Wicked ways
Susanna Gross
UNTIL recently. I was never quite sure what is meant by a Grosvenor Coup. I've often heard players exclaim to an opponent after going down in a contract, 'You Grosvenor'd me!', and I've always assumed it was an insult. I thought they meant that the opponent had defended so badly that they had got a false picture of the hand, and had gone down in a contract they could have made.
But that's not quite right. I've just read David Bird and Nikos Sarantakos's excellent new book Bridge Hands to Make You Laugh . . . and Cry (Batsford), and it turns out that the Grosvenor Coup is in fact a bit of deliberate mischief-making on the part of a defender. It was invented by Philip Grosvenor in around 1960 for the simple purpose of annoying another player. What it involves is this: declarer is in a contract that is doomed to failure; by deliberately misdefending, a defender gives him a chance to succeed; but making the assumption that the defender wouldn't have defended in this way if it allowed the contract to be made, declarer tumbles to defeat anyway.
Here's an example of the Grosvenor Coup in action — said to have been played by the inventor himself:
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