Nico Gardener Victor Mollo
MASTER POINT PRESS • TORONTO
Text © 2013 The Estates of Nico Gardener and Victor Mollo Cover photo: Nao Imai/Aflo/Getty Images Interior photos courtesy of Nicola Smith (private collection) All rights reserved. It is illegal to reproduce any portion of this material, except by special arrangement with the publisher. Reproduction of this material without authorization, by any duplication process whatsoever, is a violation of copyright. Master Point Press 331 Douglas Ave. Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5M 1H2 (416)781-0351 Email:
[email protected] Websites: www.masterpointpress.com www.teachbridge.com www.bridgeblogging.com www.ebooksbridge.com Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Mollo, Victor Card play technique ; or, The art of being lucky [electronic resource] / Victor Mollo and Nico Gardener. Electronic monograph. Issued also in print format. ISBN 978-1-55494-241-1 (PDF).--ISBN 978-1-55494-473-6 (EPUB).-- ISBN 978-1-55494-724-9 (MOBI) 1. Contract bridge. I. Gardener, Nico II. Title. III. Title: Art of being lucky. GV1282.3.M65 2013 795.41’5 C2013-900128-X Editor Ray Lee Interior format Sally Sparrow Cover and interior design Olena S. Sullivan/New Mediatrix
About the Authors Victor Mollo was born in St. Petersburg into a rich Russian family. When he was eight, the October Revolution occurred and his family fled Russia, traveling on a purchased train with forged Red Cross papers, crossing into Finland, then on to Stockholm, Paris and finally London. There he neglected his studies and devoted himself to bridge. As an editor in the European service of the British Broadcasting Corporation, he began to write books and articles on the game. After his retirement in 1969, he started to write even more extensively, and from then until his death in 1987 he wrote thirty books and hundreds of articles. He was also active in developing bridge cruises, mostly in the Mediterranean. His lifestyle was unusual. He would play rubber bridge at his club each afternoon, enjoy dinner and wine with his wife (‘the Squirrel’), and then work all night until 6 a.m., when he would take a nap. While he occasionally competed successfully in the major duplicate bridge tournaments, winning four national titles, he preferred rubber bridge. Many of his daily achievements at the rubber bridge table would become elements in his fictional stories. He is best known for the Bridge in the Menagerie series, which started with the book of the same name, first published in 1965. Most of the pieces had previously appeared in either Bridge Magazine or The Bridge World and that pattern was repeated in the works that followed. Mollo was recognized as ‘the most entertaining writer of the game’ in a poll among American players in the 1980s. His many significant books on different aspects of bridge include Bridge Psychology, The Bridge Immortals, and this present volume. Nico Gardener was a British international bridge player, born in Riga, Latvia (then part of Imperial Russia). After the Russian Revolution his family moved to the Ukraine, and then to Moscow, where he trained as a ballet dancer. He later moved to Berlin, where he read languages and history at Berlin University, and played chess rather than bridge. He moved to London in 1936, where his bridge career began. His partners included some of the great players of the day, such as Pedro Juan, Victor Mollo, Louis Tarlo, Iain MacLeod and Adam Meredith. As a tournament player he won the World Mixed Teams in 1962 with Boris Schapiro, Rixi Markus and Fritzi Gordon. He won the European Championship twice out of five attempts, and competed in two Bermuda Bowls (1950 and 1962) and the 1960 Olympiad. In domestic competitions he won the Gold Cup six times, and the Sunday Times Invitational Pairs in 1970 with Tony Priday. His wife Pat (the first Mrs. Mollo) was also an international player who played in four European women’s championships and his daughter Nicola is a multiple world champion.
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