Games - Alan Truscott

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Alan Fraser Truscott (16 April 1925 – 4 September 2005) was a bridge player, author and columnist. He wrote the daily bridge column for The New York Times for 41 years, from 1964 to 2005.

Truscott was born in Brixton, London, and showed early prowess at chess as well as bridge. He attended Whitgift School, and served in the Royal Navy towards the end of World War II. He studied at the University of Oxford from 1947, playing for the university at both chess and bridge. He was a member of the British team (along with Terence Reese and Boris Schapiro) that won a bronze medal at the European bridge championships in 1951, aged only 26. In 1961, he was a member of the British team that won the gold medal in the same event at Torquay.

He was also involved in a cheating scandal at the Bridge World Championships in Buenos Aires in 1965. A pair of British players (Reese and Schapiro) were accused of using their fingers to pass information about their cards by an American pair (B. Jay Becker and Dorothy Hayden). Truscott believed the British pair were guilty, although they were cleared by an inquiry set up by the World Bridge Federation. Truscott later published a book on the affair, entitled The Great Cheating Scandal. The book was not published in the UK until both of the British pair had died for fear of the English libel laws.

He wrote 13 books on bridge, and was executive editor of the first three editions of the Encyclopedia of Bridge.

He had three children with his first wife, but they divorced in 1970. He married his second wife, Dorothy Hayden, an American mathematician and international bridge player, in 1972. He died in New Russia, New York.

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