We are not alone

The slam puzzle that stumped Bryan was solved today by VANG from Romania -- congratulations, VANG!

VANG has a bridge blog of his/her/its own, which mentions some interesting bidding conventions. The site also links to other bridge blogs (at a level above our own, I'd say), including The Beer Card, which looks alarmingly similar to this one here, and from which I learn that

The Beer Card is the Seven of Diamonds. It is not part of the official rules of Bridge, but there is a tradition among some players that if the declarer succeeds in making the contract and wins the last trick with the Seven of Diamonds, dummy must buy the declarer a beer of the declarer's choice. In the same way, if the opponents defeat the contract and one of them wins the last trick with the Seven of Diamonds, the opponent who wins the last trick is bought a beer by the other opponent.

Sounds like a good fillip.

Annoyingly, all these bridge sites use the "♠" style of HTML entities for displaying their suits, which displays very badly on many Macs of my acquaintance (see screenshot). That's why I use GIFs on this site and on Rubber Soul -- please let me know if any of that looks odd on your browser.