Hi everyone. Christmas is almost upon us and what better way to celebrate the festive season than a tasty cocktail? It's at this time of year that websites dealing with people doing stupid things at card games traditionally like to present their own versions of delicious Yuletide drinkies but, at the risk of offending our colleagues at rubbisheuchre.com, we don't like to conform to such banality. So we're introducing what I'm sure will become a staple of the dare part of truth-or-dare. Whether you love a good hearty mulled wine or prefer a bottle of absinthe in a cold dark alleyway then you'll be sure to hate ... (drum-roll please) ... The Flaming Gerber. We all do!

The Gerber ace-asking convention is much loathed in the circles of arrogant bridge players who think they know better than everyone else. In our opinion, this is due to what we call the Dan Brown factor and was the inspiration for our cocktail. It takes a good thing and puts it totally out of context, making the entirety far far worse than the sum of its parts. Ace-asking can occasionally be a handy tool for slam bidding, but not when you corrupt a useful 4 bid for it — what's wrong with Blackwood? Dan Brown took an intriguing storyline and combined it with inept pacing and incompetent writing to disappoint thousands — why not hire someone with actual talent to write it? And we all love a nice bit of tabasco on our scrambled eggs in the morning, but why would anyone in their right mind want to add it to some classic cocktail ingredients?

The Flaming Gerber — the morning after was proof enough that creating a gut-wrenching cocktail as a means to parody a poor bridge convention wasn't a particularly good idea, despite what we thought at the time.

From everybody here on the poorbridge.com team, we wish you a Merry Christmas and a New Year filled with plenty of poor bridge! — Michael, Phil, Steve, Rob and Luke.