History of The Term
Presumably, the idea behind the name is that any bridge player attempting the "coup" should be locked up in a maximum security facility. According to a 1961 article by Albert Morehead:
The classic hand for the Alcatraz Coup, which was not then so called, was the following one adduced in 1947 by Oswald Jacoby of Dallas, who was trying to persuade the laws committees to change the revoke law...
Thus, the name originates some time between 1947 and 1961. In a 1973 article in The Bridge World, Kit Woolsey, describes a fictitious visit by a bridge expert to a bridge tournament at Alcatraz, where he was subject to various tricks by the inmates by means of "gaming the system." Apparently, the coup's name inspired Woolsey to write the article.
Read more about this topic: Alcatraz Coup
Famous quotes containing the words history of, history and/or term:
“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“Every member of the family of the future will be a producer of some kind and in some degree. The only one who will have the right of exemption will be the mother ...”
—Ruth C. D. Havens, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“It’s given new meaning to me of the scientific term black hole.”
—Don Logan, U.S. businessman, president and chief executive of Time Inc. His response when asked how much his company had spent in the last year to develop Pathfinder, Time Inc.’S site on the World Wide Web. Quoted in New York Times, p. D7 (November 13, 1995)