Bridge and the Victorians [Smith]

Great Britain has given the world many great games - football, cricket, tennis, golf, shove ha’penny, etc - and the world has repaid them by playing them better than the Britons and winning all the shiny baubles ever since. The same is true with bridge but there was a time, in the mid-nineteenth century, when English bridge players, especially women, were the finest in the world. The Great Exhibition of 1851 (in London’s Hyde Park) hosted a tournament that featured dazzling cardplay on almost every board and brilliance not seen before or since. Here, for the first time, you have the chance to enjoy those deals.

Nick Smith’s books are famous for including the toughest single-dummy problems in the history of bridge. If you solve even a couple of these, you are a future international player.