Story by Jon Herman (BBO: Jonny Ace1)

I first learned bridge by osmosis some 60-odd years ago, watching my mother play in one of her weekly games. It was such a huge part of her life that I made sure to mention it in her obituary and eulogy when she died two years ago at age 98. And it must have made quite the impression on me too, because even now the phone numbers of “the ladies” are all still living rent-free in my long-term memory.

Be that as it may, I started playing competitive bridge in 1979 or 1989, back when masterpoints were parsimoniously distributed on paper slips “the way God meant them to be” (in the words of a local Atlanta director), and Easley Blackwood still wrote monthly columns for the ACBL Bulletin. I was just a couple years out of college and living in the Boston area. I tracked down an old high-school buddy, and we decided to give bridge a shot, mostly, I think, as a way to reconnect after having slipped apart a bit during college days.

Andy found a local club, where the games were run by an energetic and charismatic director named Jackie Dawson (aka the late Jackie Altshuler of Naples, FL), who held together an incongruous mix of novices and experts with her specialty games, annual award ceremonies (Andy and I regularly won the “Cookie Monster” prize for our tendency to attack the snacks the minute they appeared), and overall family feeling. Though we were almost always the youngest in attendance by a good fifteen years, that didn’t stop us from feeling right at home.

We quickly developed a weekly ritual, setting ourselves every Tuesday against the competition in the open game, and then retreating to a local Friendly’s Restaurant for burgers, clam rolls, and two dozen post-mortems. It didn’t take long before we expanded the Goren-based strictures we got from our respective mothers, adopting hip “new” toys like negative doubles and Jacoby transfers, resurrecting and retooling “discredited” conventions like Flannery and Fishbein, and trademarking our own strong two-club openers and defense against notrump—constantly noodling between bites with all our various gadgets. And I daresay we actually got to be pretty good, often ending an evening in the money; Andy’s brilliant play of a hand once made it into Henry Francis’s daily bridge column, and subsequently into the August 1989 issue of the ACBL Bulletin.

But not long after becoming duplicate regulars, we quickly had to phase out that little piece of our lives. Andy got married and started a family, I was accepted to graduate school, and our weekly outings suddenly turned into once-in-a-while treats we needed to plan well in advance. When my job took me out of Beantown in 1991, first to Oregon, then to Upstate New York, and finally to Atlanta, that more or less marked the end of my illustrious bridge career. My wife never developed any interest in it (“numbers aren’t real to me”), and my only subsequent bridge games were the rare one-shot reunions that coincided with professional conferences or family reunions.

Even though Andy and I were effectively “retired” as a team for a solid twenty years, we kept fooling around with our systems, thanks in part to the ACBL Bulletin’s “The Bidding Box” and Bridge World Magazine’s “Challenge the Champs.” We kept expanding our repertoire despite not actually playing any “real” games, kind of like the way Stan Laurel continued to write Laurel and Hardy routines even after they’d stopped performing together. We picked up Exclusion Blackwood and Jacoby raises and started fine-tuning our use of cuebids and splinters. And for a “virtual” partnership, we usually held our own against the experts.

I’m happy to say that face-to-face bridge (as we now call it) returned to my life about a dozen years ago, when a neighbor whom I didn’t know tried to scare up a few warm bodies for a social game. I showed up for what turned out to be the bridge equivalent to a “date from hell,” but Charlie and I quickly realized we had similar approaches to the game and that our styles would fit congenially, a theory we soon tested at the local club. It didn’t take us long before we were pooling our systems and fine-tuning our own hybrid. Charlie took on Andy’s and my strong two-club, defense over notrump, Fishbein, Flannery, and Exclusion, and he gave me Michaels, support doubles, inverted minors, weak jump-shifts, and gambling three notrump. And though we seldom played more than once a week, I still managed to hit a couple of Life Master milestones.

When I told Andy I had a new “Atlanta partner” and that we were becoming duplicate regulars, he had only one question for me: Are you still the youngest players there by at least fifteen years?

Of course, in the post-Covid era, BBO has created a whole new bridge world for me. And it has even given Sunny (The cat) a chance to learn the game!

Cheers.

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