A Night at the Crypto-club

by Peter Winkler, Murray Hill, NJ, USA

One night, after a hard day of work walking to the underground station to go home, my eyes met a girl with a piece of paper in her hand that resembled a convention card. When I spoke to her she explained she had a quarrel with her bridge partner. I offered to play with her that night, and although she advised me not to, she eventually accepted. I was surprised, because I didn't know of any bridge club in this part of town, but she guided me to a building with oak doors and a shabby Jugendstil lounge, where we took an elevator (of the first generation of self-service elevators) to the sixth floor. She comforted me, we were not going to visit an ordinary bridge club, but the Crypto Club. That was all explanation I got; we entered a large room where about 50 people were playing bridge already.

• A big man with grey-white hair greeted my partner: "Ah, there you are" and showed us to a table.
• "I must warn you," my partner said as I placed her chair, "they might play conventions you are not really used to."
• "Don't worry, I've seen them all" I replied humbly. "What do we play? Just straight up-and-down?"

5 K874 J753 Q952

Playing against an older married couple I picked up these cards as South:

East, the male half, was dealer and opened 1. I passed, and the answer of 3NT was alerted and explained as "Forcing raise in spades, with two out of the three top honors"

Easts 4 was alerted (standard US practice at least in those days) as an asking bid.

• "What does it ask for?" I asked.
• "Controls" LHO replied lazily and bid 4, also alerted and passed out.
• I fumbled my 3 of diamonds and said: "I suppose 4 denies a diamond control ?"
• And to my right the answer came: "No, it denies a control in the suit the control was asked for."
• "But diamonds was the suit asked for?" I continued.
• "No, it is diamonds when I have the Ace of spades, hearts when I have the King and Clubs when I have the Queen"

I took some time to work this out. It was clear to me, that the spades holding at my left provided her with the information in which suit the control asking had been. It also seemed that by bidding 4 or 4 East could have asked the same for the other suits. But what was this all about ? I raised my shoulders and looked at my hand again.

• "Wait a minute" I yelled, "how am I supposed to know which suit to lead?"
• My RHO pointed his right index finger in the air and raised simultaneously his left eyebrow. "Aha!" he said.

I finally decided for a kind of Solomon's judgement and put my small trump at the table. This was the whole board:

Board 2 Dealer West N/S Vul	J93 9 T982 AK843
AK64 T65 KQ64 76		QT872 AQJ32 A JT
	5 K874 J753 Q952

My partner seemed to think that -480 was quite a normal score on this board, but I was irritated that my opponents had been able to bid this board intelligently without expose their club weakness.

Fortunately the opponents did not enter the auction on the next board. I was dealer and opened 1NT, raised to 3NT by my partner

Board 3 Dealer South E/W Vul	972 T K94 AJT962
T863 K84 T852 Q4		KQ5 Q76532 J3 K7
	AJ4 AJ9 AQ76 853

West started with the 3 of spades and East inserted the Queen. This seemed like the right moment to impress my partner with my pairs-playing technique. I'll take the lead and play a club to the Ace to take the chance of keeping East of the lead. But I realised I had to look at their convention card to see if they played fourth-best. One glance at it and I saw an ominous green-spot: fourth-best against 3NT on hands with less than 7 points, otherwise third/fifth.

Help, if the lead had been of a five card or longer (rather probable because she would have picked a heart holding 4-4 or 4-5 in the majors), it would be better to duck the lead, and finesse twice in clubs - the latter being after all the best technically. I played the 4 of spades and East returned a heart for 9 and King. West returned a heart into my fork and after losing a club trick I made one overtrick. This was not a score.

• I complimented East with his heart switch, "Why didn't you continue with the King of spades ? Couldn't your partner hold Jack fifth ?"
• "No, I can conclude from the auction she holds than 7 points, so her lead must be fourth-best. We concluded that we are able to read each other leads for about 75% using this system, while the leader almost always hasn't got a clue."
• My partner didn't seem to have any troubles with this explanation, but I couldn't hold myself together. "Are these kind of conventions allowed ?" I asked her after finishing the table."It is not allowed to provide each other with information the opponents can't understand, is it?"
• "Why not, they do not have secret understandings and you can't force anyone to tell what he can conclude of his own hand."
• "I suppose you are right, but it doesn't make me feel good."
• "Just wait, there's plenty more to come" she said. "This club was founded by a group of experts in decrypting secret codes - amateurs and professionals - and there's a tradition in giving information encrypted here. Do you see the Director there ? He is Greenspan, people say he was involved in decrypting the Purple Code. The woman we just played designs secret codes for industrial use, her man is employed at a computer security firm and the small guy at table 6 takes care of cryptogrammes for newspapers."

