunch. My partner came around to find me with my nose inside the Sheinwold. I had just started the chapter on deceptive plays. “You are reading up on Play? I hope that does not wash away whatever you remember of the SYSTEM! Hope you remember the relay breaking sequence.” He thrust the system notes into my face. “Yes, I remember,” I told him weakly, hoping he would go find someone else to bother. Fortunately, the other pair called him from downstairs. I went back to deceptive play removing the system notes from my face. A quarter of an hour later, my team mates called me. Team meeting, they said, come to Tarams. With a huge sigh, I put down Sheinwold, gathered up the system notes and trotted off to Tarams. A strategy session followed. My partner and captain impressed upon me that the other pair (two IITB grads who were doing their MS here and were regular partners from IITB days) would be our anchor pair, while my job was to keep the losses low. We were the top seeds in our group of three hostels. “Little do they know…” said my partner, with a condescending bow in my direction. The team we were playing was a strong one. If we won, even narrowly, that would give us a chance to qualify from our group for the next match was a far easier one…

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