Pattaya bridge club raid: a minor over-reaction, dare I say?
We, the arrested Pattaya bridge players, are somewhat confused by your analysis (February 14, page 2). In truth, we are technically still on police bail awaiting a decision by the public prosecutor.
Your statement that bridge is a card game played by four players in two teams, using one deck of cards, does not remotely apply to duplicate bridge as licensed by the Thai Contract Bridge Association. I attended a bridge congress in Thailand last year where 100 persons competed in 50 separate partnerships.
The event, happily not raided as many influential Thai nationals were present, required dozens of packs of cards in use at the same time. Let’s not confuse bridge with Snap or Canasta.
Played really well, bridge requires similar mental agility to chess and lies at the borders of human cognition in its higher reaches. I do not know whether bridge should be an Olympic sport or not. Nor do I know how many angels can dance on the end of a pin. So what? Pattaya bridge club was patently raided because gambling had been reported by a most doubtful source whose identity is known to us. Once the crucial gambling charge was shown to be silly, the spotlight obviously shifted to secondary issues such as too many packs of cards, the significance of legislation passed during the Japanese occupation in 1943 and pondering whether a glass of beer on a side table between 2pm and 5pm is a criminal offence or not.
Not for a moment do I contest the right of the civilian licensing authority or the police to look at all these matters. But we are bound to ask whether a mass arrest lasting 12 hours, including vulnerable ladies in their 80s and in the full glare of international publicity, wasn’t just a slight over-reaction especially as Pattaya bridge club is now in its 22nd year of operation. A tragic misunderstanding?
Barry Kenyon
