Terence Reese
John Terence Reese (28 August 1913 – 29 January 1996) was a British bridge player and writer, regarded as one of the finest of all time in both fields.
Within a year of graduating and after a brief stint at Harrod's, Reese started working for Hubert Phillips's magazine and co-wrote his first book with him in 1937.
When a Ministry of Labour inspector turned up to check on him, a hasty phone-call was needed to get Terence into an office surrounded by ledgers.
[7] Reese last participated in international bridge at the 1976 World Team Olympiad in Monte Carlo, where Great Britain placed third.
A number of players and observers, including Dorothy Hayden, New York Times columnist Alan Truscott, John Gerber, British nonplaying captain Ralph Swimer, British Bridge League Chairman Geoffrey Butler, ACBL president emeritus Waldemar von Zedtwitz, and ACBL President Robin McNabb, all watched Reese and Schapiro and were convinced that they were signalling illegally.
At a hearing held at the tournament site in Buenos Aires, the World Bridge Federation (WBF) judged Reese and Schapiro guilty of cheating, and announced that due to "certain irregularities", the British team was forfeiting the matches they had already won against North America and Argentina, and that Reese and Shapiro would not be playing in the remaining matches.
The British Bridge League (BBL) subsequently convened their own enquiry, chaired by Sir John Foster, barrister and Member of Parliament, and General Lord Bourne.
[19] They pointed out that the Hearing itself in Buenos Aires had a number of unsatisfactory features; there was no proof that the finger signals communicated any more information than bidding would have done; the impact of the Reese & Schapiro team could no have affected the result of at least one of the matches at issue (vs Argentina); 'Mr Kehela the Vice-Captain and Coach of the (USA) team, stated that he had come to the conclusion that the two players accused were not cheating’;[20] and other salient points.
In 1968, a compromise was reached, the WBF maintaining their guilty verdict, but allowing Reese and Schapiro (who had announced his retirement from international bridge after the Buenos Aires Olympiad) to play in future world championships.
Truscott's book emphasizes the unlikelihood of the observed variations in finger signals being coincidental, or of such a large number of witnesses colluding to fabricate the evidence.
[23][24] In May 2005, the English journalist David Rex-Taylor, a bridge player and publisher, claimed that Reese had made a confession to him forty years earlier, one that was not to be revealed until 2005 and after he and Schapiro were dead.
Naturally, we received an equal number of letters from subscribers who vigorously applauded the appearance of this material, in view of the not-guilty verdict rendered by the British Bridge League following its enquiry.
Therefore, we see no choice but to disregard this case and judge material received on its merit.Reese contributed to the Acol bidding system originally developed by Maurice Harrison-Gray, Jack Marx and S.J.
As the title suggests, it dealt with card play at the highest level, including some ideas that were novel at the time, for instance, inferences from events that did not occur, and the principle of restricted choice.
Examples of bridge logic abound in Reese, for instance, a player who overcalls but does not lead his suit is likely to lack one or two key honours; this concept is often called 'the dog that did not bark in the night' (after Sherlock Holmes in Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of Silver Blaze").
His examples of counting (and other ways of drawing inferences from the bidding and play) spread such ideas from a coterie of masters in London (or New York) to a much wider group of nascent experts.
Later, Reese made use of the growing library of hands from international competitions to create interesting quiz-type books, where the discussion was usually on the verso of the page which presented the problem.
