A number of young Israelis are taking the International bridge world by storm. All in their twenties, their achievements so far have been impressive and show no signs of slowing down. Their Junior team took Silver in China’s 2012 World Youth Championships. Lotan Fisher and Ron Schwartz won the coveted Cavendish Pairs in Monaco, and four of them have just qualified for Israel’s Open Team in the European Championships in Croatia this June.

The two I know best are Lee Rosenthal, a 24-year-old ex-soldier, and Dror Padon, arguably one of the strongest Junior players of all time. Lee now lives in London and Dror is a frequent visitor, often playing for my team and knocking the socks off the opps.

Here is Dror, in a recent NICKO match, proving that you don’t need 30 years’ experience to be a class act:

West led ♠4 which dummy took perforce. Now, I don’t know about you but I would have looked at dummy, shaken my head internally, and wondered why I wasn’t in Grand slam. I would then have laid down the ♣Q and …gone off! Dror, an analytical genius, saw immediately that with an apparent 13 tricks at his disposal, the only way to go off was precisely this bad trump break, so at trick two he played a small club to the 10, retaining trump control in case of emergencies whilst still having a trump in dummy to ruff the inevitable spade continuation.

That, my friends, is the difference between a Muppet and a God!