AQ5 QT6 AK42 KQ8

Our next opponents were two dark faced young men, probably students also working for the CIA. Following two passes to my RHO opened 1H and his partner alerted. "Could be a lead-directing psyche with a suit headed by King or Ace". Holding half of the points of the deck in my hand I doubled:

• LHO bid 1NT, alerted and explained as "Values for a redouble, and guaranteeing Ace or King in opened suit".
• "What is their obsession with trump honors" I thought to myself, but its mechanism became soon clear to me. My partner passed and my RHO bid 2.
• LHO alerted and explained after being asked for it: "If he holds the Ace of hearts, he has a psyche, but if he holds the King, he has a standard opening."

And so my LHO now knows where he stands; his own heart honor shows whether or not his partner psyched. I thought he psyched, but how could I clarify it or my partner? 2 NT seemed too high even to me, so I doubled again. LHO bid 2, and following two passes I as your servant was at the helm again.

A little voice in the back of head said "Just be talked out of it" but these crypto-creeps began attacking my nerves, so I doubled again. Believe it or not, RHO held a normal 3rd seat opening, 10 points and 5/5 /. I saw the execution of 2 doubled being dummy.

T943 KQT5 AK42 A

This just went on and on. Instead of having fun in playing the game and playing it with this partner, I tried harder and harder to take revenge for our bad scoring. My partner at the contrary looked very relaxed and seemed to enjoy seeing me having a rough time. When the last board of the evening got on our table I showed, and I am ashamed to say so, signs of active paranoia. As dealer I held:

and opened 1, LHO bid 1 and partner raised to 2, now RHO doubled, alerted and explained as a spade raise holding Ace or King. I'd seen that one before, a useful convention to show partner he can easily lead his own suit.

Trying to double them at 3 level I bid a modest 3, and now it went pass-pass-3.

• I had almost already taken the double card, when I saw LHO's alert. "Now, what is this again?"
• "If he holds the Ace of spades, it is just competitive, otherwise it is a game-trial, 3 would show the opposite meaning."
• It wouldn't have been a very smart idea to double a game-trial, but what I did was even worse. "What is it ?" I screamed.
• "Like I told you it is either ........". At the moment the Director was already behind me.
• My partner shrugged her shoulders, as if she was about to say: "I am sorry, I know he is a newbie, but I thought he could handle it."
• "I am perfectly alright" I insisted, while sweat started to soak my entire body.

I can't recall too much of what happened next, but I have some fight floating my mind, calming words, feeling my feet lost contact with the floor, and then: darkness, concrete and rain.

Furthermore all is clear. My partner's face was very clear in memory the next morning, but I didn't know her name. Eleven evenings in a row I went to that building, but the sixth floor was always empty, and last time a group of workers were rebuilding the floor into an orthodontists' lab. I finally tracked down the owner of the building, who told me he rented the floor just once to a man named Greenspan, but only once. Greenspan hadn't left any address or phone number. The Atlanta telephone book did not give any clue either.

The year following this I met some people in cryptological circles, but without any success. Nobody had ever heard of the Crypto Club or Greenspan; a list of people involved in the research on the Purple Code didn't surface. As far as known there was absolutely no connection between cryptology and bridge. I knew what I had to do.

Editor's note:

• First published as "My night at the Cryppie Club" by P. Winkler, in the English "Bridge Magazine", in August 1981.
• The above is a translation back to English of the Dutch version of the article as it appeared in the Dutch "Weko Wijzer" (which is the quarterly magazine for TD's etc.) of June 1992.
• My thanks to Stuart Hood who posted this article on rec.games.bridge, and put me in touch with John Hoffman, who knew the origins of the article.
• My thanks to John Hoffman, who put me in touch with Peter Winkler.

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